Corinna Ott

UC Riverside
PhD Student in Education, Society and Culture
cott002@ucr.edu

Corinna Ott is a PhD student in Education, Society, and Culture at UC Riverside. Her research interests surround the experiences of preservice teachers and teachers of Color, community-based teacher education, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Corinna received her BA in History from Westmont College in 2014. A few years after graduating, she dipped her toes into the world of teaching and was hired to teach 5th grade at an elementary school in her hometown of Gilroy, California. After this year of teaching, she pursued her single subject credential and MA in teaching at Santa Clara University. While there, she discovered her passions for teacher education, research, and scholar-activism by working as a research assistant for a project surrounding the experiences of preservice teachers of Color in their student teaching placements. After graduation, she taught history and AVID at a large high school in the Bay Area. Throughout her career as a teacher, Corinna actively sought and advocated for practices and solutions that would effectively address and dismantle the inequities she and her students of Color witnessed and experienced on a daily basis. Building upon the knowledge she gained in her Masters research project, Corinna aims to center her work as a PhD student around understanding and documenting the racialized experiences of preservice teachers of Color in teacher education programs and student teaching placements, implement practices that sustain them in the profession, and empower them to resist and dismantle oppressive power structures embedded within the educational system.