Leavey Presidential Chair & Professor, Loyola Marymount University
Antonia Darder is a Professor of Education Leadership at Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Antonia Darder is an internationally recognized Freirian scholar. She holds the Leavey Presidential Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles and is Professor Emerita of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. For more than 30 years, her practice and scholarship have focused on political questions and ethical concerns linked to racism, class inequalities, language rights, critical pedagogy, Latino education, and social justice. More recently, her work has sought to articulate a critical theory of leadership for social justice and community engagement, as well as to theorize a pedagogy of beauty, in the pursuit of a liberatory practice of education. Dr. Darder’s scholarship has been deeply influenced by the world-renowned Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, whose ideas on schooling and society profoundly shaped the direction of her early work.
Beyond her scholarly efforts, Dr. Darder has been an activist and visual artist, participating in a variety of grassroots efforts tied to educational rights, worker’s rights, bilingual education, women’s issues, environmental justice, and immigrant rights. In the 1990s, she convened educators from across the state to establish the California Consortium of Critical Educators (CCCE), a member-supported radical teachers’ organization committed to an educational vision of schooling intimately linked to social justice, human rights, and economic democracy. In 2005, she established a radio collective with students and community members who produced Liberacion!, a public affairs radio program on WEFT. As a member of the Champaign Urbana Independent Media Center, she was active as a community journalist with the Public I. In 2007, she worked with graduate students on an award-winning documentary, Breaking Silence: The Pervasiveness of Oppression that examined the persistence of inequality at the university.