David Emmanuelle Castillo

David Emmanuelle Castillo has over 10 years of experience in education. He is a certified and licensed special education teacher, founding member for the Department of Black and Latino Male Achievement (BLMA), co-founder of the Coalition of Anti-Racist and Restorative Educators (CARE), founder of Equitable Systems Consultants, program coach for We Will All Rise, cultivating genius coach for Professor Gholdy Muhammad, and planning committee member for Xodus Academy.

Mr. Castillo believes that creating a more just and equitable world starts with servant leadership that centers the voices of those most marginalized and oppressed. Over the past six years, he has engaged in self-work —using a variety of tools that include breath work, meditation, journaling and writing, being in ceremony, and consumption of plant medicine. His self-work has the explicit intention of unpacking the ways colonization has kept him from being in touch with ancestral wisdom, his own humanity, and the humanity of others. Mr. Castillo believes that breathwork, meditation, and plant medicines are accessible tools that help us in overcoming the ways our ego ‘Edges God Out’ so that we are not in touch with our own divinity and humanity, and of others as well.

Hear from Mr. Castillo: Why Education?

“As a young person, my mentor shared the etymological meaning of education, stating to me that ‘education should draw out the inherent genius in everyone in a way that keeps their dignity and humanity intact.’ Inherent genius being drawn out in this way requires distinguishing education from schooling. Paulo Freire stated, ‘Education either functions as an instrument, which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present systems and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom: the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.’ These words capture beautifully why I teach, which is also informed by my lived experience.

Prior to starting kindergarten, I spent most of my formative years with my abuela Martha since my mom worked long hours. My abuela contributed greatly to my Spanish fluency, and in American schooling, my initial primary language somehow marked me as a student with a deficit, making kindergarten difficult since I struggled with the ABCs and 123s. I am unsure if this placed me into special education, but I recall at some point during that school year being pulled out of the class two or three times a week to get one-on-one phonics instruction. I enjoyed the time I spent with the lady who provided this support; however, the pull-out model made me a target for bullying. I was already being teased for struggling with the alphabet, reading, and counting, and my peers seeing me get pulled out of class only added to the shame I felt.

I will never forget what an incredible educator my kindergarten teacher (Ms. Locotel) was. She made a concerted effort to address the bullying, communicating to students that we all learned differently and that speaking multiple languages was a gift. She did her part to make the classroom welcoming for students like me and even provided support outside of school to progress my phonics proficiencies. The support of these two great teachers buffered the feelings of alienation I felt at the onset of my schooling experience, but the former was not consistent in my experience whereas the latter was.

My mom enrolled me into a private Catholic school in the neighborhood both grandparents settled in upon emigrating to Los Angeles. I was a little person who loved to socialize, and my second grade teacher always wrote ‘talks too much’ in big ugly penmanship for my weekly progress report. My mom would have conversations with me about this, and I would rebut that you cannot expect a kid who likes and needs to talk to stay completely quiet for six hours a day. I had a genuine dislike for this teacher and the school. It made me feel like a problem for not getting in line with the school’s authoritative structure and for not being a devout Catholic. Some of the encounters I had with the adults and peers at the school made me wonder what God they preached to and if that God would accept a person like my father, my family, my community, and I. It also made me wonder if these folks were God, and if they were, it was clear God had given up on us.

This school brought up feelings I internalized about my identity, my family, and my community. It made me aware that my father was a cholo and that there was nothing positive about this even though I witnessed positive elements of that culture. It made me hate myself, wish that I was not Mexican/Chicano, and made me wish I grew up in a different community…a white one to be exact. Thankfully, I only spent one year at this school and spent the rest of my years in Los Angeles Unified School District.

Growing up in Los Angeles, California during the late ’90s and early 2000s made for some interesting times, and I’ve processed this experience enough to recognize certain things played out over the course of my educational experience starting at third grade. It started with the DARE program in elementary school, to peers wearing ankle bracelets and police being called to our schools only to provoke and make situations worse during my middle school years, and by the time I reached high school, policing was part of the operational culture of schooling.

It wasn’t until community college that I learned about the ways local politics plus policy had a role in all this. Certain things like the 1999 Street Terrorism Enforcement Prevention (STEP) Act served as a precursor to gang injunctions and increased police presence in low and working class neighborhoods, which inevitably led to increased harassment of young people. Little did I know at the time, but part of my lived experience with public education coincided with stages of what would later be termed the school-to-prison pipeline, of which I have recently started to call the school-to-prison nexus given the work of abolitionist scholars. School felt like a place that was preparing me for what the society at large felt my life trajectory would be…another Brown male to warehouse within the California Department of Corrections to downplay the barriers and obstacles my peers and I navigated. This may seem hyperbole to some, but being Chicano and from the barrio, your lived experience forces you to learn the way racism plays out systemically within institutions and across them. The state of California built 22 prisons by the time I entered high school while only building one University of California campus.

I have a strong belief that education provides a space where young people can engage in the critical and creative transformation of their world, which schooling does not provide. I chose the path of education exactly for this reason, and I strongly believe a new paradigm is needed that focuses on education as opposed to schooling — a status quo-disrupting paradigm that recognizes education is inherently political and the importance of shifting to a new model that humanizes the self and others by incorporating assets-based approaches that center anti-oppression, healing-centered engagement, intersectionality, and liberationist praxis.”

• PhD Candidate in Language, Literacy, and Culture for University of Illinois, Chicago
• MBA in Education Leadership from Milwaukee School of Engineering, 2019
• MA in Urban Special Education from Cardinal Stritch University, 2016
• BA in Sociology from the University of California, Riverside, 2013

• EDU 1010 Education and Society.
• EDU 2010 Introduction to Child and Adolescent Psychology
• EDU 2050 Teaching and Supporting Learners with Diverse Characteristics and Needs
• EDU 4282 Culturally Responsive Instruction
• EDU 4340 Urban & Cultural Leadership
• EDU 5110 Curricular Issues
• EDU 5282 Culturally Responsive Instruction
• EDU 5820 Introduction to Child and Adolescent Psychology

Mr. Castillo’s research interests include culturally and historically responsive education. He hopes to build off Prof. Gholdy Muhammad-Jackson’s Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) framework, which she developed based on her research of the Black Literary Societies in the United States during the 19th century. Mr. Castillo’s research would study the Mesoamerican codices prior to Spanish colonization, using this information to determine what a framework for teaching and learning looked like for the indigenous Nahua communities of Mexico.

• Presenter for the 2025 Teach for America Choose the Twin Cities professional development, serving as lead facilitator for the “Appreciating Difference & Diversity” workshop, presenting on a dialogical reading unit incorporating the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework developed by Prof. Gholdy Muhammad-Jackson.
• Presenter for the 2023 National Forum Conference, serving as a moderator for the “Building Authentic Partnerships, Creating Space & Shifting Power: Young People in Milwaukee Informing Transformative Change in Education through Equity-Based Project Proposals” workshop. You Deserve a Lover, July 2023.
• Presenter for the 2020 Coalition of Anti-Racist & Restorative Educators inaugural conference, serving as lead facilitator for the “Do You See Us? Critical Reflection Learning Tool” workshop.