Faculty

Emma Fuentes, Professor in the International and Multicultural Education Department at the University of San Francisco. Her research encompasses the areas of critical social theory, racial justice and education, and movement building praxes. As a scholar, she is deeply committed to humanizing praxes grounded in solidarity and justice. Her work investigates the ways that communities marginalized based on race, class, language, or immigration status organize themselves and engage in active...

Dr. Monisha Bajaj is Professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. She is the editor and author of eight books and numerous articles on issues of peace, human rights, migration, and education, and is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Human Rights Education. Dr. Bajaj has developed curriculum and teacher training materials—particularly related to human rights, racial justice, ethnic studies, and sustainability—for non-profit and...

Melissa Ann Canlas is Assistant Professor in International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco (USF). Her work focuses on Ethnic Studies, issues of educational equity, critical leadership, critical pedagogies, and human rights, particularly for immigrant and refugees and students of color. She has over fifteen years of work as an educator, and her work experience includes teaching a wide variety of Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies classes at the undergraduate...

Dr. Colette N. Cann is an associate dean and professor in the School of Education. Before coming to USF, she served for over ten years at Vassar College as an associate professor of Africana Studies and Education, as a class advisor, as a house fellow in a residence hall, and as the director of a community college transfer program. In addition, Dr. Cann worked with Vassar students to establish the RISE Center for Racial Justice.

Dr. Cann’s scholarship has allowed her to collaborate with...

David Donahue is a professor within the School of Education. Prior to USF, he was at Mills College for 23 years as a faculty member in the School of Education, working in teacher education and the doctoral program, and most recently was interim provost. He is the recipient of Mills College’s two highest teaching awards: The Sarlo Award and the Metz Chair. His research interests include teacher learning generally and learning from service-learning and the arts specifically, and he is a widely...

Dr. Rosa M. Jiménez is an Associate Professor in the International and Multicultural Education Department at the University of San Francisco. Her research examines K-12 classroom pedagogies and theoretical principles necessary for conceptualizing and enacting critical language education and culturally responsive learning environments, especially with Latina/o and immigrant student populations. Dr. Jiménez has conducted classroom-based research in several K-12 contexts including the California...

Shabnam Koirala-Azad explores social and educational (in)equities through a transnational lens. Through ethnography and participatory research, her work critically examines the experiences of South Asian students and families in schools and society, as they experience shifting identities and navigate through structural inequities in various geographic, social and political spaces. By examining their realities in both home and host country contexts, she offers new ideas for transnational social...

Sedique Popal, Assistant Professor and the coordinator of the MA TESOL program. He teaches cognitive and social theories of linguistics: Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Assessment and Testing, Curriculum Design, and TESOL Methods courses. He has taught and trained teachers in six different countries. He has been a featured presenter and keynote speaker in the following national and international organizations: TESOL, CATESOL, NABE, and CABE. He has been awarded the Outstanding Educator...

Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer (she/hers) is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar born in Honolulu and raised between/across Hawai’i and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an associate teaching professor of Indigenous Studies at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, CA.  Her new book, Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood (Routledge, Nov. 2022), deploys Indigenous feminist methodologies to understand the problem of the over...

Dr. Luz Navarrette García is a part-time professor in the Department of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. She has been a proud part of the IME familia since starting her doctoral studies in 2008. A full-time community college ESL professor at Santa Rosa Junior College, Dr. García is happy to share her expertise with students in the MA TESOL program.

Dr. Manuel Alejandro Pérez received his EdD in international and multicultural education from the University of San Francisco. He is one of the original founders and co-director for Grupo Folklórico Los Alteños, a traditional Mexican folklórico company in Sacramento.

With 25 years of experience in traditional danza, Manuel enjoys connecting his research on identity, artful resistance, and radical imagination to social justice spaces of performance. In recent years, he has traveled to various...

Heather M. Streets comes from a family of scholars and is the sixth to earn a doctorate, which she completed at the University of San Francisco (USF). Using a term she coined called the collegiate Black space, her research focused on how Black students who attend historically White universities use online spaces for support, knowledge production, and organizing for activism. Heather’s scholarship centers her ongoing interest in deepening and expanding conversations about anti-Blackness in higher...

Susan Roberta Katz is Professor Emeritus of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco, where in 2008 she co-founded the first graduate program in Human Rights Education in the U.S. She has received two Fulbright fellowships: 2003 at the University of Pécs, Hungary, and 2010 at the bilingual intercultural teacher training institute of the Shuar indigenous nationality in Ecuador. Dr. Katz’s writings on the education of youth from diverse marginalized communities...