Renée DePalma
I have been an instructor at the University of A Coruña, Faculty of Education, since 2010. I received my PhD in 2003 from the University of Delaware (USA). As an educator, I am interested in analyzing the social construction of marginalization within and beyond school settings, in order to be able to imagine and carry out emancipatory education. As the school itself is a hegemonic institution, how can one design educational practices that question and break with the schemas that maintain the status quo of inequality and exclusion? I am interested in critical pedagogy and all related perspectives (linguistic awareness, queer pedagogy ...) for offering possibilities for a deep rethinking of everyday life and, therefore, the opportunity to imagine new, groundbreaking, impertinent, and fairer possibilities. Education for Global Citizenship (GCE) is especially promising for its recognition of the inequalities between the global South / North and the commitment it requires of us, as citizens, to seek solutions. I have been researching GCE since 2014, and look forward to following this exciting path together with my colleagues in the ECIGAL group.
About me
I am an instructor at the University of A Coruña, in the Faculty of Education. I received my doctorate in 2003 from the University of Delaware (USA), where I helped establish the program La Red Mágica, a community-university collaboration project that aimed to promote intercultural relations between students in the Faculty of Education and children of migratory origin in a Latin American community center. Between 2006-2008 I was based at the University of Sunderland (UK), and co-directed the Participatory Action Research (PAR) project No Outsiders: Researching approaches to sexualities equality in primary schools, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. In December 2008 I joined the University of Vigo with an Isidro Parga Pondal fellowship, and in 2010 I was hired by the University of A Coruña. I teach on the undergraduate degree program in Early Childhood Education and on the Sociology Master's program in Social Policies and Socio-Community Intervention (MOPS). In 2015 I was appointed Honorary Professor by the Faculty of Education of Kwazulu-Natal University (South Africa). Currently, I am secretary of the UD’s Center for Gender and Feminist Studies (CEXeF), and a founding member of the Galician Network of Queer Studies. I have been part of the Council for Galician Culture since 2020, and serve as editorial board member of two journals: Sex Education and Sociology of Education.
I began my research career in GCE in 2014, participating in the research project “Exploring the possibilities of extending the global dimension of DE in compulsory secondary education. A diagnostic study of Galician schools,” funded by the Xunta de Galicia. I was the principal investigator of two Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects on development education (DE), also funded by the Xunta de Galicia (2015-2016; 2016-2017). From these projects arose the book La educación para el desarrollo y ciudadanía global (2019, Graó). In 2021 I led the project “Mapping critical global citizenship education in Spanish schools,” funded by the Gene/EERA Global Education Award. Since December 2020 I have been the coordinator of the ECIGAL Research Group, and I hope to continue on this exciting path together with my colleagues.