Cathlin Goulding, Ed.D., is the co-director of YURI Education Project. A Los Angeles-born yonsei, she started in the education field as an English and poetry teacher at a public high school in the East San Francisco Bay Area. Her research on place-based learning has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and the Library of Congress’ Teaching with Primary Sources. She teaches in the Adolescent Social Studies program at the City University of New York and lives in Queens.

Freda Lin is the co-director of YURI Education Project. Being a student activist leader for Asian American Studies at Northwestern University led her to become a middle and high school history teacher. After leaving the teaching field, she facilitated social movement history tours with Freedom Lifted, and consulted with the Center for Asian American Media and UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project. As the Education Program Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, Freda implemented programming to promote awareness of the World War II Japanese American incarceration experience and its connection to current issues.

Karishma Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Education, Culture and Society Program at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education. Drawing on transnational feminist and anthropological lenses, she studies the politics of knowledge at the intersections of gender, globalization, and education in South Asia and the United States. Karishma was a literacy and social studies teacher in New York City and Chicago, a founding instructional leader at a middle school in central Queens and has worked in teacher and school leader professional development and curriculum design in the United States and internationally for over fifteen years. 

Tran Templeton, Ed.D., is an Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Studies at the University of North Texas. She studies children’s photography and literacy practices as well as works with teachers in attending to children’s perspectives in ways that lead to curricular change. A 1.5 generation Vietnamese American, Tran was a special education teacher and school director (in Houston and Guatemala City) for eight years and an early childhood teacher in NYC for five years.

Roseann Liu is Assistant Professor of Education Studies at Wesleyan University. Drawing from critical race and abolitionist frameworks, she teaches and researches structural inequalities in education, including their effects on communities of color and the organizing strategies used to enact change. She writes about the pitfalls and possibilities of progressive pedagogy and multiracial coalitions. These interests are informed by her experiences as a student and teacher in New York City public schools. She engages broad audiences through producing short films and writing op-eds that have been featured in Colorlines, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Hechinger Report.

Noreen Naseem Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Learning, Research and Practice in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests include the culturally sustaining pedagogies of Asian American and Latinx teachers and the teaching of so-called "difficult histories" to young learners through children's literature. She was a bilingual elementary educator in Austin, Texas for nine years and is the co-author of the forthcoming book Social Studies for a Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Approach for Elementary Educators.

Deborah Wei is an educator and community activist. She helped found Asian Americans United in 1985 to organize low-income and working-class Asian Americans; its victories include winning reform in the School District of Philadelphia for immigrant students and families, improving language access across the city, and stopping the construction of a stadium and a casino in Chinatown. She worked as a multicultural studies curriculum specialist in Philadelphia for 13 years, focusing on curriculum development and teacher training in K-12 AAPI studies. She was a founder and founding principal of Philadelphia’s Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School, a model for best practices in serving immigrant and refugee families.