Eliana Castro, IRT ’15

Educator, Researcher, and Author

Eliana Castro earned a B.A. in education and an M.A.T. in secondary history/social studies from Brown University in 2009 and 2010, respectively. She then taught in her hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts, until enrolling in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Ph.D. program at Michigan State University in 2016. She is a proud IRT alum.

Eliana is active in the education research community. She is a member of the American Educational Research Association and has presented her research at annual meetings. She chairs the Student Outreach and Technology subcommittee of the AERA Division G Graduate Student Executive Committee. She has reviewed conference proposals and served as discussant for the College and University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies. Eliana is also graduate assistant to the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) and reviews manuscripts for JTE, Theory and Research in Social Education, and The High School Journal. Most recently, she collaborated on an invited piece for Social Studies Journal’s autumn 2018 issue and on the January/February editorial in JTE. She has two co-authored articles forthcoming: one is on the experiences of black high school girls, which will appear in the American Educational Research Journal, a leading peer-reviewed academic journal. The other article focuses on strategies for teaching anti-essentialist historical inquiry and will appear in The Social Studies.

Eliana seeks to promote the teaching and learning of Latinx history in ways that are affirming, healing, and culturally sustaining. Her dissertation will be a design-based case study of strategies for teaching and learning about Afro-Latinx identity and history in an urban high school classroom.

Listen to Eliana’s thoughts on her educational journey and experiences writing for the Journal of Teacher Education.