2025 Teaching & Learning Conference

There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.

Paulo Freire, Literacy as Liberation

For the 2025 conference theme, we hoped to explore the relationship between student voice and liberation. The theme - “Student Voice, Liberation, and the Places We Teach” - is grounded in the work of Paulo Freire and his awareness of education as a means for learners to develop a critical consciousness of oppression and, in the process, discover their own agency for change. What does it mean for UC Berkeley to be a site for liberation?

There is undeniable tension between the pursuit of liberation and higher education as a system of learning. For example, Dr. Gina Garcia’s Organizing Framework for Decolonizing HSIs holds important implications for ways in which institutions can fail to recruit, retain, and value minoritized students and their racial and cultural identities and histories. Our Teaching and Learning Conference is an opportunity to confront this reality from the level of classrooms, pedagogy, and our interactions with our students.

We look to you, the members of our campus community, to tell your story as it relates to empowering students toward their own liberation and, perhaps, discovering liberation for yourself in the process. Garcia’s work reminds us that liberation is a community responsibility: students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, and community partners “must believe in the mission and work toward the purpose” (138).

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Gina Ann Garcia

Dr. Gina Ann Garcia is a professor in the School of Education at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on issues of equity and justice in higher education with an emphasis on understanding how Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) embrace and enact an organizational identity for serving minoritized populations. She explores the experiences of administrators, faculty, and staff at HSIs and the outcomes of students attending these institutions. As an equity-minded scholar, she tends to the ways that race and racism have shaped institutions of higher education.

Dr. Garcia is the author of Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges & Universities and Transforming Hispanic Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice. She is also the editor of the book Hispanic-Serving Institutions in Practice: Defining “Servingness” at HSIs and created and co-authored the workbook Transforming HSIs for Equity and Justice: A Practitioner’s Workbook.

She has delivered over 300 public lectures and workshops across the country and consults directly with HSIs to work towards organizational transformation. She is also the host of the popular podcast ¿Qué pasa, HSIs?

Dr. Garcia graduated from California State University, Northridge with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, the University of Maryland, College Park with a master’s degree in college student personnel, and the University of California, Los Angeles with a Ph.D. in higher education and organizational change. She is a proud alumna of a HSI and was a Title V Coordinator at CalState University, Fullerton which drives and motivates her research and praxis.