Jonathan Pérez

Jonathan Pérez is a guest lecturer in the Department of Equity, Leadership Studies, and Instructional Technologies. He first started teaching in Louisville, Kentucky, at a high school for parenting and pregnant teenagers. His experience with non-traditional spaces inspired him to explore other avenues of critical pedagogy. He eventually received two-consecutive Fulbright grants from the US State Department to explore the potential of community-informed curricula, where he worked with elementary schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Jonathan’s curricular focus incorporated inspiration from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. In Brazil, he additionally taught at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and Universidade Federal Fluminense. Currently, Jonathan serves as a curriculum planner for The School of The New York Times and is completing his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He has his MAT from the University of Louisville and his MEd from Columbia University’s Teachers College. His research explores transdisciplinary conversations between critical theory and the learning sciences to understand learned identities.