Please tell us a bit about yourself! How long have you been at USF, what do you teach, and what are your research interests? 

My name is Dr. Rosa Jiménez, and I’m an Associate Professor in the International and Multicultural Education Program, in the School of Education. I am in my tenth year at USF.  My graduate training is in education with a focus on language and culture, and I received that at UCLA along with a Master’s in Latin American Studies. I come to this work, to research and to the field of education, as a classroom teacher. I was a bilingual social studies middle school teacher in LA for many years before pursuing my doctorate. Those two lenses, the teaching practice and my lived experiences as a daughter of immigrant parents influenced my journey (2016). My research interests are multicultural and multilingual learners in K-12 settings. My approach is, how do we understand and practice culturally responsive and critical pedagogies in K-12 settings with youth of color and immigrant youth?  I collaborate with teachers about their teaching practices and the ways we can enhance belonging, develop bilingualism, and improve critical literacy. 

Please tell us about your recent study on auto-ethnographies of immigration as pedagogical practice. 

I have a book chapter, Migration as counterstories (2022),  published by the leading research organization, American Educational Research Association (AERA). The study was a collaboration with a high school teacher in the Bay. We were both Latinas, we both have immigrant backgrounds, and so I thought about the ways that we could share our own migration stories, to share our own lived experiences here in the US as a model to help students think about and write their own migration stories. It’s also a way to help students counter the deficit perspectives, the anti-immigrant culture that we often see in our world. Students can internalize these deficit views of one’s self, so part of my approach is to talk about our culture, language, and immigration stories as an asset, as beautiful, as surviving, and as thriving. How do we build on that and view our journeys as complex, complicated, and as beautiful. My research examines these kinds of topics, culturally responsive teaching in K-12 schools. 

What do you hope readers will gain from your work? What is the impact you’re hoping to make at USF?

I think there’s a couple layers to this. I think, at USF, one of the beautiful things we do is  that we embody and model these teaching practices with our own graduate students. It’s not a detached thing — learning and knowledge are not found all in a textbook. So for example, even with my graduate students, I do interactive games, icebreakers, and kinesthetic activities. Everyone’s nervous, insecure, and worried they won’t have the right thing to say, even in graduate school, so we build community together. The other central point is that we analyze power — power relations, race and racism, structures of power. We center student experiences and analyze them in relation to what we’re learning. Pedagogically, that’s one of the contributions. 

The other part is my research — my work in K-12 schools and with community organizations (2020). For the past few summers, I have helped run a summer youth program for 100 children of farmworkers. Students had unique experiences to learn music and dance, participate in a surfing class, and all the while they were also reading and writing about their immigration and cultural experiences. So that’s my hope and contribution, that students and the public at large can see the value and beauty of our culture and how to center it in learning. Especially in these trying times, how can we center equity, culture, and justice in TK-12 learning and across all of our educational spaces? That’s my hope and my life’s work. 

 

1. Jiménez, R. M. (2020). Community cultural wealth pedagogies: Cultivating autoethnographic counternarratives and migration capital. American Educational Research Journal (AERJ), 57(2), 775-807.
2. R. M. (2022). Migration as counterstories: Pedagogies of possibility Gist, C. D. & Bristol T. J. (Eds). The Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers. American Educational Research (AERA) Publishing.
3. Jiménez, R. M. (2016). “Nuestro camino es más largo” (Our journey is much longer): A testimonio of immigrant life in the Central Valley and the road towards the professoriate. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal (AMAE), 10(2), 65-79.