Eddie Partida

Eddie Partida is an educational practitioner, scholar, and vision-driven leader who seeks to enact Teacher Education for peace, understanding, and social justice. Informed by his educational experiences as an undocumented Mexican immigrant who at once benefited greatly from educational opportunity yet was harmed by many of the subtractive schooling practices still common in schools today, Partida approaches the work of teacher education with critical lenses, intellectual humility, kindness, and productive struggle.

Since his appointment as director of CGU’s Department of Teacher Education in 2019, Partida has re-centered the program around a critical social justice teaching framework that brings to bear the most current research on culturally responsive teaching, highly-effective teaching practices, restorative practices, socio-emotional leaning, antiracist and anti-bias pedagogy, and the art and science of teaching and learning. To steward this vision, he has assembled a talented, dynamic, and passionate team of teacher education practitioners and scholars responsive to the educational landscape as it exists—fraught by the legacy of systemic racism and oppression, yet rich in vibrant optimism for creating schools that seek to humanize and empower students. Under his leadership, the Department of Teacher Education secured a $3.2 million Teacher Quality Partnership grant from the U.S. Department of Education to implement a teaching residency pathway that addresses teacher shortages in the metropolitan Los Angeles area through a critical social justice lens.

Prior to assuming the role of director, Partida has served various roles in CGU’s Department of Teacher Education since 2010, including mentor teacher, faculty associate, district coordinator, and STEM coordinator. In 2014, he co-authored a grant proposal with Professors DeLacy Ganley and Adam Landsberg that resulted in a $3 million award from the National Science Foundation to address the critical shortage of highly qualified STEM teachers in under-resourced communities. In 2016, he designed and organized the first-ever Spark Challenge, a STEM event hosted at CGU to promote STEM among children in grades 3-6. In 2018, this project was extended to high school students through a $25,000 grant from the Toyota USA Foundation.

Partida regularly presents at local, national, and international conferences. In 2019 he was invited by the U.S. India Educational Foundation (USIEF) to be a guest presenter along with Ganley at the Teach to Ignite:Classrooms for GenZ and Beyond Teacher Alumni Workshop in New Delhi, India.

Prior to his tenure at CGU, Partida was a science and engineering teacher in the Hacienda-La Puente School District, where he served as chair of the Science and Engineering Academy and advised student teams in STEM-related competitions including the Metropolitan Water District’s Solar Cup race, KISS Institute’s Botball Robotics tournament, Team America Rocketry Challenge, and Science Olympiad. He continues to support STEM initiatives through creative research projects that seek to broaden participation in STEM among historically underrepresented groups.

Partida holds a bachelor’s degree in human development from the University of California, San Diego, a master’s degree in education from Azusa Pacific University, and has advanced to candidacy in the PhD program in Education at Claremont Graduate University.