Before coming to CIE, I spent several years in Brazil and after finishing my undergraduate degree, I worked as a curriculum writer for a community education program run by the nonprofit, Care for Life in Beira, Mozambique.  This program was notable in how hard it tried to solicit community involvement and stewardship in its programs, but there were many moments in which I wondered how the communities we worked in might come to further emulate what I had seen in Salvador.

I then taught for several years in disadvantaged communities in the US through Teach for America, teaching fourth grade in Washington Heights in New York City and third grade on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico.  I became fascinated with the literacy acquisition process I was seeing in my students and literacy instruction in general.  Also, I became much more invested in the formal education process and the need for quality, especially in terms of teacher quality in low-income schools.

After spending several years at CIE, I transferred to UCLA where my dissertation research was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award. My research focused on urban education reform in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with an emphasis on the nonprofit sector. It was awarded the 2014 Council on Anthropology and Education's Frederick Erickson Outstanding Dissertation Award.

I am now an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, and Program Coordinator of Educational Leadership at Texas State University. Prior to my current position, I worked with the University of Georgia's Center for Latino Achievement and Success in Education (CLASE) for three years as research faculty focused on data analysis for several projects evaluating pedagogies and policies targeting Latino students.

I have several areas of focus within my broader research portfolio, including teacher education policy, discourses of education reform, Freirean theory and pedagogy, teacher training, critical race theory, and the schooling experiences of recent immigrants. Regionally, my research is primarily focused in large urban areas in the Lusophone world (especially Brazil and Mozambique) and the United States. My most recent publications can be accessed here. [7-23]

Email: r_s534@txstate.edu