Tara J. Yosso

Tara J. Yosso is an American education scholar known for developing the concept of community cultural wealth within critical race theory in education. Her widely cited framework identifies forms of capital, including aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational and resistant capital, that students of color and other marginalized communities bring to their education, reframing these assets against deficit-thinking models that treat such communities as lacking the cultural and social capital of the dominant group. Yosso has held faculty positions in education at universities including the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan, where her research and teaching focus on critical race theory, Chicana and Chicano educational pathways, and the ways school structures and curricula can either support or obstruct students from historically underserved communities. Her community cultural wealth framework is widely taught in teacher preparation and educational equity coursework and cited across education research examining how schools recognize or overlook the strengths students already carry into the classroom.