Diana Nguyen

Principal, Del Mar High School (2024)

Campbell Union High School District

How do you define educational equity?

In my quest to achieve educational equity in the very same education system that has paradoxically failed and supported me, I often continue to reflect on Richard Rodriguez’s epiphany (1982) : “A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student” (p. 46). Upon reflection, I attribute my successes to my ability to code-switch. Like many of our students of Color, I, too, have been forced to sacrifice beloved pieces of my racial and cultural identities in order to adapt to the dominant, White cultural norms upon which the American school system is based. The critical consciousness (Daniel Tatum, 1997) that I have developed around this truth, however, has empowered me to advocate for social justice in education from a place of reflection, experience, and empathy.

Bearing in mind the fragmentation of my own intersectionalities (Daniel Tatum, 1997), I regularly make conscious efforts to employ the method of what Yonezawa et al. (2012) refer to as “personalization,” which they define as “the cultivation of a web of positive relationships...to promote learning” (p. 42). To that end, I try to be very thoughtful about the ways in which I capitalize on individual students’ cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) such that I can support them in achieving their own “conception[s] of the good” (Bull, 2007, p. 12). Certainly, there are students who have little to no desire to continue their education beyond high school, but it is not my responsibility to make that choice. Instead, my mission is to provide them with opportunities to engage with a rigorous, viable, and culturally relevant curriculum that will prepare them for college and career.