research overview
- Ramirez’s recent scholarship focuses on pedagogical practices to advance cultural understanding and educational opportunity and success for all students, particularly through dialogue as a pedagogy and practice. Her practitioner-based research studies how dialogue experiences that attend to power in conversational spaces serve as an engaged and interactive form of learning across differences. She has published and presented on dialogue as a pedagogical practice that promotes open and meaningful conversation among students from different backgrounds. Her dialogue-related research work includes serving as Co-PI on a multi-year Spencer Foundation Civics Measures research grant to develop measurements for assessing dialogic and deliberative engagement across difference in educational settings. She also served as the Project Manager of two multi-year collaborative change dialogue projects, within CU’s Finance and Business Strategy (FBS) unit and CU’s Office of Information Technology (OIT), designed to train staff in critical dialogue practices and promote communication across differences, develop critical consciousness, and drive collective action within organizations. Her earlier body of research and publishing considers narrative mappings of place in 19th/20th Century western American literature and how these narrative mappings dialogically intersect with contemporary public memory of western places. She is the author of Reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and has published on Indigenous actors’ participation in the Ramona Outdoor Play as a form of Indigenous cultural continuation through public performance that dialogically negotiates with the embedded, colonialist narrative of Southern California. She has also published on narrative mappings in Willa Cather’s novels.