BernNadette Best-Green is an associate professor of Education at San Joaquin Delta College within California’s Central Valley. Best-Green is also is a veteran K–12 educator (teacher and administrator) and practitioner-researcher of culturally diverse youth, whose linguistic dexterity and plurality enables them to blend and alternate between the standard and nonstandard Englishes within their linguistic repertoires in creative, dynamic, and expansive ways. She earned her BA in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and her MA in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from California State University, Sacramento. She  earned her PhD in Education: Language, Literacy, and Culture from the University of California at Davis, where she was awarded the 2014–2017 Teacher Educator-Scholar Fellowship and a 2017–2018 Professors for the Future Fellowship. The title of Best-Green’s doctoral dissertation is “Reframing ‘Broken English’ as ‘Counterhegemonic Linguistic Drip’: Investigating Ethnolinguistic Vitality within My Sixth-Grade Classroom.” Through this research, she investigated how exposure to an original critical language pedagogy curricular innovation (the Our Original Word Habits unit) influenced students’ perceptions about their languages-of-the-heart (which were sometimes—but not always—the same as their home languages). During her doctoral studies, Best-Green combined her service as a public school teacher with her role as a teacher educator by teaching graduate coursework to teacher credential and Master of Arts degree candidates within a university-based school of education that prepared preservice and novice teachers to advocate for equity of all students.

Mentor: Ayanna F. Brown

Dr. Ayanna F. Brown earned her Bachelors of Science from Tuskegee University in Secondary Education Language Arts, M.Ed in Curriculum and Instructional Leadership and Ph.D from Vanderbilt University in Interdisciplinary Studies: Language, Literacy and Sociology.  Dr. Brown is an Associate Professor of Education and Coordinator for the Middle Level English Language Arts major at Elmhurst University. Dr. Brown is the author of several peer-reviewed journal articles, several book chapters, and is the co-editor of Critical consciousness in curricular research: Evidence from the field.  She is the Co-Principle Investigator for a National Science Foundation to increase the number of STEM majors to consider classroom teaching.

Dr. Brown’s research explores micro-analytic examinations of pedagogy that contextualizes diverse perspectives within literacy classrooms, of which discussions of race and discourse analysis are central.  Thematically, my research, pedagogy, and activism are centered on culturally responsive and sustaining educational practices, racial literacies, and anti-racist education development.

Laura C. Chávez-Moreno is an interdisciplinary researcher and a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. In July 2021, she will join the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies faculty as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on Chicanx/Latinx education, in particular teaching, literacy, language, and racialization, and uses a relational lens to study race. Chávez-Moreno’s dissertation research won several grants and awards, including five 2019 Outstanding Dissertation Awards: American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division G Social Contexts in Education; AERA Latinx Research Issues Special Interest Group (SIG); AERA Bilingual Education Research SIG (1st place); American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (3rd place); and National Association of Bilingual Education (Honorable Mention). Her work has been published in the Journal of Teacher Education, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Peabody Journal of Education, and the Handbook of Research on Teaching (5th edition). Her current project explores how Latinidad is constructed relationally in a bilingual education program. Among her many service activities, Chávez-Moreno has mentored undergraduate and graduate students through several organizations, including the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and has served as Division K Teaching and Teacher Education Representative for AERA’s Graduate Student Council, as well as cofounding Wisconsin Education Policy, Outreach, and Practice. Prior to her doctoral studies, she served as a Philadelphia public school teacher of Spanish for five years, wrote district curriculum, and worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was born in Mexico and was raised in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. Twitter: LauraCCM

Mentor: Renee M. Moreno

Brittany Frieson is an assistant professor of Literacy and Antiracist Education in the Teacher Education and Administration Department at the University of North Texas. She recently earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in language and literacy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her current research derives from her dissertation, “(Re)mixin’ & Flowin’: Examining the Literacy Practices of African American Language Speakers in an Elementary Two-Way Immersion Bilingual Program,” where she employs critical ethnographic work that draws upon critical approaches of raciolinguistics and critical race theory, to explore how young Black children utilize their rich language and literacy practices while navigating bilingual hegemonic Whiteness (Flores, 2016) in multilingual spaces. In addition, her latest scholarship highlights the experiences of Black children in dual-language programs, in regard to how they powerfully reaffirm their cultural and linguistic identities in the absence of institutional support from their DLBE program. Inspired by her experience as a former teacher of culturally and linguistically diverse children, Frieson looks forward to scholarship that further includes examining anti-Blackness in bilingual programs, with the goal of preparing preservice bilingual teachers who actively engage in antiracist pedagogies that humanize the literacies and lives of Black children.

Mentor: April Baker-Bell

Dr. April Baker-Bell is a transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist and Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education in the Department of English and Department of African American and African Studies. A national leader in conversations on Black Language education, her research interrogates the intersections of Black language and literacies, anti-Black racism, and antiracist pedagogies, and is concerned with antiracist writing, critical media literacies, Black feminist-womanist storytelling, and self-preservation for Black women in academia, with an emphasis on early career Black women. Baker-Bell’s recently published book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, brings together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy. Baker-Bell is also co-founder of the Black Language Magazine and #BlackLanguageSyllabus with Dr. Carmen Kynard.

Hui-Ling S. Malone is an assistant professor of English Education at Michigan State University. She is a former secondary English teacher who has previously worked in various communities including Detroit, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; and the South Bronx, New York City. She is interested in language and literacy that sustain communities as well as young people. She draws upon culturally sustaining pedagogies and critical pedagogy as a framework to engage students and their communities to advance equity in schools. Malone’s research centers young people, from partnering with school districts to interrogate disproportionality through Youth Participatory Action Research, to researching various youth learning experiences in and outside the classroom, including the learning of nontraditional high school students in a critical literacy filmmaking program. Her research focuses on community-centric practices through teaching and learning in hopes of strengthening relationships among students and surrounding school community members to address immediate social issues for the greater good of the collective. Malone is the inaugural graduate student recipient of the NYU Patricia M. Carey Changemaker Award—her scholarship and teaching are deeply rooted in her value of community advocacy work.

Mentor: Timothy San Pedro

Timothy San Pedro is an Associate Professor of Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education at Ohio State University. His scholarship focuses on the intricate link between motivation, engagement, and identity construction to curricula and pedagogical practices that re-center content and conversations upon Indigenous histories, knowledges, and literacies. San Pedro’s work is published in the American Educational Research Journal (2), Research in the Teaching of English, Equity and Excellence in Education (2), Journal of American Indian Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Urban Education. Most recently, San Pedro co-edited two books: Applying Indigenous Research Methods: Storying with Peoples and Communities and Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square. He serves as the chair of the Standing Committee on Research for the National Council of Teachers of English and is a standing member on the Literacy Research Association’s Ethics Committee. He is an inaugural Gates Millennium Scholar, Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow, a Ford Fellow, a Concha Delgado Gaitan Council of Anthropology in Education Presidential Fellow, and a Spencer Fellow.

Alexis McGee is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama. She serves on the Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies committee and teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses including the history of composition and rhetoric, African American rhetorics, and technical writing. She has also taught Introduction to Women’s Studies and First-Year English courses. She received her PhD with two certificates of concentration in linguistics and rhetoric and composition from the University of Texas at San Antonio. McGee’s research interests focus on Black feminist theory; African American rhetoric, language, and literacies; Hip Hop rhetoric and pedagogy; as well as rhetoric and composition theory and history. She is the past recipient of NCTE’s Early Educator of Color Leadership Award and belongs to a number of professional organizations. Her work has been published in Pedagogy and Obsidian, and she also has a number of book chapters in the e-book Racial Shorthand: Coded Discrimination Contested in Social Media; The Lauryn Hill Reader; and The Lemonade Reader.

Mentor: Carmen Kynard

Carmen Kynard is the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Before TCU, she worked in English and Gender Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice as well as English, Urban Education, and Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She interrogates race, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/African American cultures and languages, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition and literacies studies. Carmen has taught high school with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools, served as a writing program administrator, and worked as a teacher educator. She has led numerous professional development projects on language, literacy, and learning and has published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly, Literacy and Composition Studies and more. Her award-winning book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement. Her current projects focus on young Black women in college, Black Feminist/Afrofuturist digital vernaculars, and AfroDigital Humanities learning. 

Giselle Martinez Negrette is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds an MA in education with a concentration in Bilingual Education and TESOL from New Mexico State University and a PhD from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. As an ESL (English as a Second Language) and early childhood educator, she has worked in several different regions, including Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Her research interests center on issues of language, equity, and social justice, particularly in relation to the schooling of linguistically and culturally diverse children in the United States and other regions of the world. In her work, Martinez Negrette employs qualitative methods to research multilingual education, language ideologies, and dual language immersion programs. In her most recent work, she investigates how emergent bilinguals in dual language immersion programs perceive, enact, and negotiate the tenuous intersections of race, ethnicity, social class position, and language in American school settings. Her work has been recognized nationally and locally by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the Morgridge Center for Public Service at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Mentor: Danny C. Martinez

Danny C. Martinez, Ph.D. is Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis – School of Education. His research explores the cultural and communicative practices of Black and Latinx youth in secondary literacy classrooms and teacher learning as it relates to leveraging and sustaining these practices. His work is inspired by ethnographic traditions in literacy studies, anthropology and education, and sociocultural language theories. Martinez received his Ph.D. in Urban Schooling at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published in the Review of Research in Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Linguistics and Education, English Education, and Urban Education among others. He is a former NCTE CNV fellow and current Associate Chair of NCTEAR. He is a former English Language Arts and English Language Development teacher in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Lakeya Omogun is a PhD candidate in the Language and Literacy Studies program in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. Her hybrid identity as a Nigerian and African-American woman is reflected in her interdisciplinary approach to understanding how Black immigrant youth narrate themselves through linguistic moves while living in the United States. Her current research documents six Nigerian immigrant youth’s employment of language and literacy practices across their Central Texas homes, communities, and digital spaces to construct, negotiate, and imagine identities for themselves. Utilizing ethnographic and narrative analysis approaches, her project draws on theories from Indigenous studies and human development and psychology to produce knowledge for literacy research and educators to recognize and support the unique identities and diverse range of language and literacies of all youth. She envisions her research as a contribution that could further dismantle monolithic and homogenous representations of immigrant youth in US schools. Her work has been published in Journal of Literacy Research, Teachers College Record, and Texas Education Review. She is a former literacy teacher and McNair Scholar who holds a BA in Elementary Education from Michigan State University and an MA in Literacy Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Mentor: Patricia Enciso

Patricia Enciso is a Professor of Literacy and Literature and Associate Faculty in Latinx Studies at Ohio State University, where she is also Director of the Martha King Center for Languages and Literacy and teaches courses in diverse literature and equity and engagement in literary reading.  Her current research focuses on the ways middle school youth engage in storytelling, drama, and visual arts to construct and negotiate stories about themselves and their communities. Dr. Enciso has served as President of the Literacy Research Association, Chair of the NCTE Research Foundation, and co-editor of Language Arts.  She is co-editor of the Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2011) and the Handbook of Reading Research: Volume V (2020).  Her research and essays have appeared in English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Reading Research Quarterly, Language Arts, and English Education.

Jenell Igeleke Penn received her PhD in Adolescent, Post-Secondary, and Community Literacies  in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University. She serves as the Program Manager for the department’s English Education and Social Studies Education programs. Her dissertation study, “In This Space, We Rock Hard: The Garret(ed) Spaces for the Literacies of Black Preservice Teachers,” utilized collective and collaborative approaches to qualitative research, including ethnography, critical race theory, Black feminist thought, and Ubuntu, to explore how the curation of garret (McKittrick, 2006) spaces for Black preservice teachers in an English Education teacher preparation program can hold space for them to draw on their literacies to affirm, resist and reshape perceptions of who they are, what they know, and what they need. Penn is a former middle and high school ELA teacher as well, and her research interests center around how nurturing spaces and visibility in the areas of pedagogy and curriculum help Black teachers and Black youth to experience and share affirmation, community, joy, and liberation. In addition to her dissertation research, she cochairs the annual Equity and Diversity Educator Conference at the Ohio State University and facilities book clubs and programming for youth in local school districts.

Mentor: Arnetha Ball

Arnetha F. Ball is the Charles E. Ducommun Endowed Professor (Emerita) in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. She currently serves as Chair of the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) program and is Interim Director of the Program in African and African American Studies. Dr. Ball served as Secretary, Vice President, and President of AERA and the US Representative to the World Educational Research Association.  Her interdisciplinary program of research focuses on preparing teachers to teach students in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms and community-based organizations.  She investigates the role of generativity and successful paradigms of practices in teacher education across national boundaries in countries that serve large numbers of historically marginalized students—including the U.S., South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.  Her recent work focuses on the development of blended online professional development that prepares teachers to work with diverse student populations.

Josephine H. Pham, a San Francisco Bay Area native, is an assistant professor in the Secondary Education Department at California State University, Fullerton. She earned a BA in English Education at San Jose State University, an MA in Education at Stanford University, and a PhD in Urban Schooling at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where her dissertation received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and  Information Studies and from the American Education Research Association, Division K: Teaching and Teacher Education. Drawing on her relational experiences as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees, a former classroom teacher, and a teacher educator, her scholarship aims to uplift, sustain, and regenerate the invisibilized labor and heartwork of teachers of color by centering their multi-faceted resistance, radical joy, and critical ingenuity. Studying race, racial literacy, and racial formation processes through an interdisciplinary lens, Pham employs methodological tools from educational anthropology and learning sciences to analytically 1) challenge dominant ontologies of “leadership” that marginalize the counterhegemonic leadership that communities of color embody, and 2) amplify the daily basis through which socially conscious teachers of color grapple with context-specific reproductions of racially unjust schooling spaces, while learning to re-make meanings of race and place in solidarity with and among young people of color. Her emerging research has also been published in journals such as Teacher Education Quarterly and Journal of Learning Sciences.

Mentor: Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is an award-winning associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on racial literacy in teacher education, Black girl literacies, and Black and Latinx male high school students. A sought-after speaker on issues of race, culturally responsive pedagogy, and diversity, Sealey-Ruiz works with K-12 and higher education school communities to increase their racial literacy knowledge and move toward more equitable school experiences for their Black and Latinx students. Sealey-Ruiz appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright”, a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou. Yolanda’s first full-length book of poetry, Love from the Vortex & Other Poems (Kaleidoscope Vibrations LLC) was released in March 2020. Please visit her website at yolandasealeyruiz.com.

Shamari Reid often refers to himself as an ordinary Black Gay cisgender man from Oklahoma with extraordinary dreams. Currently, that dream involves completing his doctoral work at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the department of Curriculum and Teaching, where he focuses on urban education and teacher education. Before starting his doctoral program, Shamari completed a BA in Spanish Education at Oklahoma City University and an MA in Spanish and TESOL at New York University. He has taught Spanish and ESL at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels in Oklahoma, New York, Uruguay, and Spain. In addition, he has spent the last few years teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on Urban Education, Teaching Developmental Reading,  and Literacy, Language, and Culture at CUNY-Hunter College. His research interests include Black youth agency, advocacy, and activism and transformative teacher education. He is currently in the process of completing his dissertation on the agency of Black LGBTQ+ youth in New York City.  Oh, and he has a small addiction to chocolate chip cookies. You can engage more with him and his work on his website: shamarireid.com

Mentor: Gholnecsar Muhammad

Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy at Georgia State University. She also serves as the director of the GSU Urban Literacy Collaborative & Clinic. She studies Black historical excellence within educational communities with goals of reframing curriculum and instruction today. Dr. Muhammad’s scholarship has appeared in leading educational journals and books. Some of her recognitions include the 2014 recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English, Promising New Researcher Award, the 2016 NCTE Janet Emig Award, the 2017 GSU Urban Education Research Award and the 2018 UIC College of Education Researcher of the Year. She works with teachers and young people across the United States and South Africa in best practices in culturally responsive instruction. She is the author of the bestselling book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.

Cori Salmerón is an assistant professor of Literacy and (Bi)Literacy in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education at Georgia State University. She earned her PhD in the Language and Literacy Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. Before entering graduate school, she was an elementary school teacher for six years in New York City and Beirut, Lebanon. Her teaching and personal experiences led to her research focus on multilingual students’ language and literacy practices, how teachers draw on them as assets, and preparing teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse children. Her research provides insights into translanguaging both as a linguistic practice and as culturally sustaining pedagogy, and has been published in The Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Bilingual Research Journal, Multicultural Perspectives, ISTOR: Revista de Historia Internacional, and Literacy Research: Theory, Methods, and Practice.

Mentor: Eurydice Bauer

Stephanie R. Toliver is an assistant professor of Literacy and Secondary Humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She earned her PhD in Language and Literacy Education as well as a graduate certificate in diversity, equity, and inclusion from the University of Georgia, and was a 2019 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow. Informed by her love of science fiction and fantasy texts as well as her experience as a 9th and 10th grade English teacher, Toliver’s scholarship centers the freedom dreams of Black youth and honors the historical legacy that Black imaginations have had and will have on activism and social change. Specifically, she focuses on representations of and responses to Black youth in speculative fiction texts to discuss the implications of erasing Black children from futuristic and imaginative contexts and to assist teachers in imagining how classrooms can use speculative fiction as a means to center Black joy and Black dreams. Toliver’s current project stems from her dissertation, “Endarkened Dreams: A Speculative Counterstory from Black Girls’ Oral and Written Stories,” in which she uses a combination of womanism and muted group theory to better understand how Black girls might use Afrofuturistic short story writing to critique social injustice and position themselves as agents of social change. Her academic work has been published in several journals, including Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Journal of Children’s Literature, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and English Journal. Her public scholarship has been featured on LitHub, Huffpost, and the Horn Book.

Mentor: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she was a member of the NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color’s 2008-2010 cohort, served on the NCTE Conference on English Education’s Executive Committee from 2013 until 2017, and is the immediate past chair of the NCTE Standing Committee on Research. Currently, she serves as co-editor of Research of the Teaching of English. Her most recent book is The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019).

Francisco L. Torres is a Puerto Rican assistant professor of Language Arts and Literacy Education at Penn State Berks. He received his PhD in Literacy from the University of Colorado Boulder, his master’s degree in English Education from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, and his bachelor’s degree in English and History at the University of Connecticut Storrs campus. His research focuses on how children, especially Latinx children, take up and complicate the connection among social justice, popular culture, and current events that matter to them. At its core, Torres’s work is theoretically driven by critical theories of race, translanguaging, and revolutionary love. His most recent work engaged fifth-grade elementary students enrolled in a bilingual school in conversations of language, representation (race, class, gender, etc.) and advocacy. In this work, students created comics, newspapers, and poems arguing against issues of injustice that mattered to them, like monolingual ideologies at the school, LGBTQIA+ issues, and climate change. His work has appeared in English Journal, The ALAN Review, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, and the book Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom. He has been awarded the CU Elizabeth Anne Wilson Memorial Scholarship and the 2019 English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Geneva Smitherman Cultural Diversity Grant.

Mentor: Gerald Campano

Gerald Campano is Professor and Chair of the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. He was a school teacher for a decade. His scholarship focuses on immigrant families, critical literacy, and participatory methodologies in university-community partnerships. Gerald is a Carnegie Scholar and the recipient of the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from NCTE for his books Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering (2007) and Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through Literacy (2018). His last book also received the 2017 Edward Fry Award from the Literacy Research Association. Gerald has published in a range of venues, including Harvard Educational Review, Educational Leadership, Review of Research in Education, AERA-Open, and Research in the Teaching of English, an NCTE journal he now co-edits with Penn colleagues. His current research is being funded by a Research-Practice Partnership Grant from the Spencer Foundation. 

Qianqian Zhang-Wu is an assistant professor and director of Multilingual Writing in the Department of English, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern, she received her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the Lynch School of Education, Boston College, and her MS Ed in TESOL from the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Over the past 12 years, Zhang-Wu has taught young and adult learners in K–20 settings and community contexts nationally and internationally. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Zhang-Wu is passionate about multilingual writing, bilingualism/biliteracy, teacher education, and translanguaging pedagogy at the K–20 level. She is particularly interested in examining theories and practices that could advocate for students from culturally and linguistically minoritized backgrounds and support their linguistic functioning across academic and social settings. Her recent scholarship focuses especially on higher education contexts. Drawing upon her lived experiences as a multilingual and multiliterate individual, a first-generation immigrant woman of color, a life-long language learner, a nonnative English-speaking teacher, and a teacher educator, her work carries with it a strong social justice orientation. Zhang-Wu’s work has appeared in various edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Education, Journal of International Students, and Journal of Second Language Writing. Zhang-Wu is currently working on her new book under contract with Multilingual Matters, UK, on Chinese international students’ bilingual linguistic functioning during their first semester in an American university.

Mentor: Allison Skerrett

Allison Skerrett is Professor of language and literacy studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also Director of Teacher Education for the College of Education. Her research examines the language and literacy practices of diverse youths and conceptualizes how English education can honor and leverage those practices for promoting youths’ literacy development and fulfillment across school and outside-school contexts. A particular demographic of interest to Dr. Skerrett is transnational youth. Her book, Teaching Transnational Youth: Literacy and Education in a Changing World, (Teachers College Press, 2015) is the first to examine the educational resources and needs transnational youths present in English/literacy classrooms within and across nations. Dr. Skerrett also studies the preparation and development of urban English teachers across their preservice and in-service years. Her research has been published in journals such as American Educational Research Journal, Research in the Teaching of English, Reading Research Quarterly, and Journal of Literacy Research.