WORK
In addition to a published book and Community Cultural Wealth framework,
Dr. Yosso has authored numerous chapters and articles in publications such as Race Ethnicity and Education, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Harvard Educational Review. Dr. Yosso has designed, produced and hosted a variety of community events and experiences.
Metamorphosis of Migration 2016, La CASA USC, Student Union, Suite 402 by Luis-Genaro Garcia | A mural dedicated to the knowledge that students have used for our own social transformation that has been nourished by the migration and hard labor of our parents. Our parents sacrifices reflected via minimum wage occupations and educational support serve as the source of our metamorphosis and our aspirations.
“The perfect combination of empiricism, qualitative analysis, and literature. Engaged scholarship at its best.”
Richard Delgado
John J. Sparkman Chair of Law, The University of Alabama
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“Provocative, insightful, and accessible scholarship from which students, educators, and educational researchers have much to gain.”
Dolores Delgado Bernal
Professor and Chair, Chicana(o) Latina(o) Studies Department, California State University, Los Angeles
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“Yosso skillfully provides the field with the most powerful and insightful analysis ever produced about the experiences Chicanas/os endure as they navigate the obstacle-laden educational pipeline, from elementary through graduate school.”
Richard R. Valencia
Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology and Former Faculty Associate of the Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
RENOWN FRAMEWORK
COMMUNITY CULTURAL WEALTH
As cited formally 8,000 times nationally and international application in fields beyond academic research, such as human resources, leadership development, and more.
This article conceptualizes Community Cultural Wealth as a challenge to traditional interpretations of cultural capital. Dr. Yosso shifts the research lens to focus on and learn from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged. Various forms of capital nurtured through cultural wealth include aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital. These forms of capital draw on the knowledges people bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom.
SELECT PRESENTATIONS
"Community Cultural Wealth: A Live Literary Discourse on the Past, Present, and Future"
Association for the Study of Higher Education | Annual Conference, Chicago IL, November 2023
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Keynote Speaker: "Reflections on Community Cultural Wealth and Student Success"
Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institution Educators | Seventeenth Annual Best Practices Conference
Riverside City College | Third Annual Equity Institute
Center for Excellence | Strong Workforce Faculty Institute
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SELECT ARTICLES
Carving out a legal narrative from Galarza to Soria: Accounting for the complexities of history, race, and place in educational research
D. G. García & T.J. Yosso | International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2021
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D. G. García & T.J. Yosso | History of Education Quarterly | Volume 53, no. 1, 64-89
Honorable Mention, History of Education Society Prize Committee​
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SELECT PROJECTS
CULTIVATING SEMILLAS
Semillas refers to a tradition in Mexican immigrant and Chicana/o communities of passing on cultural knowledges to facilitate critical navigation through society’s institutions.
Inspired by this tradition, Dr. Yosso created the Cultivating Semillas conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara to support community college students’ navigation to and through the University of California system.
The annual event featured workshops and speakers focused on the strengths community college students bring to the university, while addressing the main curricular and financial aid barriers they face in achieving transfer to the UC. UCSB students served as mentors, conference assistants, and campus tour guides. Over the course of five years, the Cultivating Semillas conferences served at least 375 community college students, and enabled the participation of about 100 UCSB undergraduate and graduate student volunteers.
DEMYSTIFYING GRAD SCHOOL
As a first-generation college student, an alumna of the University of California who had participated in similar programs, Dr. Yosso
holds a very personal understanding of the significance of efforts to expand opportunities for historically underrepresented students at critical transition points along the educational pipeline. Chicana/o, Latina/o students and faculty remain severely underrepresented in universities across the nation and in the University of California.
This four-part workshop series was designed to be led by graduate students and to support undergraduates aspiring to pursue degrees beyond the baccalaureate by offering an Introduction to Grad School, an overview of Financing Grad School, discussing Writing a Statement of Purpose, and listening to insights from a Graduate Student Panel.
¡VIVA LA CAUSA!
¡Viva La Causa! Viva Cesar Chavez! was a unique program designed to deepen the connections between an elementary school community in Ann Arbor with an over 40% Latina/o enrollment and the University of Michigan. The event began with an all-school field trip for thirteen classes of K-5 students along with parent chaperones and teachers (380 people) to the University of Michigan to attend a concert by Mariachi Vargas de Tecálitlan.
Dr. Yosso coordinated with multiple departments across campus to support this event and specificallty worked with the School of Music Theater and Dance and the University of Michigan to bring three award-winning high school vocalists who were opening up for Mariachi Vargas to interact with students before the concert.
After the concert, 36 University of Michigan undergraduate and graduate students traveled to conducted an interactive read-aloud of bilingual books about activism, to commemorate the legacy of César E. Chávez, a labor and human rights activist who co-founded with Dolores Huerta the United Farm Workers of America—UFW.
“We need to help students and parents cherish and preserve the ethnic and cultural diversity that nourishes and strengthens this community – and this nation.” - César E. Chávez
Book Image by Luis-Genaro Garcia | These books have served as a philosophical framework of resistance within the work of the artist, Luis-Genaro Garcia. Included are books on the Funds of Knowledge, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline, and his own dissertation, “La Loteria: Art, Education, & Creative Resistance.”
TEACHING: SELECT COURSES
Dr. Yosso creates a unique classroom space featuring tools of popular culture such as film, theater, newspapers, TV, and music. She often utilizes humor to interrogate patterns of disconnect between theory and practice, or intentions versus outcomes.
GRADUATE AND TEACHER EDUCATION
COUNTERSTORYTELLING IN EDUCATION
Engages students in a counterstorytelling methodology within at least three general forms: autobiographical stories/narratives, biographical stories, and composite stories. Each of these storytelling methods draws on research data, existing writings in areas such as the law, social science, history, and literature, and professional/personal experiences. Students will study and utilize counterstorytelling as a methodology in educational research.
CHICANA/O CURRICULA: THEORY INTO PRAXIS
Explores academic literature in critical pedagogy, bilingual, and multicultural education and contextualizes this information with hands-on experience in educational settings with Chicana/o, Latina/o students. Students examine the historical, social, political, and economic forces that shape disparate outcomes along the educational pipeline, by race, gender, class, and language. Students volunteer in local school-settings three hours per week to contextualize their academic knowledge with K-12 practice. Students create grade-level specific curriculum that weaves together their cultural and academic knowledges with the state requisites and Common Core content standards.
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Examines academic literature in critical pedagogy with a focus on Paulo Freire and scholarship that carries on his legacy of questioning the contradictions of knowledge and power in the educational system. Students engage in theory-making focused on the critiques of schooling as a site of oppression and possibilities for schools to become sites of emancipation. Students the development of critical pedagogy while analyzing some of the historical and contemporary educational experiences of Communities of Color in the United States. They consider the intersegmental implications of critical pedagogy for research, curriculum, policy, and praxis. Students apply a critical pedagogical lens to the planning, instruction, and assessment tasks outlined in the edTPA.
Undergraduate
IMAGINING CHICANAS/OS: A CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY SEMINAR
Presents a critical historical overview of mainstream media images of Chicanas and Chicanos, with an emphasis on their educational impact. Students examine the fundamental theories, concepts, and methods necessary to analyze entertainment film portrayals of People of Color in general and Chicanas/os in particular. Students consider media practices of inclusion and/or exclusion of topics related to race/ethnicity, gender, and class and ask “who benefits” from these depictions and/or omissions. Students design and implement a critical media literacy research project.
INTRODUCTION TO CHICANA/O STUDIES: CULTURE
Surveys Chicana and Chicano culture in the United States, with two main emphases: (1) how we learn about and teach Chicana/o culture in formal and informal educational settings and (2) how we conceptualize, analyze, and critically engage Chicana/o culture. Students are introduced to socioeconomic, political and educational conditions shaping Chicana/o communities, and analyze Chicana/o cultural invention, transformation, resistance, adaptation, and identity formation within these contexts. Chicana/o culture refers to those dynamic social processes, practices, and productions, which take place within specific historical and political contexts, and change over time. Chicana/o culture includes values, attitudes, ideas, behaviors, and material and nonmaterial productions, which are learned, taught, shared, and exhibited. Students examine Chicana/o culture in spatial and regional terms, and engage in critical discussion about the intersections of culture with race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and immigration status.
CHICANA/O EDUCATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Students engage a theoretical and empirical historical survey of Chicana and Chicano schooling in the United States. Special emphasis is placed on analyzing the ways in which race, gender, class, and immigrant status have historically shaped Chicana/o educational experiences. Students examine the ways Chicana/o students, parents, and communities respond to and resist political and economic forces restricting access and opportunity in education.
EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY
This course introduces students to the study of educational leadership with a focus on the tools employed by leaders historically, and in the more recent past, to realize the elusive goal of equality of educational opportunity. Through the course readings, films, and assignments, students explore leadership across P-20 contexts, and beyond schools. Special emphasis is placed on analyzing the ways race, gender, class, immigrant status shape educational experiences, and also the ways students, parents, teachers, lawyers, and communities respond to and resist discrimination in pursuit of education.
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What DOES it mean to be una persona bien educada (a well educated person)? It means you are a kind person, someone who is honest, someone who holds themselves with integrity, who is respectful of others. In Spanish educación has this dual meaning, beyond formal schooling, about how you carry yourself in the world. -Tara J. Yosso, PhD
TARA J. YOSSO, PHD
