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
“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
“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 critical race theory (CRT) challenge to traditional interpretations of cultural capital. CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups 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 Students of Color bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom. This CRT approach to education involves a commitment to develop schools that acknowledge the multiple strengths of Communities of Color in order to serve a larger purpose of struggle toward social and racial justice.
SELECT ARTICLES
A critical race theory test of W.E.B. DuBois’ hypothesis: Do Black students need separate schools?
T.J. Yosso, W.A. Smith, D.G. Solórzano & M. Hung | Race Ethnicity and Education, 2021
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
Critical Race Media Literacy for These Urgent Times
T.J. Yosso | International Journal of Multicultural Education, 21(2), 5-13, 2020
Recovering Our Past: A Methodological Reflection
D. G. García & T.J. Yosso | History of Education Quarterly | Volume 60, no. 1, February 2020
D. G. García & T.J. Yosso | History of Education Quarterly | Volume 53, no. 1, 64-89
Honorable Mention, History of Education Society Prize Committee
Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for Latina/o Undergraduates
T.J. Yosso, W.A. Smith, M. Ceja, & D.G. Solórzano | Harvard Educational Review | Volume 79, no. 4, 659-690
Cited over 1,600 times
Critical Race Methodology: Counterstorytelling as an Analytical Framework for Educational Research
D.G. Solórzano & T.J. Yosso | Qualitative Inquiry | Volume 8, no. 1, 23-44
Cited over 4,800 times
D.G. Solórzano & T.J. Yosso | International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education | Volume 14, no. 4, 371-395
Cited over 1,400 times
D.G. Solórzano, M. Ceja & T.J. Yosso | Journal of Negro Education | Volume 69, no. 1/2, 60-73
Cited over 4,280 times
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 to address issues of access and equity in education. Counterstories weave together theory and analysis with narrative prose to reflect on the lived experiences of People of Color while raising critical consciousness about social and racial injustice. [Ideally students in this course would have taken a seminar in Critical Race Theory in Education and Critical Race Methodology in Education].
Richard Delgado (1989) reminds us that, “oppressed groups have known instinctively that stories are an essential tool to their own survival and liberation” (p. 2436). Critical race scholars continue in this tradition and have practiced counterstorytelling in 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.
CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN EDUCATION
Examines critical race theory (CRT) in education, as an analytical framework which seeks to understand and challenge the intercentricity of race/racism and other forms of subordination as they shape disparate schooling access and opportunities for Communities of Color. In this overview of CRT, students explore some of the intellectual genealogies of the framework, from its origins and branches in schools of law (e.g. LatCrit—Latina/o Critical Legal Theory) and its applications to the field of education to questions of epistemology, methodology, pedagogy, policy, and praxis across the P-20 pipeline.
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.
"
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
