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Cassandra Drake

California State University, Stanislaus

United States of America - Turlock

I am a binational, bicultural, teacher/researcher/advocate with a passion for equity and innovation in education.

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at CSU Stanislaus in California’s Central Valley. We are situated in a rural region with a tremendous amount of cultural and linguistic diversity. I have worked at Stan State since 2019 - I recently earned my Ph.D. in Education (Teaching, Learning and Culture) at San Diego State University in conjunction with Claremont Graduate University. I have a master's in Curriculum and Instruction, a California multiple-subject teaching credential and a bachelor's in Liberal Studies; all from California State University, Sacramento. I lived, worked, and completed the majority of my education in our highly diverse state capital.

I am a former K-8 classroom teacher. While in Sacramento, I taught in diverse, urban school districts in the northern and southern regions of the city. I taught first, fifth and seventh grade as well as held long-term temporary positions in physical education and a preschool autism special day class. also taught for three years in a Punjabi language charter school which is housed in the West Sacramento Sikh temple. Within these positions, I experienced teaching, learning from and caring for students from communities vastly different from my own.

I used my dissertation to explore the development of teacher-candidate cultural competence toward the overall development of a social justice orientation. Broadly, my research interests are based on educators addressing the social/academic advancement and learner rights of K–12 public school students from ethnically, culturally, linguistically and socioeconomically diverse communities. My particular areas of interest are: multicultural education, culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies, critical literacies, historical foundations of the US education system, social justice education, teacher identity, multimodal learning, social constructivism, visual data analysis, curriculum studies, online teaching methods, social media use in education, and techquity.