by Adam Mastoon, for ImagINe Project
Edwin Mayorga, Ph.D. is a parent, educator, scholar, activist and podcaster working for justice.
Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Studies , and a member of the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies, at Swarthmore College (PA), his work centers on cultural political economic examinations of urbanism, urban education policy, Latinx education, digital social science, racial/ethnic studies and teaching for social justice.
He is founder and lead co-researcher of the Education in our Barrios Project (#BarrioEdProject) in Philadelphia (@BarrioEdPHL) and New York City (@BarrioEdProj), a youth, participatory action research (YPAR) collaborative and middle school afterschool club whose goal is to work with and for youth and communities. A second major project is the Cultivating Community Together (CCT) project where he and his team work alongside Philadelphia schools and their local communities in examining and developing school+community relationships, teaching and learning. CCT is funded by a small grant from the Spencer Foundation in the Fall of 2021. A third project is EthnicStudiesPHL, which is an educator network, curriculum database and research study of racial/ethnic studies education work in the Southeastern Pennsylvania regiion. ,
A writer, public speaker, and consultant, Edwin has written articles and book chapters on various issues including school closures; participatory action research entremundos (PAR entremundos), Black Lives Matter & teacher education; school and community partnerships, and decolonization and abolition.
He is the co-editor with Ujju Aggarwal and Bree Picower of What’s Race got to do with it:How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality (1st & 2nd ed) from Peter Lang.
At Swarthmore Edwin has created the Critical Education Policy Studies (#CritEdPol) study group, which is a space geared toward encouraging critical discussions and writings within the field of education policy. The group led to the creation of #CritEdPol, an open source, online, journal of critical education policy studies for scholars and education advocates.
Edwin teaches a variety of courses at Swarthmore, including: Pedagogy & Power: Introduction to Education; Teacher Narratives, Policy & Power; Urban Education, Education Policy: A Site of Struggle; Urban Politics, Policy & Education; Student Teaching Supervision; and The Undercommons: Critical Racial/Ethnic Studies & Education.
Edwin was also the host of an online show, encuentros políticos/political encounters with USALA media in North Philadelphia. The show examined a range of socio-political issues that impact Philadelphia’s Latinx communities and beyond. The project is currently dormant, but Edwin hopes to revive the podcast in the near future.
Originally from the Los Angeles-area, Edwin is a child of working class, Nicaraguan & Nicaraguan Chinese, immigrant, parents. He has a BA in History from UC-San Diego, where he was also a McNair scholar, has an MA in Elementary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and NYS N-6 Teacher Certification. Edwin, and his family, currently live in the Swarthmore, PA area. He lived in New York City between 2000 and 2014, working as an elementary school teacher in the NYC public school system between 2002 and 2007.
He completed his doctoral studies in Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY-GC). His dissertation, Dominance and survivance: Urban Latino communities and education in racial neoliberal urbanism, the first study conducted by the #BarrioEdProject collaborative where they examined urban change within the Latinx core community of East Harlem (El Barrio) and and its local schools during the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013). During his years as a doctoral student, Edwin was an Instructional Technology Fellow at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College (Lehman College) and a Writing Fellow at Hostos Community College. He was also part-time faculty at Hunter College and New York University.
Between 2002 and 2014, Edwin was a core member the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) a grassroots collective of current and former public school educators who believe that struggle for justice must happen both inside and outside the classroom. He is a board member of the National Latino Education Research & Policy Project (NLERAP) and the Education Law Center (PA), and on the community advisory board of the Participatory Action Research Center for Education Organizing (PARCEO).
His graduate studies were supported by CUNY-GC Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship, and his dissertation was supported by a CUNY-GC Dissertation MAGNET Fellowship and a GC Provost’s Digital Initiatives Grant.
Over the years Edwin has also worked on website development and integrating digital technologies into educational environments and social justice activist circles. He was a co-coordinator of the CUNY Internet Research Team (@CUNYirt) which is a group of students, faculty, and staff from the CUNY-Graduate Center that are interested in thinking about research on, about, through, and with the internet.
Curriculum Vitae: Mayorga, E. CV 05.2021 (pdf)
web:
www.swarthmore.edu/edwin-mayorga
https://swarthmore.academia.edu/EdwinMayorga
twitter:
facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/barrioedproj
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