Short Biographies of the Curriculum Inquiry Editorial Team

Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández (Editor-in-Chief) is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, where he is also the Director of the Youth Research Lab. He teaches courses in curriculum theory, decolonization, cultural production, and solidarity. His articles have been published in education journals like the Harvard Educational Review, the Review of Educational Research, and the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. His research and scholarship are concerned with questions of symbolic boundaries and the dynamics of cultural production and processes of identification in educational contexts, including elite schools, specialized programs, and with Latinx and Indigenous students in public schools. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between cultural production and solidarity. He has also conducted community-engaged research for more than a decade and is currently Co-PI of the Pedagogies of Community Engaged Practice Partnership. He is the Producer of TheWhyPAR Podcast (ypar.ca).  

Diana M. Barrero Jaramillo (Associate Editor) is a PhD student in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research explores the tensions between state and community-based memory initiatives related to the armed conflict in Colombia. She has worked as a research assistant on a participatory action research project with Latinx and Urban Indigenous youth in the Toronto District Board, and a peacebuilding citizenship learning comparative project between Mexico and Canada. Her previous work focused on how educational policies reproduce racial order in settler colonial contexts through the discourse of achievement gaps.

Gabrielle Warren (Assistant Editor) is a Ph.D. student in Curriculum and Pedagogy at OISE/University of Toronto. She is interested in the history and politics of Canadian education, focusing on archival research. Her current project investigates the evolution of educational discourse and childhood inequity in Ontario from the 1970s to now. In praxis, she has worked as an advocate and writer for the past eight years with Start2Finish Canada, an organization focused on alleviating the effects of deprivation for school-aged children through community connection and educational enrichment.

Ali Azhar (Assistant Editor) is a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum and Pedagogy program at OISE. His thesis is a fictional narrative exploring the link between writing and intellectual emancipation. He works with fragments of the past to tell a story of intellectual emancipation and his work contains reflections on time, love, history, poetics and belonging. Previously, he has a Masters degree in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University and is a co-founder of an elementary school in rural Pakistan.

Jennifer Brant (Faculty Editor) belongs to the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk Nation) with family ties to Six Nations of the Grand River Territory and Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. Jennifer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research interests include: Indigenous literatures; Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies and Methodologies; and Ethical Spaces for Liberatory Praxis. Jennifer’s scholarship positions Indigenous literatures as educational tools to foster sociopolitical action and calls for immediate responses to racialized, sexualized, and gender-based violences. Jennifer is the coeditor of Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and currently working on the second edition. Her latest piece on racialized, sexualized, and gender-based violences can be found in Global Femicide: Indigenous Women and Girls Torn from our Midst University of Regina Press. Her work on Indigenous mothering is featured in several Demeter Press collections as well as a Routledge Reader on Maternal Studies. Jennifer’s writing can also be found in the International Journal of Lifelong Education; Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement; Historica Canada and The Conversation. Jennifer’s latest work ‘Finding Homeplace within Indigenous Literatures: A Pedagogical Juncture of bell hooks’ Feminist Theory and Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies’ is in press with Hypatia. Through her community work, teaching, research, and writing, Jennifer is dedicated to encouraging teacher candidates to engage in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's 94 Calls to Action and the 231 Calls for Justice released in Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Cassie J. Brownell (Faculty Editor) is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Framed by her experiences as an early childhood educator in post-Katrina New Orleans, Cassie’s research is undergirded by her long-standing commitment to educational justice and social equity.  In her work as a teacher educator, Cassie foregrounds children’s personhood through readings and assignments that emphasize children’s diverse funds of knowledge. In her research, she draws on critical sociocultural theory to critically consider how schooling might become more inclusive of children’s cultural, linguistic, and modal ways of knowing. Often, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work as she bridges scholarship from literacy and social studies education to examine children’s sociopolitical development and civic participation. Within her school-based research studies, Cassie emphasizes how children not only are capable of, but desire the chance to discuss critical social issues, particularly since they live raced, classed, and gendered lives. More recently, she has engaged in community-based research with New Orleans-based Be Loud Studios (https://beloudstudios.org/). Here, she is working and learning alongside Be Loud’s kid-DJs and community teachers to amplify children’s stories in and about the community. She has previously served  as an international research partner for the University of Sheffield's MakEY Project (an EU H2020 Research and Innovation Staff Exchange [RISE] program) and she has received funding for her studies from the International Literacy Association (ILA), the National Council of Teachers of Education (NCTE), and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Samples of her research can be found in the pages of the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Theory into Practice, Teachers College Record, and Research in the Teaching of English. 

Arlo Kempf (Faculty Editor), is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. His research interests include anti-racism, anticolonialism and white supremacy in education; educational access for precarious status students; teachers' work and professional lives in critical perspective; and critical perspectives on neoliberalism in education. Arlo teaches in the areas of race and equity in education. His work has been published in multiple journals including Teachers College Record, Race and Ethnicity in Education, Critical Education, International Education, Directions, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Journal of Workplace Learning , and the National Evaluation Gazette. Arlo has also contributed chapters to multiple edited collections, encyclopedia, and handbooks. His seventh book, Critical Perspectives on White Supremacy and Racism in Canadian Education: Dispatches from the Field (Co-edited with Heather Watts), was published in 2024 with Routledge. Arlo is Book Series Editor (with Nina Bascia, OISE/UT; Denisha Jones, Sarah Lawrence College; and Rhiannon Maton, SUNY Cortland) of the Routledge Book Series: Teachers' Work and Teaching in Critical Perspective.

AV Verhaeghe (they/them) has been Curriculum Inquiry’s Editorial Assistant since 2018. They have worked in academic publishing for the past decade and recently completed their PhD in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University. AV was a Managing Editor of Feral Feminisms, an open access, peer reviewed, multimedia feminist journal, for seven years, and they have copyedited and proofread edited collections and monographs for the University of Toronto Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press. In their dissertation, AV theorized the Canadian state’s regulation of sexuality as a racial project by problematizing the analogies between racism and homophobia that Members of Parliament and Supreme Court justices used between 1969 and 2005.