Zaynab Gates

Zaynab Gates is a current Ph.D. student in Education Studies, UC San Diego. Born in Argentina to a Californian father and an Argentine mother of the Wichi people, she has been long drawn to issues of diversity, equality and social justice. She is passionate about the effect of quality education for historically excluded populations, in particular how it can empower their efforts to develop their communities. Her research interests include intercultural bilingual education, teaching literacy, inservice teacher training, and access to and the quality of higher education. Her research comparing two schools of the same transnational ethnic community located on both sides of the Argentinean-Bolivian border has recently been published by the Bilingual Research Journal. She received a BA in Education, with a focus on Learning Disabilities from Educares University, Chile and was the research lead for a USAID funded teacher training program centered on literacy in Bolivia, where she lived for six years. She obtained her MA in Social Sciences with a focus in Sociology from FLACSO, Ecuador. Her love for reading and writing has led to authoring school texts and teachers’ materials in Language Arts, used in private and public educational institutions of Ecuador.