American University’s Baker School of Education (Baker) is honored to welcome Dr. Soribel Genao among its newest Scholars in Residence. “This is both a challenging and profoundly hopeful time to enter classrooms,” she said.

A professor of educational leadership at Queens College, CUNY, and former Provost Diversity Fellow, Genao brings a wealth of expertise in equity-centered leadership and culturally responsive practice to her new role at Baker.

Genao’s work aligns seamlessly with AU’s mission to prepare justice-focused educators and leaders. Her scholarship centers on culturally responsive leadership, equity-based evaluation, and building organizational cultures that move beyond symbolic commitments toward meaningful structural change. She embraces the Scholar in Residence position because it “creates intentional space to collaborate with faculty, students, and community partners who are wrestling with similar questions about how to sustain equity work amid political, economic, and organizational constraints.”

As advice for students pursuing educational leadership, Genao emphasizes a critical skill set: “the ability to lead with cultural and political clarity while remaining deeply relational.” This includes understanding how race, language, migration, gender, and class shape schooling experiences, and learning to genuinely listen to and co-create with communities. She stresses the importance of “building the adaptive capacity to navigate conflict and change without abandoning core values” and becoming comfortable seeking feedback and holding oneself accountable to communities served, not merely to institutional metrics.

In today’s challenging landscape, Genao offers practical guidance for schools facing resource constraints and difficult political environments. Her first recommendation: “protect and clarify what is non-negotiable about your equity commitments.” This means embedding equity into required courses, leadership standards, and evaluation systems so it cannot be dismissed as an “extra” when budgets tighten. She advocates for focused equity audits and strategic partnerships across community organizations, philanthropy, and advocacy networks to create alternative support systems when political rhetoric seeks to undermine equity work.

For aspiring teachers, Genao’s message is both realistic and inspiring. “Teaching should be approached as justice work and intellectual labor, not simply as content delivery.” Teachers shape “conditions for belonging, rigorous learning, and language and identity affirmation, particularly for Black, Latine/x, multilingual, and other historically marginalized students.” She encourages future educators to seek preparation programs where culturally responsive practice and community engagement are central, and to “build your circle early” with peers and mentors who share their commitments.

Through her residency, Genao will co-design learning experiences, facilitate public conversations, and develop practice tools that bridge university-based research with PreK–12 realities and community-led change efforts. Her work promises to strengthen the vital connections between scholarship and the daily work of creating more equitable schools and communities.