María Rojas is a Chilean Ph.D. candidate from the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. In Chile, she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism. She became interested in specializing in education after working for two years as a Spanish teacher in a marginalized high school in Santiago. After that experience, she came to the US with a Fulbright scholarship to pursue her masters’ degree in Education Policy at the University of Washington in Seattle. Currently, María’s research aims to understand how the mechanisms under which a market-oriented education system operates (standardize testing, choice, privatization, high-stake accountability, etc.) impact and inform the process by which schools welcome (belong) or reject (other) the arrival of immigrant students who identify as black in Chile and the US. This interest is informed by her international experiences as a student in South Africa and Germany and her working experience in New Zealand. María is in the US with her husband and her two years old son, who will become a big brother in October.
