Dr. Tara J. Yosso

A powerful storyteller and scholar, Tara Yosso is the Inaugural Distinguished Scholar-InResidence for the Institute for Emancipatory Education at the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University and Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. Yosso applies the frameworks of critical race theory and critical media literacy to examine educational access and opportunity. Her work seeks to understand the ways communities of color have historically utilized an array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and networks to navigate structures of racial discrimination in pursuit of educational equality.

Yosso’s model of Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) challenges the idea that students of color lack the appropriate knowledge and networks necessary for academic achievement. She historically grounds what scholars call a “strengths-based” approach by naming an array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and networks possessed and utilized by communities of color to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.

Within a critical race theory in education framework, Yosso often engages researchbased creative narratives — counterstories — that recount racially and socially marginalized perspectives. Her publications describe how a counterstorytelling methodology can illuminate educational experiences both individual and shared. Her award-winning 2006 book, Critical Race Counterstories Along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline, applied this method to examine Chicana/o experiences navigating from elementary through graduate school, embedding critical conceptual and theoretical content within an accessible counternarrative format. Because she is a leading voice on counterstorytelling and CCW, she is called on to advise and consult with a range of national and international projects, STEM initiatives, professional development for faculty and administrators, student-life staff trainings and first-year experience programs.

She has authored numerous collaborative and interdisciplinary chapters and articles in publications such as the Harvard Educational Review, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Journal of Popular Film and Television and The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities. She has been awarded a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for Diversity and Excellence in University Teaching and honored with a Derrick Bell Legacy Award from the Critical Race Studies in Education Association. She is extensively cited within and beyond the field of education.