Our Team

T. Gertrude Jenkins is a veteran English teacher of over fifteen years. Her work as an educator expands across the country and around the globe; she has worked and studied in school school systems in Florida, Georgia, California, and Botswana.  Jenkins is currently a doctoral student at the University of San Francisco as part of the International & Multicultural Education program in the School of Education. Her research focuses on the legacy and evolution of fugitivity in Black education, highlighting the narratives of Black teachers and students. Her work is motivated by her desire to provide an alternative for Black teachers, students, and families who desire education spaces that are free from systemic white supremacy.

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Eghosa Obaizamomwan Hamilton is a first generation Nigerian American originally from Sacramento.  She is co-founder of Making Us Matter (M.U.M.), a Black woman-owned nonprofit educational organization.  M.U.M. aspires to create an educational experience that values the voices and experiences of students and where Black educators are valued and their experiences can inform their teaching.  She is currently pursuing an Education doctorate with a concentration in Racial Justice at the University of San Francisco through the International & Multicultural Education department. She is the author of Making Us Matter: Combating Anti-Blackness, White Supremacy, and Other Conversations About Race In Schools and the co-author of Making Us Matter & the Work of Spirit Revival and Black Teachers Are Essential: A Comparative Study In Black Student Experience.

She has presented at conferences on unpacking anti-Blackness in education, Black student experience, and culturally-responsive curriculum development.  She has developed curriculum for Ethnic Studies, Social Justice English, and Sociology.   With over 14 years of experience her writing, teaching, and research meet at the intersections.  Her sites of inquiry are centered on anti-Blackness in education, Critical Pedagogy, BlackCRT, the experiences of Black girl learners, and embodied epistemologies. She seeks collective liberation and visibility for those who have been left in the margins.

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Raina J. León, PhD is a Black and Afro-Boricua Philadelphian (living for many years in the Chochenyo Ohlone territory of Berkeley).  She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo,  and Círculo de Poetas and Writers She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self.

Her poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work has been published in well over 100 journals and anthologies.  She has received fellowships and residencies with the Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and The Ruby in San Francisco. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there, and as a creative arts practitioner and co-learner holding space in various communities.  She is passionate about Afro-futurism, genealogy and walking in relationship with our ancestors, ecopoetics, writing for change, writing for healing and health, and mothering.

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Marceline DuBose has 20 years of experience in public education as a high school social studies educator, state and federal level policy administrator, professional development leader, strategic planning consultant, and curriculum writer. Her primary focus is equity leadership development and strategic planning, working with districts to improve systems for creating equitable schools and classrooms. Marceline also provides professional development to thousands of school professionals each year.

Ms. DuBose has served as an adjunct faculty member at Hamline University, Macalester College, and St. Mary’s University. She holds a BA in Economics from Macalester College and an Ed.M. in Teaching and Curriculum from Harvard University as a Rockefeller Brothers Teaching Fellow. Also a certified yoga instructor, Marceline intentionally incorporates historical and policy perspectives, systems change theory, adult learning theory, critical reflection, and key approaches from yoga philosophy as she works toward individual, organizational and societal change that supports the full potential of all learner.

Shabnam Koirala-Azad, PhD,  is the first female dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, and in 2018, was recognized as one of the Most Influential Women in the Bay Area. Her leadership is informed by a strong background in educational research and scholarship. As a full professor in the School of Education she has continued to mentor and support students in their doctoral research, while contributing to infrastructure development in the School of Education.  For more than a decade as a faculty member in the School of Education and as department chair for the Department of International and Multicultural Education, she added a strong global education component to the curriculum and co-founded the first degree program in Human Rights Education in the United States.

As a critical scholar, she has made new conceptual and methodological contributions to the field of international and comparative education, migration, and diaspora studies. Specifically, her work with South Asian immigrant students and families brings a transnational lens to concepts of identity, belonging, citizenship and civic participation, disrupting misconceptions, and offering critical possibilities for grassroots collaboration across borders. As a mother-scholar, she contributes to scholarship that highlights ways in which mothering enriches careers in academia. Her current passion lies in forging new and humanizing methods and approaches to social science research by honoring lived experiences, utilizing radical imagination, and validating collective forms of knowledge generation through the School of Education’s Center for Humanizing Education and Research (C-HER), which launched under her leadership.

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Nathan Alexander, PhD, is a visiting professor of mathematics at Morehouse College in the Department of Mathematics and the Division of Mathematical and Computational Sciences. His research focuses on mathematical modeling for in/justice and mathematics teaching and learning in undergraduate, non-traditional, and alternative settings, with a particular focus on the development and function of academic communities and peer networks. Dr. Alexander also explores perspectives on justice using Afrofuturist thought and practices, such as music, art, and – yes – mathematics.

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