PhD Dissertation Defense: Renata de Almeida Ramos

Dissertation Defense for Renata de Almeida Ramos

Date: Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026

Time:

10 am to 12 pm PDT (Las Vegas) 1 pm to 3 pm EST (Pittsburgh)15 hrs to 17 hrs (São Paulo)Zoom Link: Available upon request. Contact Renata de Almeida Ramos at [email protected].

Dissertation Title: "The Felted Web - The Continuous Process of Becoming a Critical Teacher among Experienced Pedagogues in the Early Years of Elementary Education in Brazil and the United States"

Dissertation Description:

This study travels alongside five experienced early elementary public educators in São Paulo, Portland, and Washington, D.C., to understand how becoming a reflective-critical pedagogue is lived, struggled with, and reinvented in daily praxis. Grounded in Freire (1970, 1998), Lugones (2003), and Ciampa (1987), we learn that these pedagogues embody a living web of relationships, enacting praxis through humility, empathy, love, esperançar, and freedom. Curriculum is both a contested space, where corporate education logic and ethical praxis collide, and a territory of emancipatory praxis that pedagogues negotiate daily. Their praxis, Freirean in grammar, is often decolonial in practice, centering territory, place-based epistemology, and collective conscientização as conditions for transformation.

Dissertation Committee: Dr. Michael Gunzenhauser (advisor), Dr. Kari Kokka, Dr. Edwin Mayorga, Dr. Leigh Patel