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Virginia Navarro
Virginia L. Navarro, assistant professor in the Division of Teaching and Learning at UMSL, began her career in education teaching high school English and journalism at both public and private high schools. Recently, she became Co-Director of Career Transitions, a funded alternative certification program for critical need areas in St. Louis Public Schools. Her research interrogates the social construction of identity, including the way that school discourses shape cultural understandings about gender, race, and class. Additionally, she writes about school/university partnership work in preparing quality teachers, especially in urban settings. Recently, she co-edited a collection of case studies for the Urban Network to Improve Teacher education (UNITE) called Staying Connected (2005) that analyzes school/university partnerships across the country. She also wrote the final chapter for a 2005 Erlbaum book, Designing Urban Performance Systems, that explores why context matters when assessing urban schools.
Dr. Navarro grew up on the south side of Chicago as the youngest of seven children. Her education in Catholic schools included a strong grounding in philosophy and theology and she graduated with honors from Loyola University, Chicago, in 1968 with a major in English. Her junior year was spent in Rome, Italy, and she continues to love the adventure of international travel. At Washington University in St. Louis, she received an MAT in English, and taught high school English and journalism at two large public high schools. She then returned to Washington University to complete her doctoral work in education; since then Dr. Navarro has been teaching in higher education at UMSL. She received a UMSL Chancellor's Award for Excellence for teaching in 2000, and with a group of colleagues was recognized for innovative work in teacher education with UM-Systems Performance Shares in 2001.
Supported by a federal Teacher Workforce Replenishment grant, Dr. Navarro developed Mentor Workshops to help improve retention of new teachers by providing trained mentors; she also developed a Character Adventure Day for student teachers and supervisors to link experiential team-building activities with the complexity of becoming character educators. This work led to a Character Education Partnership grant with Dr. Marvin Berkowitz to infuse character education across the preservice teacher education program. Dr. Navarro is a consulting editor for the APA journal, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and writes contemporary book reviews for PsycCritiques. She teaches courses about child and adolescent development as well as two doctoral seminars on qualitative research methods and sociocultural theory.
With her husband of 36 years, she has raised four children, and she has served in a variety of volunteer roles as an active member of her faith community and as a La Leche League leader when her children were young.