My commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity informs my professional career in significant ways. As an individual, my outlook on these issues was shaped by formative experiences within my family, as bi-racial child growing up in Brazil. As a professional, my developing awareness of how to advance diversity and inclusion goals through education started with my training in the United States. Informed by transparent and activist language about racism and prejudice, inspired by the experiences and examples of civil-rights activist colleagues, and challenged by transformative approaches such as critical race theory, my work explicitly promotes more equitable, inclusive, and ultimately transformational teaching and research. In my writing I articulate how diversity can lead to equity:
I am moved by the proposition that education is a vehicle of social transformation. I am first generation college-educated, of a mixed-race background, non-American from a developing country, not a native speaker of English. I taught kids who did not have shoes, let alone textbooks, and kids who lived in gated communities and came to school in chauffeured import cars. Through my personal and teaching experiences with elementary grades in both public and private schools in Brazil, as well as my current academic work in the United States, I contemplated the breath of the social gap, and witnessed the transformative power of learning. This transformative work is personal; it is based on constant evolving reflection about our own instances of oppression and privilege, as much as that of our students’ (Bastos, 2010, p.3).