About Me

Rakhat Zholdoshalieva

Rakhat was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan (in Central Asia), lived for seven years in Pakistan, and has lived in Toronto for five years. She has taught kindergarten and lower secondary school students, as well as teachers. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research examines the meaning of education and learning in a rural Kyrgyz community during the period of post-Soviet social transformations. As a former teacher and teacher educator, she strongly believes in education for social justice. As a team member of the Citizenship Rights and Responsibilities Pakistan, she contributed to the development of educational materials and taught several professional development courses that promote global citizenship and peace education.

In addition to Kyrgyz--her mother tongue--Rakhat speaks Russian and English, and understands several Turkic languages. She grew up in a mountainous Kyrgyz community. Her lived experiences in the mountain village inspired her respect for and appreciation of interactions between nature and human society. As is typical of children in the mountainous Kyrgyz community, she spent her summer vacations in jailoo (mountain summer pasturelands in Kyrgyz) with her grandparents, from whom she learned her traditional semi-nomadic pastoral culture.