About

I am a Freirean scholar and practitioner.

My current areas of research and practice include access to social and legal justice; Public Legal Education and Information (PLEI); legal plain language;  the study of theories and practices in adult education, and public policies and regulations of public legal services. 

My current institutional affiliation is the Department of Educational Studies at the Faculty of Education.  The University of British Columbia is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceeded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people, The People of the River Grass. I am grateful to the Musqueam people for their hospitality and for supporting my community-based practice and research.

I am a Certified Elementary School Teacher by the Ministry of Education of Guatemala. I also hold a Certificate in Special Education Teaching, by Licée Français de Guatemala.  I have taught at primary grades including Grade 2 at Colegio Nuestra Señora de los Angeles (Santa Eliza), which is the school where I did my elementary schooling.  I taught literacy, Castellano, Grades K-12 teacher, and was school principal (indeed, all these job titles at once) to Maya Kek’chi people living at a community  of  people internally displaced due to Guatemala’s armed conflict.  I remain thankful to the communities I worked for in Guatemala. My work as school teacher helped me pay for my undergrad studies in anthropology; but more importantly, these experiences contributed to raise my awareness about systemic discrimination and violence.

My educational background is multidisciplinary and international: from education, forensic anthropology, international crimes investigations, conflict resolution, inter-faith dialogues, criminology, to international human right law.  I have done undergraduate and graduate studies at the following academic institutions: Departamento de Antropología de la Universidad del Valle (Guatemala); Institute des sciences de la mission et dialogue interreligieux à l’Université Saint-paul (Ottawa, Ontario); Department de criminologie à l’Université d’Ottawa (Ottawa, Ontario); Irish Centre for Human Rights at National University Ireland (NUI Galway); School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia). I hold post-Graduate certificates in Applied Project Management (CAPM, Langara), and in Evaluation and Crime Prevention (Public Policy Institute, Centro de Estudios en Seguridad Ciudadana CESC, UChile).I am an independent project management, evaluation and research consultant.I am an active member of the Canadian Evaluation Society (CES) BC and Yukon Chapter.