Monica Gonzalez

Monica Gonzalez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction and the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, College of Education. Her scholarship centers on Chicanx/Latinx language, literacies, and community knowledge systems, particularly examining how bilingual youth navigate sociopolitical worlds through home and community knowledge.

Her educational background includes a double major in Latina/Latino Studies and Spanish from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2011), a Master's degree from the University of Utah (2013), and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder (2018).

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (B.A., Latina/Latino Studies & Spanish, 2011)
• University of Utah (M.A., 2013)
• University of Colorado Boulder (Ph.D., 2018)

Dr. Gonzalez's research focuses on Chicanx/Latinx education, bilingual pedagogies, and community-based learning, with particular emphasis on raciolinguistic justice and resistant literacies. She investigates how youth participatory action research and Chicana/Latina feminist frameworks can transform educational spaces, often documenting multimodal expressions of knowledge in community settings. Her work consistently challenges deficit perspectives on Latinx communities while centering embodied knowledge and linguistic expertise.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications reveals consistent thematic focus on translanguaging practices, critical linguistic cariño in teacher education, and chisme as resistant pedagogy. Her scholarship demonstrates increasing methodological sophistication through participatory design research and multimodal analysis, with growing attention to embodied literacies and girlhood/womanhood resistance against white heteropatriarchy.

Dr. Gonzalez has received significant recognition including:

• Cultivating New Voices Fellow, National Council of Teachers of English
• AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship

She actively collaborates with The Fugitive Literacies Collective to develop educational fugitivity frameworks for youth of color, and teaches graduate courses including Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education and undergraduate courses on social justice in education. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes creating transformative educational experiences that bridge classroom and community contexts.