Dr. Antonia Darder
As an internationally recognized Freirean scholar and Professor Emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where for more than a decade she held the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership, Dr. Antonia Darder, has worked tirelessly to counter social and material inequalities in schools and society.
In the 1990s, she convened the California Consortium of Critical Educators that brought together radical educators, parents, students, and workers to contend with oppressive educational policies related to high stakes testing, attacks on bilingual education, immigrant rights, and worker struggles. Her activism, teaching, and critical scholarship over the last 4 decades has consistently focused on racism, political economy, and questions of liberation.
Dr. Darder is an American Educational Research Association Fellow, the recipient of the American Educational Research Association Scholars of Color Lifetime Contribution Award, and an award-winning author and editor of more than 20 books in the field, including Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, Freire and Education, The Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Decolonizing Interpretive Research: A Subaltern Methodology for Social Change.
In addition, she has
held distinguished visiting professorships at the University of
Johannesburg, South Africa; the University of Victoria, University of
Newcastle, and Queensland University, Australia; and University of
Lincoln, Uk, where she has worked to extend Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of love
and contribute to furthering our understanding of inequalities in
schools and society. Through her decolonizing scholarship on the body,
ethics, racism, curriculum, methodology, and the arts, she has
contributed to rethinking questions of empowerment, pedagogy, and
liberation from a worldview that centers the voices of oppressed
populations.
As a distinguished professor of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois, she wrote and produced a student-community collaborative award- winning documentary, The Pervasiveness of Oppression, which explored the persistence of inequities within higher education.
Her lived experience growing up in poverty, her struggles as a single mother, her battles within the academy, and her love of life are essential to her commitment to working for a more just and loving world.
Beyond academia, Dr. Darder is also a talented poet and visual artist.
