REI Colloquium: How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in USA

How Schools Make Race shows how a Spanish-English bilingual-education program teaches—implicitly and explicitly—about race. It shows how the program’s practices, pedagogy, and policies construct the Latinx group as an example to illuminate the process through which schools unintentionally reinforce racial ideas and impede their anti-racist efforts. The book frames the program as a racial project and attends to how schools construct Latinidad in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group and calls for ambitious teaching that rethinks race and works toward a critical racial consciousness education through considering racialization.

Dr. Chávez-Moreno’s book, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, published by Harvard Education Press, won the 2025 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Early Career Book of the Year Award and a 2025 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Book Award. Her book has been featured in several podcasts and media, including the New Books Network and Latinx Talk.

About the Speaker:

Laura Chávez-Moreno, PhD, is an award-winning scholar, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor in the Departments of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prof. Chávez-Moreno’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals and recognized with prestigious awards from organizations such as the American Educational Research Association​, the Critical Race Studies in Education Association​, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. In 2023, she received the Alan C. Purves Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for her article, “The continuum of racial literacies: Teacher practices countering whitestream bilingual education,” published in Research in the Teaching of English. This annual award honors the article deemed most significant in advancing the field.

This is an accessible event. If you have accessibility needs and need reasonable accommodations to participate they will be provided. For more information, and to make a request, please contact Ezra Bristow at [email protected]

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Host or Publisher Institute of Governmental Studies