Zaynab Gates
Zaynab Gates is an educational researcher focused on teacher learning and social development, with two decades of experience working in Latin America and with Indigenous communities.
Her expertise in teacher education includes working as the applied research adviser for the Center for Excellence in Teacher Training (CETT) in Bolivia, where she contributed to the development of an 18-month in-service training program on early literacy teaching approaches, which highlighted in-classroom teacher accompaniment and reached 6,000 public school teachers. She also designed and implemented teacher professional development institutes for Galapagos Conservancy in the Education for Sustainability Program, a 5-year initiative reaching all 300 teachers on the Galapagos islands. Additionally, Zaynab has worked in educational public policy, as the national coordinator of pre-university courses at the National Secretariat of Higher Education in Ecuador, to increase access and quality of higher educational opportunities for youth.
Zaynab’s research stands at the intersection of teacher education, language and literacy, and Indigenous knowledges. She has studied Intercultural Bilingual Education policy and practice in Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador, building collaborative partnerships with Indigenous teachers and organizations. Currently, she is leading a research project on Indigenous teachers’ teaching frameworks and their implementation during preservice teachers’ supervised practices with an Emerging Scholars grant from the Wallace Foundation and the International Society of Learning Sciences (ISLS).
Dr. Gates holds a PhD in Education from the University of California San Diego where she researched biliteracy practices in Indigenous teacher education in Northern Argentina through the use of design-based research (DBR) and Indigenous research methodologies. Her work has received funding from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Doctoral Fellowship and Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Zaynab is a member of the Wichí-Weenhayek people whose traditional territory between the Pilcomayo and Bermejo rivers is situated in Argentina and Bolivia.