Throughout her career as a scholar and academic leader, Estela Zarate, Ph.D. has been recognized for her innovative approaches to education and her dedication to fostering equity and inclusive learning environments. These and other traits led LMU to name her the new dean of the School of Education, where she began her role on July 8, 2024.
Zarate, a former faculty member and administrator at California State University, Fullerton, the University of California Irvine, and other institutions of higher education, was most recently a visiting senior faculty fellow at the Diana Natalicio Institute for Hispanic Student Success at the University of Texas, El Paso. There she led the institute’s strategic planning and developed other key initiatives and networks.
A graduate of Rice University in Houston, Zarate moved to Los Angeles more than 20 years ago to attend UCLA, where she earned a Ph.D. in education. She has called the City of Angels her home ever since. As she stepped into her new position at LMU, she spoke with us about SOE’s close ties to the educational community in southern California and beyond, and how she envisions working with faculty and staff to build upon the school’s strong foundation to address the evolving needs of educators and students alike in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
How have you been preparing for your new role as dean? What aspects of the position are you most excited about?
One appealing aspect of this role is the capacity to increase the visibility of the SOE and its programs and faculty. To prepare for this, I have been connecting with people in and around Los Angeles, and have joined some conversations that the SOE is already participating in. I’m really looking forward to leveraging the relationships that SOE has already, as well as cultivating new ones. I’ve lived in the Los Angeles area for more than 20 years, and being a dean will allow me to build community connections in ways that were not within my capacity as a faculty member. So that’s really exciting.
What do you believe sets LMU School of Education apart from prior institutions where you’ve worked?
There’s no question that what makes LMU unique is its Catholic, Jesuit, and Marymount heritage. It provides a built-in mission that is very much aligned with the social justice approach that our current PK-12 schools are asking for, or practicing. The philosophy of educating the whole child, seeing education as a public good, using education as a tool for justice—these tenets of our schools today align with the traditions for which LMU is known and valued, and are part of the university’s founding principles and identity. Those are really distinctive qualities. Terms and buzzwords in education always evolve over time, and it will be interesting to see whether or how long the “social justice” terminology sticks around at schools or institutes of higher education. A social-justice approach toward education is not sustainable if it’s not deeply embedded in the culture of a place, or in its curriculum. It can’t just emerge from market research or be enacted from a slogan. But at LMU School of Education, this approach has always been central to how we cultivate and train future educators, so it will never change because it is part of our core values.
Also, the SOE’s programs and faculty have always maintained a strong presence in the local community, whether through our LMU Family of Schools, our Upward Bound programs, or other connections and touchpoints. The school has a strong reputation for cultivating educators and counselors and school psychologists who are equity-oriented, and who see their fields of practice through that lens. These are sought-after qualities in our schools and community organizations.
You were classified as an English language learner when you started school and were also a “first to go” to college in your family. What do you wish all educators knew about these types of students? How can schools and school systems support them?
Certainly my lived experiences are partly what led me to pursue a career in education and have influenced the topics I research. Over time, what other scholars and I have observed is that our institutions have been created and designed for the students of yesterday. Now what we’re all working toward—and I include the SOE faculty in this description—is creating institutions to serve the students of today. We live in an increasingly diverse, interdependent, and global world. Language diversity is just one of the types of diversity we see in our students today. Adapting to the students of today means you must reimagine how schools are structured and how school leadership and front offices are organized. It means that teachers have to adjust their expectations about what students know and how they learn. It requires a major shift in the ways that we operate, as well as how we define learning processes and support students’ mental health. It’s overdue, I would say, for educators and institutions to put in the work to ensure that schools and policies truly serve the students of today.
LMU School of Education is fortunate to have both formal partnerships and informal relationships with local schools, districts, and communities. Can you speak about the importance of partnerships and community engagement in educator preparation?
The SOE’s existing partnerships are an area of strength for the school. My understanding is that faculty and staff want to continue deepening those relationships, so I look forward to contributing to this work in my capacity as dean. Regarding partnerships overall, the starting point of these conversations should always be, “What do these schools need? How do they want to grow and evolve?” And then we design partnerships that are mutually beneficial, with growth and evolution happening on both sides.
We also need to ask school partners, “How open are you to innovating?” With the LMU Family of Schools, for instance, we are the partner university to PK-12 schools in the Westchester area that comprise a diverse range of school types—traditional public schools as well as charters and Catholic schools within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. We place our SOE candidates in these schools as intern teachers and counselors, and this gives them experience in a wide variety of settings. However, there are likely opportunities to work with those schools and others to develop new programs at SOE and to strengthen existing ones. And perhaps they can also serve as areas of research and development.
Finally, our partner schools should also be places where SOE students, in their capacity as intern educators, can ask questions, suggest new approaches, and grow in their disciplines and with the communities they serve. This cross-pollination of ideas raises the level of practice in education, and it is the broad impact we at the SOE want to have.
Could you share an approach, program, or problem-solving exercise from one of your previous roles that you believe might be beneficial to implement at LMU School of Education?
During my career I’ve seen great innovation happen in developing programs, when given the right conditions and support. I once had the experience of leading a team to revise the curriculum of a program to increase enrollment. It was a very rewarding experience to engage colleagues in the visioning process, because if we focused on our strengths and allowed them to guide the program’s design, people became fully invested in the process. For a program to be successful, there must be authentic engagement from faculty.
In that vein, I am very interested in finding out what drives our faculty. What ideas are they working on? What gets them excited? These are the elements that will ignite new ideas for programs and initiatives at the SOE. The same goes for finding out what drives staff. To build sustainable programs, you must first identify the qualities and values that make the whole team feel enthusiastic, and go from there. This is the spirit I am hoping to foster at LMU.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the field of education over the next five years? How do envision LMU School of Education contributing toward changes?
A lot of conversations in education right now currently start with AI. How do we engage with that in education, not just at the university level, but in PK-12 schools as well? To me that brings broader questions around, how are we preparing future educators and providing professional development for educators around engaging technology for learning?
Obviously, at the university level, we’re not asking students questions for which answers are easily findable via Google. We must train them to ask deeper questions about “the why” and the purpose of the work, or the impact of the problem being examined. What type of preparation do students need along these lines in different disciplines?
AI is forcing us to ask a lot of questions about the confluence of technology, art, design, and craft in all sorts of fields. For instance, through my prior role at UTEP, I had the opportunity to attend a hackathon. One of the speakers told the audience that most of what we’ve interacted with thus far regarding AI is around text and narrative, and that’s how we’re framing decision-making right now. I thought that was interesting. And I recently learned that one of the large universities in our area has seen a 20 percent enrollment drop in computer science majors, along with an increase in humanities majors. Maybe this is because of a belief that AI can handle programming, but cannot “do the work” that is unique to a person who studied humanities. And recently, while on vacation in Japan, I visited a museum where they had robots that read your facial expressions and react to them—they are programmed to understand and respond to human emotion, and they’re quite good at it.
So the question of how we incorporate AI into education and daily life is a really big one, and one that takes courage to tackle, particularly those of us who had our training before things like search engines existed. And it requires a little bit of vulnerability to understand that we may not know everything, but also confidence to engage the inquiry using methods that we know.
It’s a full rethink of what learning looks like and how we communicate about these issues with one another. And at SOE, we have the iDEAL institute that is tackling these questions in real time. I believe there’s an opportunity for us, as educators, to take a leading role in posing those questions that help us better understand where we can or should go with AI. I look forward to the ways that SOE, and educators overall, will become a part of that conversation.
