Announcing the 2022-23 CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellow: Jasmin Patron-Vargas, Ph.D.
A First-Generation Chicana, Returns to Chicago to Continue Research on Ethnic Studies in K-12 Courses.
Announcing the 2022-23 CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellow: Jasmin Patron-Vargas, Ph.D.
A First-Generation Chicana, Returns to Chicago to Continue Research on Ethnic Studies in K-12 Courses.
The Centro de Excelencia at National Louis University serves as the hub for programs and initiatives that advance our work as a community and career-focused Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). The CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellowship program is a key activity of the Promoting Post-baccalaureate Opportunities for Hispanic Americans grant from the Hispanic-Serving Institutions Division of the Department of Education.
CLAVE is an acronym for “Comunidades Latinas Académicas con Vision de Exito,” [Latinx Academic Communities with Vision of Success]. Through its Graduate Student Institute, the Center de Excelencia seeks to increase enrollment of Latinx students in Masters and Doctoral programs, develop and support a network of promising doctoral scholars, and increase their professional networks, writing capacity, and financial and professional knowledge.
The goal of the CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, within the CLAVE Graduate Student Institute at National Louis University, is to build the talent pool of Latinx faculty at colleges and universities at both the national and local levels, particularly the metropolitan Chicago area. Successful candidates for the program are selected on the basis of scholarly promise and potential for research and/or community engagement pertaining to Latinx or other BIPOC groups in doctoral education.
The CLAVE Graduate Student Institute is extremely pleased to introduce the 2022-2023 CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellow: Dra. Jasmin Patron-Vargas.
Doctora Jasmin Patron-Vargas (she/her/ella) is a 2022–2023 CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centro de Excelencia at National Louis University. She earned two Ph.D.s from Michigan State University, one in Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education and the second in Chicano/Latino Studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Latin@ Studies and Gender and Women Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MEd in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Dra. Patron-Vargas is a Chicana from the predominantly Spanish-speaking community of La Villita on the Southwest Side of Chicago. She is the daughter of immigrants who migrated from Guerrero, Mexico. She is a proud product of Chicago Public Schools, where she developed an initial interest in history, education, and social justice. Dra. Patron-Vargas’ educational experiences as a first-generation Chicana, along with her professional experiences in K-12, led her to pursue a career in higher education.
Dra. Patron-Vargas’ scholarship addresses the growing need to support schools and educators implementing Ethnic Studies K-12 courses. She approaches this goal with two interrelated lines of inquiry: educational policy and pedagogy. Using critical policy perspectives, her first area of research explores the development of Ethnic Studies educational policies in the K-12 Social Studies curriculum. Her second area of research draws on interdisciplinary perspectives in Teacher Education and Chicano/Latino Studies to examine the adoption of Ethnic Studies curriculum and instruction in secondary schools. Together, these two research projects contribute to the collective vision of educational spaces of joy and liberation through an Ethnic Studies lens.
As an action-oriented scholar, Jasmin has also established a reputation as a collaborator. She has collaborated on several education projects, including a national study on teaching Latinx topics in K-12 classrooms, the ethnic studies graduation requirement initiative at Washington State, and the History TALLER (pronounced tah-yer) research group. In recent years, Jasmin was selected as a Fellow for the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) and is the recipient of the King-Chavez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowship.
Dra. Patron-Vargas is excited to join El Centro de Excelencia, and more broadly, the National Louis University community, as a CLAVE Postdoctoral Fellow. In alignment with the program’s mission to “build the talent pool of Latinx faculty at colleges and universities,” she is enthusiastic about the opportunity to support minoritized students through her first-hand experiences as a Chicana, along with higher education training. She also looks forward to collaborating with colleagues invested in racial equity.
