“I am honored to be able to serve as dean and work with an amazing group of faculty, staff, and students to extend the reach and impact of UConn’s Neag School of Education,” Irizarry said. “I take on this role with a deep sense of gratitude for every individual who has made this School the incredible place it is. After a particularly difficult year for us all, so much promise and opportunity lie ahead. With our dedicated community of colleagues, school partners, alumni, and friends, I could not be more thrilled to reconnect and collaborate in positioning our school as a national leader in education.”

“I take on this role with a deep sense of gratitude for every individual who has made this School the incredible place it is. After a particularly difficult year for us all, so much promise and opportunity lie ahead.”

— Dean Jason Irizarry

Irizarry’s research focuses on urban teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention with an emphasis on increasing the number of teachers of color, culturally responsive pedagogy, youth participatory action research, and Latinx students in U.S. schools. A central focus of his work involves promoting the academic achievement of youth in urban schools by addressing issues associated with educator preparation. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in multicultural education, culturally responsive curriculum development, urban education, and participatory action research.

Manuscripts documenting the findings of his research have been published in a variety of journals in the field including Teachers College Record, American Educational Research Journal, Educational Leadership, Education and Urban Society, Multicultural Perspectives, Journal of Latinos and Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Centro Journal of Puerto Rican Studies and others appearing as chapters in various books. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Latinization of U.S. Schools: Successful Teaching and Learning in Shifting Cultural Contexts (Paradigm Publishers, 2011) and co-editor of Diaspora Studies in Education: Toward a Framework for Understanding the Educational Experiences of Transnational Communities(Peter Lang, 2014).

Irizarry first began his career at UConn in 2005 as a post-doctoral fellow with the Teachers for a New Era project, and as a faculty member from 2006 to 2013. He served as the director of urban education at the University of Massachusetts from 2013 to 2016, where he was responsible for building a stronger partnership between the university and schools in Springfield and Holyoke, Massachusetts. He returned to UConn in 2016 to the Neag School faculty and also serves as a faculty associate in El Instituto: Institute for Latina/a, Caribbean and Latin American Studies.