she/they
Rebecca Hatkoff, phd
I seek and find opportunities to develop humanizing, love-soaked, antiracist, and enriching classroom, school, and community ecologies.
My work bridges research and practice in education as well as its intersections with housing, culture, business, and politics—because we can actually build the futures we deserve when we consider our whole community.
As a California enthusiast born, raised, and shaped in Los Angeles, I’m deeply versed in the landscapes of my home city and state — geographically, politically, culturally, and educationally. I’ve worked intentionally at the intersection of TK–12 and higher education, developing informed, nuanced understandings of the challenges — and especially the opportunities — across K–16 classrooms and systems.
TEACHER EDUCATION, PARTNERSHIPS, & CREATIVE SOLUTIONS
I served as the Director of Teacher Education at Claremont Graduate University (CGU), where I stewarded the department’s transition to residencies and developed sustainable, critical social justice residency partnerships with local districts through strategic thinking, intentional planning, and authentic relationship building. As hoped and intended, those partnerships also increased our enrollment and decreased staffing shortages for our partners.
Our program was so strong, it earned recognition from The Learning Policy Institute as one of the most effective in the state of California (read more here).
Today I am a Research Fellow, but over the course of a decade at CGU, I also served as an Assistant Professor, Claremont Fellows Residency Coordinator, and Clinical Faculty Advisor supporting candidates in the field. Over six years, I helped secure more than $6 million in grant funds from federal, state, and private organizations.
Currently, I’m working with colleagues at the Thompson Policy Institute on Disability and support from the Gates Foundation to help school districts across the state of California develop bespoke teacher residency models and partnerships that serve as infrastructure to support multiple needs at once.
CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE & SUSTAINING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In 2021, I co-founded Joyful Disruption (2021-2025) to support teachers and administrators with professional development workshops that helped them cultivate the mindsets and tools needed to joyfully disrupt default norms, language, and practices that neither serve communities nor honor the breadth and depth of their funds of knowledge and talents. During that time, I worked with more than 4,000 educators across LAUSD, t of whom were part of the Community Schools Initiative.
EDUCATION & PERSONAL BACKGROUND
I studied English and Theater at the University of Pennsylvania, where I learned I didn’t like a “real winter” and came home to Los Angeles to play tennis, walk my pit bull, camp, garden, and soak up the sun year round. After teaching high school English for six years (and Sex Ed), I went back to school to learn more about the broader landscape of education in the US and especially California. I earned my PhD in Education at CGU and spent about a decade studying, observing, and learning from principals, teachers, and students in more than 100 classrooms across more than 80 K-12 schools in the greater Los Angeles area before accepting a full time position in Teacher Ed at CGU.
Like 80% of teachers in the US, I’m white; I’m also Jewish, queer, and solo mother to a radiant child I named after Ralph Ellison, author of my favorite novel, Invisible Man, in which he wrote, “the world is a possibility, if only you discover it.”