Bautista Guerra, Juanita B.
Juanita is a Colombian woman who received her entire formal education in her home city, Bogota. She studied at Colegio Nueva Granada, where she received her Bachillerato and High School diplomas. Studying in a bilingual school provided her with a foreign language (English) and helped her to develop a curiosity about American society. This upbringing, and the opportunity to visit several countries in four continents brought her to believe that amidst cultural diversity, humankind is significantly interrelated in what physicist Fritjof Capra would call “hidden connections”.
She obtained her Law degree from Universidad de los Andes, where she also minored in U.S. Studies. She completed the coursework for the Masters Program in Hispano-American Literature at Universidad Javeriana and went on to work, initially as an instructor, at Universidad El Bosque. At El Bosque, where she worked between 2004 and 2008, she had considerable formative, teaching, and administrative experiences.
In the last four years she has strived to honor the privilege of being a Dean's Scholar, a distinction awarded by Michigan State University's College of Education. The College has also given her the opportunity to participate in summer awards and fellowships, as she was able to perform exploratory field work in Colombia with a Summer Research Fellowship in 2009 and travel to China with the Fellowship for Global Understanding in 2010. She has also been able to present at AERA, NARST, and CIES with the travel stipends awarded by the Program.
Her assistantship with Dr. Dorothea Anagnostopoulos dealt with the infrastructure of educational accountability and the one with Dr. Angela Calabrese-Barton inquired on how girls author identities in the STEM pipeline. Both research opportunities exposed her to important theoretical corpora as they honed her qualitative research skills. The intellectual generosity of both professors also allowed for inclusive work that took into account her ideas and initiatives while mentoring her through the intricate process of publishing and presenting at peer reviewed conferences.
She believes that appreciating the complexities that underlie the role of education in a society is a vital enterprise. From her previous experience and at her present intellectual and spiritual stage, she is interested in understanding the role of education in socialization processes that validate certain forms of knowledge over others, as she strives to quiet down her ethno-centric impulses while living amongst different cultures. She is currently working on her dissertation, which deals with the use of Actor-Network Theory to trace the people, policies, and technologies that shape Colombian rural youths' migratory decisions upon graduating from high school in a non-conflict Andean town.
