Miguel Casar Rodriguez

AWARDS AND HONORS

• UCLA Wasserman Dean’s Award
• UCLA Young Scholar Travel grant
• The University of Alabama Strategic Small Grant– Re-membering Historical (Dis)Continuities through Peace and Justice Dialogues
• California Community Foundation Grant– Renewing the Promise of a Just, Participatory Democracy: A Collaborative Research to Action project to Support School Boards
• MS Grunbacher Foundation– Imagining Freedom and Remembering Selves Project

First and foremost, my pedagogy and my love of teaching is grounded in a love for people, a belief in our ontological vocation to be and to set each other free, and a commitment to the worlds that we can build together. This ontological commitment calls for a centering of our humanities and authentic relationships as the basis for healing, critical, and transformative learning spaces. In addition, this ontology also challenges the traditional configurations of power and authority in the classroom. In my practice, this means listening deeply, making space to honor and sustain student’s cultural wealth, being vulnerable, co-constructing curriculum with students, reimagining how we practice grading and accountability, and constantly shedding light of what Freire called the teacher-student contradiction. Most importantly, it entails valuing the pedagogical encounters, the moments of possibility, and the opportunities to grow and change as a teacher, student, and person. Epistemologically, I believe education must be a place to nurture and sustain the multiple ways of knowing; the values, questions, struggles, and possibilities that our students, families, and school communities bring with them. In my own practice, moving away from understanding curriculum as books and materials that hold “legitimate knowledge” and instead centering learning as a process that takes place in and through relationships has been an invitation to plan for learning in creative and innovative ways.

Axiologically, the values and commitments that guide my work are rooted in a struggle towards what Dr. Martin Luther King called positive peace—peace in the presence of justice. For me, this is not an abstract idea to be taught or a utopian fiction to aspire towards, but a concrete set of values to be practiced in the day to day. Positive peace requires that we shed light onto those dimensions of life that all too often remain in the dark, breaking strategic and debilitating silences in our history and interrupting the monotonous reproduction of our world and its accumulated injustices. In my own classroom, this means creating space for courageous conversations and dialogue; critically interrogating and recovering historical memory; unsettling the taken-for-grantedness of normality; and honoring the right of everyone, especially those whose rights are repeatedly being infringed upon, to the word and the world.

Informed by these commitments, I have worked as an educator for more than a decade across varying contexts and roles.

CURRENT RESEARCH AND GRANT PROJECTS

• School Boards Under Siege: Toward a Possibility of Democratic Governance in Divided Times
• Imagining Freedom, Remembering Selves
• Fertile Seeds, Transformative Dreams, and Contexts of (Im)Possibility

HIGHLIGHTED PUBLICATIONS

Casar, M. (In Press). “Never Had A Chance To Imagine A Future Where I Could Be Free”; Theorizing Back And The Right To The Word And The World. In Abad, N., Conchas, G., & DeAlba, V., Eds. Youth Resistance for Educational Justice: Pedagogical Dreaming from the Classroom to the Streets. Routledge.

Stacy, J., & Casar Rodriguez, M. (2023). A Reconfigured Panopticon: COVID-19, Virtual Schooling, and Regulation of Our Homes. Teachers College Record, 125(10), 31-55. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231217580

Casar Rodriguez, M., Sasner C, & Graham, F. (2022). Nothing about us without us; Youth Voice, Power, and Participation in East Side Union. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. https://transformschools.ucla.edu/research/nothing-about-us-without-us-youth-voice-power-and-participation/ Marsh, J. Casar Rodriguez, M., & Noguera, P. (2023). School Board Elections Could Make (or Break) Our Democracy. The Progressive Magazine. https://progressive.org/op-eds/school-board-elections-marsh-casar-rodriguez-noguera-20231101/#:~:text=Attacks%20on%20school%20boards%20are,advance%20a%20broader%20political%20agenda.&text=School%20boards%20across%20America%20are%20under%20attack

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS / ACTIVITIES

• Educational Consultant–Ethnic Studies Together and Now
• Education Specialist–PAN Consulting, Class Measures, Cambridge Education
• Data and Research Taskforce Member– LA County Youth Justice Reimagine Data and Research Workgroup
• Teacher, Facilitator–Homeboy Industries Youth Re-entry Center

BIOGRAPHY

Miguel Casar Ph. D. is an activist scholar with expertise in critical qualitative research and educational justice. Compelled by a belief in the transformative power of education and the imperative to put research in the service of social change, Miguel works at the nexus of critical qualitative methodologies, social foundations of education, and justice. His scholarship explores how research can contribute to a collective praxis through which marginalized communities and those resisting oppression can ask critical questions about our realities, build power, and become protagonists of history as we imagine, author and cultivate just and humanizing futures.