Dr. Margarita Bianco
Associate Professor, University of Colorado Denver
CEO, Bianco Educational Consulting, LLC
About
Dr. Bianco is a first generation college graduate with more than 40 years teaching experience. As a multiracial Latina, she draws on her rich personal and professional experiences to inform her work. Dr. Bianco is the Founder of Pathways2Teaching®, an innovative pre-collegiate program designed to encourage high school students of color to enter the teacher workforce as a way to disrupt educational inequities.
Dr. Bianco’s commitment to issues of justice is a unifying theme that is interwoven throughout all aspects of her research, teaching and consulting work.
Professor Bianco is the recipient of numerous awards for her research, teaching, and GYO program development. Diverse: Issues in Higher Education named Dr. Bianco as one of the nation’s top 35 women in higher education.
Bianco is also the recipient of the Teacher Diversity Research Award by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Diversified Teacher Workforce and recently named the University of Colorado Denver's TIAA Chancellor’s Urban Engaged Scholars.
Dr. Bianco is a proud mother, grandmother, and lover of all things related to rescue Collies. In her free-time, you can find her walking her dogs on local trails, sitting by her Koi pond in the backyard, or shopping for turquoise jewlery.
Consulting Services
Dr. Bianco has provided tailored workshops and professional development for schools, school districts, institutions of higher education around the country for more than 30 years. Leveraging her personal experiences and professional expertise, Dr. Bianco provides workshops that are individualized to meet your community’s needs related to:
- Educator diversity - recruitment, support and retention
- Addressing the critical teacher shortage
- Developing GYO programs for high school students, paraprofessionals, and career changers
- Preparing K-12 teachers to use Social Justice Standards
- Preparing concurrent enrollment instructors
SAMPLE CONSULTING SERVICES
Developing & Implementing GYO Programs
- Developing culturally responsive educator pathways courses
- Creating Paraprofessional Certificate programs for high school students and / or current paraprofessionals
Preparing Concurrent Enrollment Instructors
- Preparing high school teachers to effectively teach college level courses
- Professional development to foster skills in discussing racial identity, diversity and equity
- Developing skills to differentiate curriculum to meet the needs of all students
Retention [K-20]
- State or district wide support for recruiting and retaining a diverse educator workforce
- Collecting and interpreting state or district data on recruitment and retention efforts
SAMPLE KEYNOTE TOPICS
An Effective Workforce Is a Diverse Workforce: Integrating Educator Shortages and Workforce Diversity Efforts
A Vision of Equity: Growing and Sustaining a Diversified & Community Responsive Teacher Workforce
Unpacking Research on Teacher Diversity
Endorsements
"”The prospect of creating a teacher pathway and pipeline for youth from vulnerable communities to return to their communities as educators is not only sound logic it is exactly what every community should do. Every district in the country that claims to struggle with recruiting, preparing, and retaining community responsive educators should be visiting with and learning from the Pathways2Teaching program."
Professor, Latinx Studies and Race & Resistance Studies, San Francisco State University
Author Equality or Equity: Toward a Model of Community-Responsive Education
""Pathways2Teaching is exactly the kind of program that is needed. By growing teachers of color who want to stay and teach in their own communities, students of color and communities of color benefit, as do the schools that serve them. Pathways2Teaching offers high schoolers an excellently conceptualized curriculum to prepare them to go on into higher education and consider teaching as a profession. This program is a national model."
Christine E. Sleeter PhD, is Professor Emerita in the College of Education at California State University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member.
""Pathways2Teaching is one of the rare programs that is willing to take the bold step of intentionally getting teachers of color in city schools. Theirs is the work we need to boldly challenge the status quo."
David Stovall, Ph.D. is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His scholarship investigates three areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) the relationship between housing and education, and 3) the intersection of race, place and school.
Author of
Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption
"Pathways2Teaching solves two sides of an important issue- how do we encourage more young people, particularly those who share the demographic characteristics of our student enrollment, to consider teaching as a profession; and how we create programs in education that are ready for this group of students to enroll as pre-service teachers. In DPS, we know we need to work on both sides of this issue if we hope to have a teaching force equipped to serve our kids.”
