Ramon Vasquez

Dr. Vasquez is an Assistant Professor of Critical Elementary Education. Before working in higher education, he served as an elementary school teacher in California. Currently, he works with a range of teacher candidates, current teachers, and community members across various sites. His publications include analyses of epistemicide and knowledge production in schools and teacher education programs as well as discussions of the ethics of memory work. Dr. Vasquez also explores different critical approaches to education collaborations with an emphasis on engagements with Indigenous, racialized, and other systemically marginalized communities.

As an experienced educator, Dr. Vasquez is committed to creating spaces for critically informed and socially accountable debates and to producing autonomous and transdisciplinary research about alternative futures for schools and society. Dr. Vasquez is also committed to working with faculty, staff, and students to develop a vision for the future that responds to the pressing social challenges of our time while also making space for different perspectives on shared issues of concern.  

In his work, Dr. Vasquez centers on collective well-being and honors accountability to various communities and collaborators, particularly as they relate to issues of decolonization. In his work, he explores possibilities for knowledge production outside institutionally established ways of understanding the world. As such, his projects emphasize collective memory work and alternative research as a means of disrupting school practices that limit engagement with a plurality of epistemologies.

What students can expect from me?

1. I approach advising with a deep commitment to decolonizing practices. 
2. I prioritize cultural competence and cultural humility in my advising while creating a shared space for ongoing dialogue and mutual learning.
3. I recognize cultural differences and marginalized identities while also paying attention to the dismantling of systematic privileges.
4. I recognize the consequences of racism and other forms of oppression on educational outcomes by understanding the impact of historical and institutional factors on student success.
5. I work with students to develop advising practices that engage cultural humility with a deep understanding of the complexities involved in interactions between privileged and marginalized identities.

Publications

Vasquez, R., Leathers, S., Lee, A., Cheruvu, R. (in press). The Cruelty is the Point: Racial Gaslighting in Teacher Education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Vasquez, R. (2024). We Expected a Normal Latinx, Not a Chicano Like You. Rio Bravo: Journal of the Borderlands, 25, 90-104.

Vasquez, R. (2023). “Twenty-four White Women and Me:” Controlling and Managing Men of Color in Teacher Education. Urban Education, 58(1), 36-58.

Vasquez, R. (2022). Pandemic as Portal: Disrupting the Violence of Epistemicide in Teacher Education. Northwest Journal of Teacher Education, 17(3), 30.

Vasquez, R. (2022). “Stop Complaining, You Just Need More Resilience:” Racial Gaslighting as “Othering.” Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 11(3)

Vasquez, R. (2021). (Re)inscribing White Cultural Hegemony: The Paradox of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy? Educational Studies https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2021.1945604 

Nenonene, R., McIntosh, N., Vasquez. R. (2021). Faculty of Color and Collective-Memory Work: The Self as a Method for Examining Intersectionality, Privilege, and Marginalization. Understanding & Dismantling Privilege, 11, (2), 2-21.

Vasquez, R. (2019). “Forget About Justice”: Survivance and Resistance in Teacher Education. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 8(1), 1-11.

Vasquez, R. (2018). “They Can’t Expect to be Treated Like Normal Americans so Soon:” Reconceptualizing Latinx Immigrants in Social Studies Education. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis. 7, (1), 2-24.

Vasquez, R., & Altshuler, D. (2017). A Critical Examination of K-12 Ethnic Studies: Transforming and Liberating Praxis. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis. 6, (2), 22-4. 

Book Chapters

Vasquez, R. (in press). Latino Faculty in Teacher Education: Everyday Lived Experiences of Being Silenced, in Vega, J. and Medina, Y. (Eds.) LatCrit and Education: Dismantling the Norm while Creating Visibility. Peter Lang.

Vasquez, R. (2022). Another Social Studies is Possible: Challenging the Violence of Organized Forgetting through Counternarratives, in Vickery, A. and Rodriguez, N. (Eds.) Critical Race Theory and Social Studies Futures: From the Nightmare of Racial Realism to Dreaming Out Loud. Teachers College Press.

Vasquez, R. (2021). Wonderful Evaluations in the Face of Teaching Anti-Racism and Multicultural Education, in Taylor, L.U. (Ed.) Implications of race and racism in student evaluations of teaching: The hate U give. Rowman & Littlefield.