Position Title
Former TJE Undergraduate Fellow
Emily Aguilar is a first generation, Mexican born and raised in East Oakland, California (occupied Ohlone Land). She graduated from UC Davis studying Community Regional Development with minors in Spanish and Education. She is passionate about helping her community, East Oakland, grow through education as well as helping first-generation students of color achieve higher education. Emily strongly believes that her city has shaped her into the young woman that she is today, and knows her community will always have her back.
Emily developed her research under Dr. Winns 5 pedagogical stances to transformative justice in education: history matter, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter. She is introducing academic conversation around love as the base of her additional pedagogical stance: space matters. Emily would like to propose loving space as a framework and pedagogy to ask How does it look like to love students and serve them through distance learning? How are we ensuring we are retaining, empowering students while at the same time understanding that we are in the middle of a pandemic? Lastly, what kind of space do first generations/low-income/students of color need right now?
She is also looking at the history of student and community organizing that has led to HSI on other campuses. For her project she will be applying all of this to a circle, a restorative practice, on campus so that she can learn more and gather data as well as apply her research directly. In the future, Emily hopes to get into graduate school to receive her teaching credentials and teach Ethnic Studies to high school students. Knowledge of self is a form of self-love and Emily hopes to be a teacher who can bring that into a classroom so that Oakland can continue its legacy in self-love and radicalism.
Eily continued her research at UC Berkeley enrolling in its teacher ed program.