Teachers of Color

Rita Kohli is an associate professor of teaching and teacher education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Building on her experiences as an urban public middle school teacher and a teacher educator, and on her scholarly training in critical race theory, she has spent the last decade researching race, power, and in/equity in the professional experiences and well-being of teachers of Color. Committed to praxis, she is also a cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice (ITOC; http://www.instituteforteachersofcolor.org). Through ITOC, she has applied her scholarly insights to programming that supports the retention, racial literacy growth, and racial justice leadership development of teachers of Color in K–12 schools.

Kohli is also the coeditor of the book Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Narratives from Teacher Educators (Routledge, 2017), and her scholarly work has been recognized through several local and national awards, including the UCR Innovator for Social Change Award, the Scholar Activist and Community Advocacy Award from the Critical Educators for Social Justice Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and the Early Career Award in Division G, Social Context of Education, also from AERA.