About Us
Who we are shapes what we do and how we do it.
Wayfinding Guides
Merging our decades of diverse and collective work across the educational landscape, we guide districts, schools, educational leaders, and teachers in harnessing the power of their existing strengths, experiences, and expertise to create more humanizing, empowering, antiracist, and inclusive school and classroom ecologies.
By developing hyper-responsive, relational, and contextualized support, we guide educators and communities in critically and compassionately:
Raising their awareness of and ability to respond to patterns of systemic racism and discrimination in schools, classrooms, and curriculum
Identifying and implementing high-impact instructional, communication, and socio-emotional practices and policies to cultivate classroom and school ecologies that honor and nurture students' and educators' whole, dynamic selves
Developing reiterative practices, reflective tools, and plans to sustain critical, compassionate, and inclusive school ecologies.
Dra. Claudia Bermúdez (she/ella)
I am a Clinical Assistant Professor and coordinator in the Department of Teacher Education at Claremont Graduate University. My positionality as a first-generation, Latina, cisgender/heterosexual, able-bodied person brought up by working class immigrant parents influences every aspect of my professional work. I strive to ally with folks whose marginalized identities are removed from the center of power.
My research and teaching interests explore the significance of healthy classroom ecologies and the tension between critical social justice teaching and subtractive schooling. My work spans K-12 to higher education, with an emphasis on antiracist and culturally responsive pedagogies; the intersection of class/race and social/cultural capital in education; and critically socially just leadership.
Between 2015 and 2017, I was part of a research team that was awarded a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation to study highly effective teachers of historically marginalized students. In 2019, the findings of this extensive study were published in a book that I co-edited with CGU Professor Mary Poplin titled Highly Effective Teachers of Vulnerable Students: Practice Transcending Theory.
Prior to my time at CGU, I cultivated my skills as an educational leader in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where, over the span of a 20-year career, I served as a paraprofessional, an elementary teacher, a site level bilingual coordinator, a district level English learner expert, an APEIS, and an elementary school principal.
I hold a Ph.D. in Education from Claremont Graduate University, a master’s degree in educational administration from CSULA, a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from UCLA, and a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies from UCLA.
Selected Works
Co-edited with M. Poplin. Highly Effective Teachers of Vulnerable Students: Practice Transcending Pedagogy. Peter Lang, 2019.
Co-authored with R. Camacho. “Women of Color in Academia: Self-Preservation in the Face of White Fragility and Hegemonic Masculinity.” In Violence Against Women in the 21st Century: Transnational Perspectives of Empowerment and Subjugation, edited by K. Zaleski, et al. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Co-authored with T. Kanaya and M. Santiago. “Improving Family-School Communication with Parents of Long Term English Learners.” Communiqué, National Association of School Psychologists, 2017.
Dr. Rebecca Hatkoff (she/they)
I'm committed to developing humanizing, empowering, antiracist, and generative classroom and school ecologies, relationships, and communities.
Uniquely and intentionally situated at the intersection of K-12 schools and higher education, my experiences have accrued into informed and nuanced views of the challenges and especially the opportunities in K-16 education. Whether teaching, researching, or supporting educators in the field, I draw on culturally sustaining, caring, antiracist, asset-based, and love-soaked frameworks.
All of my work requires interrogating, harnessing, and mitigating bias born from my positionality and experiences as a white, cisgender, Jewish woman with a deep love for poetry, urban walks, crafting, pit bulls, and playing tennis.
Currently, I serve as a Clinical Assistant Professor and the Claremont Fellows Project Coordinator at Claremont Graduate University, supported by a $3.3 million dollar grant I helped secure from the DOE.
As a Los Angeles native, I have prioritized understanding the complexities of the local educational landscape; to that end, I have studied, observed, and learned from principals, teachers, and students in more than 100 classrooms across more than 80 K-12 schools in the greater Los Angeles area.
In addition to teaching, over the past decade:
I served as the program associate for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded Digital Fellows Program, providing provosts and chief academic officers with critical information, resources, and support to help their faculty understand and adopt high quality digital courseware to enhance undergraduate experiences, persistence, and success.
I worked with a research team in LAUSD to study the implementation of all elementary dual language immersion programs in the district.
I contributed to a year long study of highly effective teachers of marginalized student populations.
I provided academic and college counseling to recent immigrants and their households.
I began my career in education teaching English in Japan and then as a high school English teacher and Sex Educator at an all girl's school in Pasadena. I hold a Ph.D. and MA in Education from Claremont Graduate University, and a BA in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.
Selected Works
“Teaching our Teachers, with Rebecca Hatkoff ’99.” Learn|Ed Podcast, 2020.
“Challenging Class: How highly effective teachers mitigate social class reproduction in working-class communities.” In Highly Effective Teachers of Vulnerable Students, edited by M. Poplin and C. Bermúdez, 205-28. Peter Lang, 2019.
Co-authored with C. Bermúdez. “‘Believe you have something to say’: Successful community college teachers of developmental English courses.” In Highly Effective Teachers of Vulnerable Students, edited by M. Poplin and C. Bermúdez, 191-204. Peter Lang, 2019.
Co-authored with C. Green. “Exploring the CAO role in digital learning.” Educause Review, 2019.
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