After leaving CIE Alberto Ochoa was hired as a faculty member and served as Chair of the Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education at San Diego State University for 15 years. He also served as the Academic Director of the Joint Doctoral Program between Claremont University and SDSU (1999-2005). In the PLC Department, he has been responsible for the implementation and evaluation of the bilingual teacher education programs at the elementary and secondary levels.
He has maintained an active record of professional development, grant writing and service to the community. His academic work is action research based, while combining theory and practice in the resolution of equity problems confronting social and educational institutions. His focus has been on community and institutional development programs/projects that have as their goal to promote democratic schooling and broad based community participation in the decisions that affect the quality of life of school communities--in both domestic and international settings.
His involvement in International educational programs in the United States and internationally have included Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Spain and China. More recently, in 2016 while teaching in Ecuador, he connected with personnel that worked with CIE’s nonformal education project in Ecuador forty–two years ago (Patricio Barriga, Enrique Tasiguano, and Carlos Moreno). They mutually reflected on their past and present ongoing work in community development.
Alberto’s research interests, with over 70 publications, document his work in the areas of public equity, school desegregation, community development, language policy, critical pedagogy, student achievement, and parental leadership.
In the last ten years, he has also been involved in developing processes for community capacity building, as well as forecasting the educational needs of school districts through demographic trends, socio-political conditions, and educational reform trends. In the process he has worked with K-12 schools in 60 school districts in California providing technical assistance in the areas of: language policy and assessment, bilingual instructional programs, community development, program management and evaluation, and parent leadership.
Among his accomplishments is the Parent Institute for Quality Education, a non-profit organization that he co-founded and that in 2017 celebrated 30 years of work in creating a college going culture in low-income schools communities using problem posing education. He achieved Professor Emeritus status in 2013 in the College of Education at SDSU.
Email: aochoa@mail.sdsu.edu