Diversity Toolkit Advisors

Aimee Nelson has proudly supported prospective and current teachers in various capacities in higher education for the last ten years.  She is currently the Director of the Center for Careers in Teaching at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF).  In this role, Aimee oversees outreach, recruitment, advising and student support services for students pursuing in a career in education.  This position also allows her to represent CSUF and the Cal State University system in statewide and national efforts focused on issues of teacher recruitment and retention.  She represents CSUF (the only institution in California) on the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education’s (AACTE) Networked Improvement Community, an initiative created to investigate recruitment and retention strategies and challenges for African-American and Hispanic/Latino men.  She was awarded the 2016 California Teachers Association State Gold Award for her work as co-founder of the Cultivating Teacher Leaders program, a multi-tiered approach to mitigate the California teacher shortage.  Aimee is a Cal State Fullerton alumna, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.

Amy Hanreddy is an associate professor in the Department of Special Education at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She teaches about inclusive and collaborative practices that benefit all students, as well as specific approaches to serve students with significant support needs. Dr. Hanreddy is particularly interested in strategies that allow students with disabilities access to meaningful instruction in the context of general education settings, as well as culturally responsive approaches to inclusive education. Prior to joining the faculty at CSUN, she taught as a special education teacher in a traditional school district as well as at CHIME Charter School, an internationally recognized demonstration site for inclusive education, where she also served as the Director of Curriculum and Instruction and as the Interim Executive Director.  Dr. Hanreddy currently partners with the Los Angeles Unified School District and CHIME Institute, a partner school with the university, to support sustained implementation of inclusive practices.

A tenured Associate Professor at San Diego State University, André José Branch earned the Ph.D. at the University of Washington (Seattle), the M.Ed. at North Carolina State University (Raleigh), and the B.A. at The King’s College (Briarcliff, New York). He has also studied at the Institute of Holy Land Studies, Jerusalem, Israel, and at Oxford, England. Having taught all grades (K-12) in the United States, and secondary school in Nigeria, West Africa, Branch presently conducts research in Ethnic Identity Development. He is interested in the intersection of ethnicity, race, and education in public schools, and investigates how teacher educators can prepare pre-service teachers to use the ethnicity that children bring to school to teach subject matter content. Branch has created the four-dimensional model of Ethnic Identity Exploration in Education to assist teacher educators and classroom teachers as they guide students in using established curricula to facilitate ethnic identity exploration. A conference speaker and workshop leader in valuing human diversity, Branch is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME). With the mission of inspiring middle school students of color to achieve academic excellence, and to become leaders in the profession of their choice anywhere in the world, Branch directs S.W.A.G. (Students With Academic Goals), a Career Breakfast Mentoring Program that connects middle school students with individuals in various career paths. Branch created and presently directs the GOLD (Guatemala Opportunities in Learning Across Distances) study abroad program, which takes SDSU (San Diego State University) students to Guatemala over spring break to teach elementary and school students math, science, literacy, and the English language.

Dr. Bre Evans-Santiago is an Assistant Professor at CSU Bakersfield.  She received her Ed.D. with a focus on culturally sustaining pedagogy at Illinois State University in 2015. Dr. Evans-Santiago grew up in both California and Illinois.  She taught for 15 years in PK-8 in San Bernardino and La Cañada, CA, Washington D.C., and Bloomington, IL. Connecting with her intersecting identities, Dr. Evans-Santiago continues to research issues in education as they relate to underrepresented populations. She is also one of the key leaders with Kern Urban Teacher Residency as she worked with WestEd, SRI and the National Center for Teacher Residencies to evaluate teacher preparation and provide insight for CSUB’s Teacher Education Program through utilizing improvement science. Her current projects include LGBTQ issues in education at various levels, QPOC, and classroom management with a social justice lens. She presents her work nationally and throughout California for several programs and districts. She is a recently published author of an edited text titled, Mistakes We Have Made: Implications for Social Justice Educators (2020). Twitter: @drevanssantiago Website: https://sites.google.com/csub.edu/drevanssantiago/home This link will take you to an external website in a new tab.

Cheryl Ordorica currently works as a recruiter, advisor, and grants project assistant on innovative teacher residency programs for Chico State Enterprises. For the past five years, her work has been supported by a grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education titled, PRISMS (Promoting Rural Improvement in Secondary Mathematics & Science), and is currently supporting another Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) Grant, Computational Literacy Across Secondary Settings (CLASS). Her expertise in teacher recruitment focuses on high-need subject areas and individuals with diverse backgrounds. She is a member of a research action cluster with the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTE-P) and has presented at national conferences on teacher recruitment for high schools. Cheryl has experience in advertising, digital marketing, website design, social media, and analytics. She is currently earning a Master’s degree in Higher Education Leadership and Public Policy at CSU, Sacramento. 

Colette Rabin teaches in the joint credential/Masters's teacher preparation program at San José State University. She teaches educational foundations, research methods, classroom management, health, special education, and student teaching practicum courses. Prior to teaching graduate school, she taught grades kindergarten through middle school for twelve years. Her research interests are in care ethics, social justice, co-teaching, sustainability, and social and emotional learning. Colette has explored the nature of relationships in schools from multiple perspectives and how to create and sustain them from the perspective of an ethic of care as a conceptual schema. Recent publications include, “Co-Teaching: Collaborative and Caring Teacher Preparation,” in the Journal of Teacher Education, “Social Studies from a Care Ethics Perspective in an Elementary Classroom in Social Studies Research and Practice,” and “Don’t Throw the Rocks: Cultivating Care with a Pedagogy called Rocks-in-the-Basket” in the Journal of Research in Childhood Education.

Dr. Fernando Rodríguez-Valls is an Associate Professor at California State University, Fullerton. Dr. Rodríguez-Valls has created partnerships with school districts and local educational agencies to develop and implement community-based [bi/-multi]literacy programs. At CSUF, Ferran/Fernando coordinates the Bilingual Authorization Program and the World Languages Program. In this capacity, he recruits and prepares future educators to design, implement, and evaluate asset-based and heteroglossia practices. As a scholar, Dr. Rodríguez-Valls’ publications focus on equitable and linguistically inclusive methodologies for the emergent bilingual, newcomer, and [im]migrant students as well as on the socio-cultural factors affecting their academic achievement, educational continuity, and school engagement. Ferran/Fernando has directed and co-directs grant projects in which teacher candidates have the opportunity to create brave learning spaces where teaching overpowers instruction, where learning surpasses drilling, where languages conquer monolingualism, where critical thinking eradicates fanaticism and a fake sense of monoglossic and univocal identity.

Pia Lindquist Wong, Ph.D. joined the College of Education at Sacramento State University in 1995. During her tenure as a faculty member, she taught courses in multicultural education, critical pedagogy and educational research. She served as the department chair for the Teaching Credentials Department from 2012-2015.  She currently serves as the Associate Dean for Research and Engagement. Dr. Wong has successfully secured over $8 million in external funding to support high quality urban teacher preparation; her awards include two Teacher Quality Partnership grants from the US Department of Education as well as funding from the California Department of Education and such foundations as the Stuart Foundation and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Her research focuses on urban professional development schools, teacher practices in the context of urban school reform and democratic education, and democratic educational reforms in Brazil. A frequent speaker at national conferences, she has published Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Education Reform and Social Movements (1998) co-authored with Maria Pilar O’Cadiz and Carlos Alberto Torres, and numerous articles in journals such as Comparative Education Review, Teacher Education Quarterly, and Journal of Educational Policy. Dr. Wong received a B.A. with Honors in Latin American Studies and an M.A. in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in International Development Education from Stanford University.  She is married to Bruce Griesenbeck, a transportation planner, and they are the proud parents of Riley Hui (22 years) and Emily Ming (20 years).

Shadi Roshandel is an Assistant Professor at CSU East Bay in the Teacher Education Program.  Prior to her arrival at this campus, she was the Program Director of the Single Subject Program and Assessment Coordinator in the Department of Education at Dominican University of California.  Over the last seven years, she has worked with pre-service teachers, striving to teach pedagogical practices that emphasize equity and inclusivity.  She earned her Ph.D. in Education with an emphasis in Child and Adolescent Development from University of California, Santa Barbara.  Her research interests focus on adolescent motivation and achievement among middle and high school students and exploring the influences of teacher support on adolescent motivation and achievement.  She explores the transactional relationship between teachers and students and applies these findings to implement professional development programs in schools for both pre-service and in-service teachers.  Prior to her doctorate work, she was a middle school math teacher in New York City and received her M.S. in education at Brooklyn College and her B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan. 

Valerie Ooka Pang, former elementary teacher, is a professor in the School of Teacher Education at San Diego State University. Recently, Pang published " Diversity and Equity in the Classroom" (Cengage, 2018) and was series editor with E. Wayne Ross of Race, Ethnicity, and Education. She also was an editor of  Struggling To Be Heard: The Unmet Needs of Asian American Children  with L. Cheng (1998). As senior editor of an instructional text for the National Council for the Social Studies, The Human Impact of Natural Disasters: Issues for the Inquiry-Based Classroom,  she integrated global and human rights education. Pang has been a consultant for organizations such as Sesame Street, Fox Children’s Network, Family Communications (Producers of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood), and Scott Foresman. Pang was a Fellow for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and Post-doc fellow of the National Academy/Spencer Foundation. Her areas of interest are teacher education, culturally relevant education, social studies, and Asian American and Pacific American education.