Social Sciences Division
UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellow
PhD Candidate
Co-facilitator of Rebellious Chingone Writing Group
Graduate
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Teaching & Learning Center (TLC)
Oakes College
Social Sciences 2
201
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Psychology Faculty Services
Sylvane is a Chicano Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies where he is being trained as a community psychologist focusing on liberation and decolonial frameworks. Sylvane grew up and started his educational career on Kumeyaay Territory (aka San Diego, Ca) where he transfered from San Diego City/Mesa College. He also organized with SDCC Mecha, the Chicano Park Steering Committee, Peace and Dignity Journeys, and the Izcalli Youth Leadership Camp. Outside of his scholarship and organizing, he is also an actor/performer with a Chicano/a theater troupe: Teatro Izcalli.
Working with the Community Psychology Research and Action Team (CPRAT), Sylvane is developing a multi-method portfolio that addresses various educational equity struggles. Specifically, he focuses on participatory action research approaches to working with Latinx/Chicanx marginalized youth and young adults towards empowerment and radical healing.
Topics of research interest include recovering historical memory via social biography, sense of belonging and counterspaces in college, youth organizer requests for radical listening, epistemic justice in youth/adult interactions, and radical healing frameworks from Indigena-Chicana Feminism.
In the past, he has been a program evaluator and researcher for the Cultivamos Excelencia, S.E.M.I.L.L.A., and M.A.P.A. HSI initiatives.
Sylvane enjoys teaching courses that are Social Justice and student focused. For example, he has been the graduate student instructor for upper division Social Psychology courses like Psyc 149 Community Psychology and Psyc 142 Psychology of Oppression and Liberation. He has also been the GSI for a developmental pscyhology course Psyc 114: Human Development as a Cultural Process.
Outside of Psychology, Sylvane has designed and implemented a general education course in the Writing program: Writ 2: Rhetoric and Inquiry: Writing for Liberation.
Sylvane has taken these opportunities to utilize alternative grading approaches like narrative evaluation, self-assessment, and contract grading where he can better align his grading style with his critical pedagogy. He has also worked with the Teaching and Learning Center to develop a forthcoming resource guide on Ungrading practices for other curious instructors.
Vaccarino-Ruiz, S., Solomon, A., Langhout, R. D., (in press) “No one is going to listen to a bunch of kids”: Youth requests for radical listening and epistemic justice. Youth and Society.
Bhattacharya, N., Langhout, R.D., Vaccarino-Ruiz, S.S., Jackson, N., Woolfe, M., Matta, W., Zuniga, B., Rowe, Z., Gibo, L. (2022) "Being a team of five strong women...we had to make an impression:" The College Math Academy as an intervention into mathematics education. American Journal of Community Psychology. 70, 228-241, DOI: 10.1002/ajcp.12573
Vaccarino-Ruiz, S., Quinteros, K., Alonso Blanco, V., Rodriguez Ramirez, D., Langhout, R., Copulsky, D., Lopezzi, M., (2021).“Yes, they were suffering, but we brought the music:” Social toxicity and possibility during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Journal of Community Psychology in Global Perspectives. 7,1,106-126, DOI: 10.1285/i24212113v7i1p106
Langhout, R. D., Rodriguez Ramirez, D., Vaccarino‐Ruiz, S. S., Alonso Blanco, V., Quinteros, K., Copulsky, D., & Lopezzi, M. A. (2021). Teaching and learning during a pandemic: How one graduate community psychology class quickly incorporated healing justice into our practices. American Journal of Community Psychology, 68(1-2), 249-265. DOI 10.1002/ajcp.12524
Vaccarino-Ruiz, S., Gordon, D., Langhout, R., (2021). Toward the democratization of knowledge: Using photovoice, social biography, and the “Five Whys” to determine problem definition in a youth PAR program with children. Journal of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. DOI 10.1037/cdp0000457
Langhout, R., Vaccarino-Ruiz, S. (2020). “Did I see what I really saw?” Violence percepticide, and dangerous seeing after an immigration and customs enforcement raid. Journal of Community Psychology. 49: 927-946. DOI 10.1002/jcop.22336