Teacher. facilitator. Learner

My journey as an educator began in my classroom ten years ago when I started experimenting with teaching techniques that I hoped would help me transform the way my students understood the past, the present and the future. As an Afro-Latinx scholar committed to justice work, I have always framed my teaching around social, racial and environmental justice. But I realized at a certain point that teaching justice content does not prepare my students to do justice work. I needed a more radical approach.

The opportunity to focus on radical and transformative learning came when I was selected to serve as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director of the Honors College at the University at Buffalo (2017-2020). As the first woman, first Latinx and first person of color director of the College, I prioritized a deep and rigorous commitment to diversity and pedagogical innovation. Pushing the boundaries with colleagues and students in and outside of the College, I developed a learning practice that braids critical thinking, critical self-reflection, engagement, and activism in a unique way. This practice became the core of the Impossible Project. 

Through the Impossible Project, I help educators from all disciplines create deeply collaborative and fundamentally transformative learning spaces where research is connected to activism in the interest of social and planetary justice.

Dr. Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller is Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY Hispanic Leadership Institute Fellow, and founder of the Impossible Project. She is also the author of Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (UNC Press, 2017).