The Rural Education Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) has named Dr. Mayra Puente of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School its 2023 Dissertation Award winner. Puente’s dissertation, written to complete her Ph.D. work at UC San Diego, is titled Ground-Truthing en el Valle de San Joaquín: A Mixed Methods Study on Rural Latinx Spatiality and College (In)Opportunity.
The award will be presented at the AERA Annual Meeting in Chicago in April. The Rural Education Special Interest Group promotes scholarly conversation about the lives of rural people, places and their schools through research and provides a forum for dissemination of this research.
Mayra Puente is an Assistant Professor of higher education in the Department of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in education at UC San Diego with generous support from the Ford Foundation Fellowship. She received her B.A. in political science with a concentration in race, ethnicity, and politics and double minored in education studies and Chicana/o studies at UCLA. The Dell Scholars Program and McNair Scholars Research Program supported her undergraduate education.
Dr. Puente’s various degrees and concentrations have shaped her transdisciplinary approach to higher education research. She is particularly concerned with college access, choice, transition, retention, and success issues for rural Latinx students and other institutionally marginalized student groups and communities. Dr. Puente draws on frameworks like Critical Race Theory, Latino Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Spatial Analysis, and Chicana Feminisms to address these pressing educational issues and enact social justice. She recently co-developed a Platicando y Mapeando methodology in educational research, which combines her interests and expertise in critical raced gendered epistemologies, Chicana feminist methodologies, and geographic information systems (GIS). This methodology will be published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
Dr. Puente’s passion for higher education access and equity is driven by the educational barriers she faced as a first-generation college student from a Mexican im/migrant farm working background and by her professional experiences as a higher education advocate in California’s San Joaquin Valley for rural Latinx students and families. As a professor at UCSB, Dr. Puente intends to extend her research and service to California’s Central Coast. She hopes to learn about the higher education (in)opportunities of institutionally marginalized students and communities from this region.