Bianca Licata

Bianca Licata is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education at San Francisco State University. She received her EdD in Curriculum & Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University (TC), where she was also an instructor for Curriculum Design and Instruction, and for Advanced Social Studies Methods. While at TC, Bianca was also a researcher for the National Center for Restructuring Schools, Education and Teaching, where she documented the “micro-innovations” (Hatch, 2021) developed by New York City public school teachers to address critical challenges that their middle and high school students faced, and build with them stronger student-teacher relationships. As part of this project, Bianca and Tom Hatch developed various representations of these teachers' creations in order to more broadly share them within their schools' network. You can read about that project here. During her time at TC, Bianca was also a professional development associate at the Center for Technology and School Change, where she focused on developing multimodal project-based learning curricula that helped students to identify and address problems that they and their school community faced. You can read about the Center and their Innovation Instructional approach here. 

Currently, Bianca’s research draws upon critical storytelling practices to explore how those in the education community (teachers, learners, families) negotiate and challenge neoliberal policies and practices that harm children and communities most impacted by interlocking systems of oppression. Specifically, she is exploring how multimodal speculative fiction creation as a methodology can materialize the often-slippery ways individuals experience, internalize, and reproduce harm, and make space for them to imagine (and plan) otherwise. Her aim as a researcher is to not only surface and challenge how harm is systematized, but to create opportunities for people to heal.   

The title of her dissertation was Negotiating the Machine: Stories of Teachers at No-Excuse Charter Schools Navigating Neoliberal Policies and Practices.