Deans Decoded: Meet Maneka Brooks

Text shared below copied from: https://insideportlandstate.pdx.edu/2025/01/16/deans-decoded-meet-dean-maneka-brooks/

Having arrived from Texas State University this summer, Dean Maneka Brooks brings fresh perspectives and a vibrant energy to the College of Education. Her office reflects her identity and values, featuring colorful artwork that celebrates her South Asian and Black heritage, shelves lined with books that amplify linguistically and racially minoritized voices and whimsical stuffed animals with happy eyes — a nod to the joy she values in education and life. As a scholar of educational linguistics, she leads with a sharp focus on equity and is passionate about creating pathways to education for all students. Her journey from teacher to dean reflects a deep commitment to fostering inclusive spaces and preparing future educators, counselors and leaders to make meaningful change in their communities.

Inside Portland State’s Ruben Gill Herrera sat down with Dean Brooks to chat about her background and the things she’s looking forward to at the College of Education.

RGH: Can you tell us a little bit about all your office decor?

MB: My office is really important because it represents who I am — all of my different identities and all the different people in my family. One key theme in my office is the multiplicity of Blackness and the African diaspora. So, all my children’s books are written by people from different cultures including Afro-Latinos, immigrants from the continent of Africa and African Americans. And then since I’m also South Asian, my mom brought me this tapestry from Sri Lanka. I display this because I like the colors and it represents the island where she’s from. And then there’s just other things here that represent what I believe about the world, about queer and transgender people’s rights to bodily autonomy. And also just about my little sayings that I keep to remind myself, like “we don’t have to be perfect but we can exist and still do good things.”

RGH: What is the best advice you have ever received?

MB: The best advice I ever received was not to compare myself to other people — that we all have our own journey and there’s different ways of arriving at a goal. I always felt a lot of pressure to do things in lockstep, but learned that the creative way of arriving at a goal can allow you to bring a different kind of experience and a unique perspective. 

RGH: Do you have a favorite item or an item here that has special meaning for you?
MB: Yes, my collection of stuffed animals. You may wonder why a dean would have a collection of stuffed animals. But I keep this here because throughout the day it’s nice to turn around and look at something that’s smiling at you — that brings you good energy. It reminds me to be silly, to stay happy and that just because you’re in a certain position, you don’t have to act a certain way. You can still be authentic to yourself. And it just reminds me of a lot of the characters that have brought me joy in other parts of my life.

RGH: What book changed your life?

MB: It’s hard to identify a particular book that changed my life, but I will say there’s a genre that I love and that’s memoir. What I love about memoir is you get to listen to someone else’s experience about their life. You get to hear about their introspection, the way they saw their world at that moment and what they think about it afterwards. I have two memoirs on my desk here that I’ve read recently and that are really interesting to me. One is Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson. The other is Heavy by Kiese Laymon. 

RGH: What is your go-to karaoke song? 

MB: Again, it’s hard to identify one song, but I would say my favorite songs to sing are by Paquita La Del Barrio. I like her music because I love the way that she uses language. I love the strong feminine voice, and it’s just really kind of fun and spunky.

RGH: Is there something personal you can share that not many people know about you?

MB: So one interesting fact that a lot of people don’t know about me is that I’m actually hard of hearing. And so I wear hearing aids. I think that’s something that I like to share with people because you don’t always notice that about somebody. It’s something that’s new to me and I’m learning how to navigate the world as a person who is hard of hearing. And I think it’s important to share these things with people to normalize it.

RGH: What is something you didn’t know about PSU before taking the position of dean? 

MB: I didn’t realize how every building was so unique, and it kind of represents how Portland is because when you look at different buildings at Portland State, there are some that look like office buildings. There are others that just look like they were built a while ago in a cool way. And then there are some that look very modern. And so all of it together still has a very unifying feeling, but it represents how here at Portland State, we can all be ourselves, but we’re all still coming together as a whole. 

RGH: What were your first impressions of Portland? 

MB: What I love about Portland is how green it is and how you get the best parts of living in a city. Take this weekend for example. We went to see some of the waterfalls, and at the same time, had a really cute brunch downtown in the city. So you get the best of all worlds.

RGH: Can you talk about your journey to becoming a dean.

MB: No child wakes up one day and says, “Hey, I want to be a dean.” I was just really passionate about how we can use structures and systems to make change, to make people feel included. And as I’ve gone through my journey from being a teacher to being a professor and now to being a dean, I’ve always sought ways to be in situations, to be in rooms where I thought I could make a difference to make things better for others. And so for me, I decided to be a dean when I realized that I can be involved in making policies and working with groups to make higher education an inclusive space for people—particularly in the College of Education. I enjoy thinking about how we can enact pathways to bring more diverse people into teaching, counseling and leadership, broadly.

RGH: Your PhD is in educational linguistics. How does that connect with what you do now?

MB: My focus in educational linguistics was examining why bilingual students end up being classified as English learners, even though they speak English, and how there’s unfair practices and policies in that. The larger connecting theme that I see in all of this is how policies that are designed to do good things can actually inadvertently end up hurting people. I believe all this connects to what I do now — thinking through that systematic critical lens about the things that we do on a day-to-day basis here in the College of Education to make sure that we’re being inclusive and preparing the best teachers, leaders and counselors for Portland, for Oregon and for the broader community.

RGH: What are you most excited about? 

MB: What I’m really excited about right now is thinking again about pathways to bring new students into the College of Education. I’m particularly excited about collaborating with our community college partners. One of the reasons that I came here to Portland State is because it’s an access institution. We’re committed to working with non-traditional students — students that are working full-time or that transfer from community college — as well as serving traditional students recently graduated from high school. So I’m really focused on how we can develop pathways to make sure that people can come here and continue to thrive. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity

MANEKA BROOKS NAMED DEAN OF PSU COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

(Text shared below copied from: https://www.pdx.edu/news/maneka-brooks-named-dean-psu-college-education)

Portland State University named Maneka Deanna Brooks as the Dean of the College of Education. Brooks currently serves as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Educator Preparation at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She will join PSU on July 1, working remotely before joining the campus community in person on August 1.

“Maneka has a track record of education leadership and community engagement that makes her a perfect fit for Portland State’s College of Education,” said Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Shelly Chabon. “I was impressed by her experience working with local school districts on staffing strategies and her research on second language literacy and bilingualism.”

Brooks is an equity-focused educational administrator with a strong research and teaching background who brings experience developing successful initiatives with community partners. Prior to joining Texas State in 2014 as an Assistant Professor of Reading Education, Brooks served as Assistant Professor of Literacy in Multicultural Contexts at California State University, Fresno and an adjunct lecturer at University of California, Santa Cruz. Outside of the sphere of higher education, Brooks has a range of experiences working within and supporting various types of educational institutions.

"I was particularly interested in joining Portland State because of its commitment to public education and its expansive vision of how education can transform life opportunities for communities and individuals," Brooks said. “I’m really looking forward to expanding existing community partnerships and building new partnerships in service to Portland and the greater region.”

Brooks earned a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from Stanford University. She has a M.A. in Bilingual Secondary Education and a B.A. in Psychology from Loyola Marymount University.

Chabon expressed her heartfelt thanks to Tina Peterman, who will return to the faculty of the College of Education after serving as interim Dean for the last year. She also offered her deepest gratitude to the College of Education Dean Search Committee which was chaired by Rossitsa Wooster, Dean of the Graduate School.

Brooks is the fourth of six new deans who will be hired during the 2023-24 academic year. 

Mid-Career Award from AERA's Second Language Research SIG

Several of my friends/colleagues who came to celebrate me as the Second Language Research business meeting. Please ignore that I am holding the award upside down :)

At AERA, I was awarded a Mid-Career Award from the Second Language Research SIG. As a part of this recognition, they asked all award winners to answer three questions: What are your main research interests? What drew you to the field of second language research? What do you see as important future directions for the field? Below, I share the responses that were included in the SIG’s latest newsletter.

What are your main research interests? 

My main research interests center on the everyday educational practices that impact the academic trajectories of bilingual adolescents in US schools. I am interested in these seemingly mundane educational practices because they are rarely examined, yet they play important roles in students' lives. For instance, in my most recent article in TESOL Quarterly (2022), I used an intersectional anti-adultism conceptual lens to investigate how 20 high school youths understood the relationship between two routine EL practices—English language proficiency (ELP) testing and EL-related course placement—and their institutional EL classification. This study found that most participants did not use ELP testing or EL-related course placement to recognize their labeling. That is, even though youths took ELP tests and/or were placed in EL-related course placement, most did not realize they were identified as ELs. Youths’ interpretations of the meaning of these two practices were related to how they understood themselves and their schooling experiences. As such, the findings highlight the necessity to create structures for multidirectional and intergenerational communication between youth and adults that challenge institutionalized adultism within EL policy. The interconnection of my research interests across the past decade is the careful analysis of the seemingly mundane, which I contend is fundamental for more just research, policy, and practice. 

What drew you to the field of second language research?

Multiple languages have always been a part of my life. My mother was raised in a multilingual family. Her childhood and adolescence occurred across various European, Asian, and African countries. Although my father was raised in the southern United States as a monolingual English speaker, he worked manual labor jobs in Los Angeles from the 1970s through the 1990s. Given his profession, he worked with many Spanish speakers and learned Spanish as a second language. I saw learning more languages as a way to be in community with the people who were an essential part of my daily life. As a result, I was determined to know more than English. I remember dragging my younger brother to the public library to check out language-learning cassettes during the summer. I became a certified Spanish-English bilingual history teacher because I love languages and education. However, I was drawn particularly into Second Language Research because of the adolescents I taught who were identified as English learners within the US school system. Their righteous discontent with their schooling experience and the labels ascribed to them caused me to question everything I was taught. They showed me how I was complicit in an unjust system, and their experiences pushed me toward creating change.  

What do you see as important future directions for the field? 

An important future direction for second language research is incorporating intersectional anti-adultism. Whether or not future studies use this specific terminology is less critical than researchers’ engaging with the following three commitments to youth (Brooks, Under Review): 

• The commitment to center youth knowledge and voices. 

• The commitment to document and act against dehumanizing practices towards youths. 

• The commitment to unlearn adultism in all aspects of life.  

These commitments require that researchers build on the understanding that youth knowledge and decision-making are necessary for equitable education. It is essential to define adultism to understand what an intersectional anti-adultism lens necessitates and how these three commitments are interconnected. Adultism entails “a set of beliefs, attitudes, policies, and practices that construct adults as developed, mature, intelligent, and experienced, based solely on their age and ensures that adults control the resources and make the decisions in society” (DeJong & Love, 2015, p. 490). As a result, anti-adultism entails rejecting age bias. Anti-adultism recognizes that adults are not necessarily more mature or in possession of other positive qualities because of their age. I argue that an intersectional anti-adultism lens is necessary because it acknowledges that age bias is not the only form of marginalization that youths experience; their multiple marginalized identities impact how they experience adultism. The three commitments of the intersectional anti-adultism lens shape how researchers engage in second language research to center youths. 

The Importance of Black Storytelling: Texas State's African American Read-In

In the 1990, the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) established the National African American Read-In. In collaboration with colleagues from across campus, I was able to host the first read-in at Texas State on February 27th. The title of the event was: “The Importance of Black Storytelling: Texas State’s African American Read-In.” The two-hour event was divided into two sections. During the first part, participants were invited to read silently, aloud, or in small groups. Individuals of all ages and from multiple linguistic backgrounds decided to step-up to the podium and read aloud! The second part of the program consisted of an interactive panel of esteemed faculty from Texas State University and San Marcos High School: Dr. drea brown, Dr. Christian Hines, Dr. Casey Nichols, Mr. Tommie Jackson, and Ms. Blanca Loya. I served as the panels moderator. This panel provided insight and involved the audience in in-depth conversations that covered a multitude of topics. Thanks to our sponsors we were able to provide food and Black literature to the attendees. In all, more than 95 individuals from on- and off-campus participated. I have included the flier and some pictures taken by Carlos Anguiano and Charlcee Certvantez.

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