Emancipatory Education Speaker Series: Leslie Gonzales

What should education look like post-COVID? How do we get there?

Many are looking forward to a time when we can go back to “normal” in education; however, that “normal” wasn’t working for too many of our children, youth, families and communities. While we await the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, we have an opportunity to imagine what a post-COVID education system can and should look like.

Join San José State University for a series of live, online conversations with nationally recognized speakers and emerging voices who will share their visions for post-COVID education through an emancipatory lens and to identify steps to enact their visions.

Bio:

Leslie D. Gonzales is an associate professor in the Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Learning unit at Michigan State University. She also serves as an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Gender in a Global Context and Chicano/Latinx studies. Since February 2020, Gonzales has served as the Faculty Excellence Advocate for her College—a role in which she brings research, theory, and practice together to advocate for a more just and inclusive academic culture.

As a working-class-Latina-first-generation-college-student-turned academic, who earned all three of her academic degrees from Hispanic Serving Institutions, Gonzales is committed to building an academic profession that honors the contributions that scholars of Color bring to the academy. To this end, in her research, Gonzales focuses on the interplay of evaluation practices, departmental, disciplinary, and organizational cultures, and faculty experiences and outcomes. Mainly concerned with the evaluation of scholars’ knowledge production, Gonzales studies how hiring, tenure, and promotion norms and practices can marginalize scholars of Color, especially scholars of Color educated in historically under-resourced institutions (e.g., community colleges, Minority Serving Institutions). Gonzales has published work in several venues, but in recent years, she has moved her research into action and often works with individual faculty members, departments, or entire colleges as they strive to unsettle exclusionary practices and norms to foster more inclusive workplace settings. Much of this work underpins Gonzales’s research in Aspire, a multi-million-dollar project sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Gonzales is the daughter of Thomas W. Gonzales and Louise D. Gonzales, to whom she owes her love of learning. Gonzales is partnered with Ruben Flores, Jr., who is her best friend and greatest support. Finally, Gonzales is the mother of a fiercely smart and fun daughter, Sudeshna, who keeps her grounded and inspired to work towards a just future.

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