Biographical Sketch

Antonia Darder is currently with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is a Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Latino/a Studies. She taught as a Visiting Professor at the University of California Irvine (2001-2002), a Professor of Education and Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University (1990-2001) and at Pacific Oaks College where she developed the first graduate program in Bicultural Development. She has also taught at California Polytechnic University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a Distinguished Professor at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. Her current work focuses on comparative studies of racism, class and society. Her teaching examines cultural issues in education with an emphasis on identity, language, and popular culture, as well as the foundations of critical pedagogy, Latino/a studies, and social justice theory.

She is the author of Culture and Power in the Classroom (Bergin & Garvey, 1991), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (Westview, 2001) and is co-author (with Rudolfo Torres) of After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism (NYU Press, 2004). She is the editor of Culture and Difference (Bergin & Garvey, 1995), and co-editor of Latinos and Education (Routledge, 1996), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society (Blackwell, 1997), and The Critical Pedagogy Reader (Routledge, 2002). As a former scholar of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, she authored the report, The Policies and the Promise: The Public Schooling of Latino Children (1993) (publication #2006). As a recipient of a Kellogg National Fellowship, she studied the education and culture of indigenous children in the Andes.

In addition to her academic endeavors, Professor Darder is an artist and poet, as well as a political activist. Her volume of poetry, each day I feel more free (Canto Jibaro Press, 1984), includes such poems as of struggle and reflection, when she reads this I hope she feels the love, you say you’ve got a program, la hembra and dueña del camino. She is currently working on The Woman With Many Hearts, a compilation of her poetry and art. Over the years, Professor Darder has also been active in a variety of Latino/Chicano grassroots efforts tied to educational rights, worker’s rights, bilingual education, women’s issues, and immigrant rights. In 1998, she convened educators from across the state to establish the California Consortium of Critical Educators (CCCE), a member supported radical teachers' organization committed to an educational vision of schooling that is intimately linked to social justice, human rights and economic democracy.

Antonia Darder was born in Puerto Rico in 1952 and raised in East Los Angeles. As a young single mother of 3 children on welfare, she began her studies at Pasadena City College in 1972. She later attended Cal State Los Angeles and Pacific Oaks College. She eventually earned her Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in 1989. She had the honor and privilege of studying and working with renowned Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire.

updated 10/2005