About Valentina Iturbe-LaGrave
Director for Inclusive Teaching Practices, University of Denver

Dr. Iturbe-LaGrave provides proactive and responsive leadership, direction, and programming to advance inclusive pedagogy.

Valentina believes in student-centered teaching practices that engage the wealth of intersecting social identities and positionalities that faculty and students bring to the classroom. She works to dismantle oppressive approaches to teaching that hinder the academic success of historically underrepresented students and is passionate about creating learning environments that value intersecting social identities, foster community, and enact collegiality for organizational culture change.

Valentina holds two BAs, an MA, and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder, a Change Leadership Certificate from Cornell University, and a Certificate in Program Strategy and Evaluation from Stanford University. She has received several research grants and is currently a Co-Principal Investigator in a $1.9 million National Science Foundation grant exploring Inclusive Identities of Engineers and Computer Scientists: Expanding Efforts to Infuse Inclusive Excellence in Undergraduate Curricula. Valentina has presented her research at the American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education, among others. She has won teaching and service awards throughout her twenty years in Higher Education. Valentina is a mother of three, stepmother of one and parent to a two-time pediatric cancer survivor.

For her recent piece on responding to trauma in the classroom, read: https://otl.du.edu/responding-to-trauma-in-the-classroom/