CNV Fellows and Mentors 2018-2020
Sara P. Alvarez is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). Alvarez’s qualitative research focuses on the multilingual and academic writing practices of self-outed undocumented young adults in the South and New York City. Her past research ethnographically examined the multilingual social media literacy practices among second-generation Latin@ youth and their transnational families in Kentucky. Alvarez is the winner of the 2017 Chairs’ Memorial Scholarship at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the 2015 Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). She is also co-recipient of the 2015 Research Initiative Award from CCCC. Her publications have appeared in the journals Equity and Excellence in Education and The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, among others.
Mentor: Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, and writer. She is an associate dean for Equity and Justice at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education. Her work addresses how narratives facilitate societal structures. With a background in sociology, she researches and teaches about education as a site of social reproduction and as a potential site for transformation. Prior to working in the academy, Patel was a journalist, a teacher, and a state-level policymaker.
Lucía Cárdenas Curiel is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual/Multilingual Education in the Teacher Education Department at Michigan State University. Curiel was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, where she earned a degree in Educational Sciences at Universidad de Monterrey and worked as an enrichment specialist at a bilingual school. She holds a master’s degree in Liberal Studies with a focus on Urban Education from the Graduate Center at City University of New York. Prior to her graduate studies, Curiel worked as a Spanish teacher at a private bilingual middle and high school in New York City. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education in the area of Bilingual/Bicultural education. Lucia was awarded first place by the National Association of Bilingual Education for her dissertation “Texturing with Multimodal Texts across Content Areas: a Translanguaging Multiliteracies Approach to Teaching and Learning.” She examines literacy practices that authentically engage culturally and linguistically diverse students in the classroom and support their academic success in schools. Her work explores the relationship between language, literacy, and the use of a variety of texts to understand how young learners—in particular Latina/o bilingual children—build knowledge in different subject areas. Curiel’s interests include using multicultural literature in the elementary classroom to discuss issues of social justice and identity development and studying language practices in community settings to introduce innovative pedagogical practices in the elementary classroom. She engages in preparing preservice and inservice teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse settings.
Mentor: Eurydice Bouchereau Bauer is the John E. Swearigen Chair of Education and Professor in the Department of Instruction and Teacher Education at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the literacy development, instruction, and assessment of students (preschool–grade 5) from diverse linguistic, economic, and cultural backgrounds, with a specific focus on bilingual literacy. In the last 10 years, Bauer has been co-principal investigator and a senior researcher on two US Department of Education grants. In addition, she has been the recipient of two Spencer Foundation grants. She has served on a number of national committees such as the National Research Agenda Planning Panel for ELL Students; NAEP Reading Framework Study Comparison Expert Panel; and the Spencer Foundation Special Panel on Reconceptualizing and Reducing Risk in Early Childhood Development. Since Spring 2016, her dual language research site became part of the NSF funded PIRE project situated at Penn State and University of California at Riverside. Starting in the fall of 2018 she will be the director of a chapter of Bilingualism Matters in connection with the University of Edinburgh. Bauer’s research has been published in The Journal of Literacy Research, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, International Journal of Bilingualism, and The Reading Teacher, among others.
Wintre Foxworth Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Reading/Writing/Literacy program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. While at the University of Pennsylvania, she has earned a graduate certificate in Africana Studies. Informed by her experiences in the classroom as an early childhood educator, Johnson’s developing scholarship seeks to honor the complex, emergent literate practices of young children. Her dissertation work, which was conducted at an urban independent, community school whose mission blends social justice curricula with the arts, documents those very practices. She examines—through a series of after-school literacy circles and parent, teacher, and principal interviews—five African American first-graders’ knowledge and interpretations of sociopolitical issues and conditions in and around their lives, the multiple influences upon which they draw, and the ways in which they demonstrate meaning-making through diverse literacy practices. This project intends to contribute knowledge both to the field of early literacy studies and to extant racial awareness research by illuminating the racialized knowing that young children are often assumed not to possess and the stories, experiences, and perspectives they offer when provided a space to express themselves.
Mentor: Sonja Lanehart is professor and Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and the Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is author of Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy (2002) and Ebonics (expected 2019); editor of Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English (2001), African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity (2009), and the Oxford Handbook of African American Language (2015); and former co-editor of Educational Researcher: Research News and Comment. Her research interests include African American Language, language and identity, sociolinguistics, and the educational implications and applications of sociolinguistic research using critical race theory and intersectionality.
Justin Grinage is a Postdoctoral Associate in Literacy Education within the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. He is a former English language arts teacher who has worked in multi-racial high school classrooms for eleven years. His scholarship is driven by the desire to assist both teachers and youth in understanding, contesting, and interrupting various forms of injustice. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to studying education, drawing from cultural studies and critical theory, Grinage’s research interests include critical literacy, race and education, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and critical whiteness studies. His current work stems from his dissertation “The Melancholy of Schooling: A Critical Ethnographic Study of Race, Trauma, and Learning in a High School English Classroom,” in which he uses the concept of racial melancholia to discern the mechanisms in which racial trauma influences teaching and learning. The implications of the study emphasize that teachers and students must learn to identify and work through unresolved racial grief if they are to improve their comprehension of race and engender anti-racist agency in the face of persistent systemic and individual acts of racial subjugation. The study underscores the generative and productive possibilities for designing curriculum and employing critical pedagogies that center on comprehending racial trauma to increase racial literacy.
Mentor: Anthony Brown is professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. His research agenda falls into two interconnected strands of research, related broadly to the education of African Americans. His first strand of research examines how educational stakeholders make sense of and respond to the educational needs of African American male students. The second strand examines how school curriculum depicts the historical experiences of African Americans in official school knowledge (e.g., standards and textbooks) and within popular discourse. Brown has published 28 journal articles, nine book chapters, one edited book and two full-length books. He is the recipient of numerous awards for research: Division G Outstanding Dissertation Award (AERA, 2008); Division G Early Career Award (AERA, 2011); Division K Mid-Career Award (AERA, 2018). In 2016, his book Black Intellectual Thought in Education was awarded the AERA Division B (Curriculum Studies) Outstanding Book Award. In 2017, he was awarded the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics’ Book Award for his co-authored book, Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of the U.S. Curriculum.
Davena Jackson is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Her current research focuses on critical examinations of racial literacy, Blackness, and anti-Blackness among teachers and students within teaching and English education. She seeks to work with and learn from educators who foster an environment that affirms students’ cultural identities, languages, and experiences. Her dissertation work is situated in a high school English classroom that provides opportunities for Black youth to construct images, write blogs and create digital stories, and so on. The purpose of this work is for Black youth to come to understand more deeply the implications of Blackness and anti-Blackness in their lives. Throughout her time at MSU, Jackson has strived in working with preservice teachers to accomplish a classroom environment where students have opportunities to engage in challenging concepts (e.g. race, racism, sexuality, ableism, sexism, etc.), so they can disrupt dominant notions about these topics. In 2017, she was awarded Michigan State University’s Excellence-In-Teaching Citation for her work as a graduate assistant. Finally, Jackson is a former middle and high school English teacher who has worked to ensure that justice, equity, and care are centered in students’ learning.
Mentor: Carmen Kynard is associate professor of English and Gender Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and associate professor of 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. Her first book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies won the 2015 James Britton Award and 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. Carmen traces her research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions.” (http://carmenkynard.org).
Lydiah Kiramba is an Assistant Professor in Educational Linguistics in the College of Education and Human Sciences (CEHS), Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education (TLTE) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on bilingual education and linguistic diversity, and second language acquisition and teacher education at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Kiramba’s recent research focused on how multilingual teachers and learners utilize their communicative repertoires under restrictive language policies to maximize meaning in classrooms. Her research provides new insights into the actual communicative practices, including how students demonstrate their knowledge of literacy through translanguaging practices and other multimodal literacies. Kiramba’s research illuminates multilingual literacies and resources in current world trends, as it increasingly becomes a necessity for multilingualism to be researched and addressed in schools as a potential tool for sustainable literacy development. Her ongoing research seeks to investigate home, school, and society intersections with a focus on emerging multilinguals (commonly known as English language learners—ELLs) of immigrant and refugee backgrounds in the US, with a goal of showcasing their multilingual competencies and contributing to educational discourses about immigrant, migrant, and multicultural populations. Her research has been published in several journals, including Language and Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, International Multilingual Research Journal, and Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
Mentor: Wan Shun Eva Lam is associate professor of Learning Sciences and affiliated faculty in Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She works at the intersection of literacy studies and applied linguistics in studying language use and learning, new literacies, language varieties, socialization practices, and political participation in new media environments. Her ethnographic work has explored the digital media practices of youth of migrant backgrounds to understand these practices within larger contexts of transnational movements, social networks and identities, and flows of media content and artifacts. With colleagues in education and journalism, she has engaged in design and research of multimedia storytelling and documentary making, particularly exploring how young people draw from diverse knowledge and representational resources in telling stories on migration. She has previously served as Associate Editor of AERA Open and Cognition and Instruction, and as area editor of the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics section on literacy. She is recipient of the Mid-Career Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Second Language Research SIG. She has recently completed a study of transnational media practices and literacies of Chinese and Mexican American youth that is supported by the National Science Foundation program in Science, Technology and Society.
Saba Khan Vlach is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. An elementary school teacher for 17 years, Vlach earned her Master’s at Texas Woman’s University in Reading Education and embarked on her journey as a critical educator. Vlach’s research interests include critical pedagogy, children’s literature, literature discussions, young children’s reader responses, and inservice teacher education. Her current work employs case study and discourse analysis methodologies in order to examine how three inservice elementary teachers enact critical pedagogy in the context of English language arts instruction with multicultural children’s literature, as well as how these teachers sustain and grow their stance as critical educators in and out of public school. Vlach’s work draws on the conceptual frameworks of Freire’s theory of critical literacy, Kumashiro’s theory of anti-oppressive education, and Brown’s theory of humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge. She looks forward to pursuing future endeavors that explore elementary teachers enacting critical pedagogy in predominantly White spaces, literacy lives of elementary Muslim students, as well as the use and creation of slam poetry with students in elementary school.
Mentor: Valerie Kinloch is the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the School of Education and Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her scholarship examines the literacies and community engagements of youth and adults inside and outside schools. Author of publications on race, place, literacy, and equity, her books include: Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan (2004), June Jordan: Her Life and Letters (2006), Harlem On Our Minds: Place, Race, and the Literacies of Urban Youth (2010), Urban Literacies: Critical Perspectives on Language, Learning, and Community (2011), Crossing Boundaries: Teaching and Learning with Urban Youth (2012), and Service-Learning in Literacy Education: Possibilities for Teaching and Learning (2015). In 2012, her book Harlem On Our Minds received the Outstanding Book of the Year Award from the American Educational Research Association, and in 2014, her book Crossing Boundaries: Teaching and Learning with Urban Youth was a staff pick for professional development by Teaching Tolerance magazine. Currently, she is completing articles and book projects on literacy, justice, race, engagement, and leadership. Among other awards, Kinloch is the recipient of the 2018 NCTE Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award and the 2018 NCTE Rewey Belle Inglis Award for Outstanding Women in English Education.
Kira LeeKeenan is currently a doctoral candidate of Language and Literacy Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Across the 2016–2017 school year, she conducted her dissertation research in four culturally and linguistically diverse high school classrooms, exploring writing groups as a potential space for humanizing and emancipatory learning. Attending to the varied environments that shape students’ learning, she explored how teachers design and enact instruction to support peer-to-peer talk in writing groups, as well as how students’ participation in writing groups promotes their identities, agency, and practices as writers over time. Drawing on theories of ecology (Barton, 2007; Syverson, 2008), critical theories of discourse and cultural models (Gee, 2015), and Bakhtin’s (2010) notion of dialogism, this year-long social-design study illuminated the ways that social identities develop within writing groups, and the ways in which language and power shape students’ writing development. Inspired by her years as a high school English teacher in Lawrence and Cambridge, Massachusetts, LeeKeenan’s research and scholarship considers teachers’ understanding and practice of critical and humanizing pedagogies and students’ complex identity development and learning as readers and writers. Her work has been published in Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy and Journal of Literacy Research. She holds a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts and an Ed.M in Instructional Leadership from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Mentor: Sarah Warshauer Freedman is a Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was founding director of the Multicultural Urban Secondary English Credential/MA program and for 10 years directed the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy. Her research focuses on how secondary students learn to write, with special attention to students served least well by the schools. Most recently, she has examined the role of the schools in helping youth navigate societal divisions as they develop as citizens, comparing the struggles youth face on varied sides of the societal divides in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the US. Freedman is member of the National Academy of Education and is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.
María Leija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bilingual and Literacy Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Leija earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a former elementary teacher who taught for six years in Idaho. During that time, she helped develop and implement an 80/20 two-way bilingual immersion program, was a Spanish dual language teacher, and taught in the mainstream class while supporting the academic language development of her emerging bilingual students. Her dissertation explored how a bilingual teacher incorporated Latinx students’ linguistic, cultural, and experiential knowledge through interactive read alouds. The dissertation highlights the importance of providing bilingual students a space to discuss complex issues, such as immigration, language ideologies, and cultural practices through children’s literature. Her research focuses on elementary Latinx preservice and in-service teachers’ pedagogical practices in Spanish/English bilingual classrooms. Leija utilizes Latino critical race theory to examine classroom discourse and pedagogical practices. She has examined and published on the use of children’s literature for teaching the social studies and language arts by analyzing themes such as immigration, gender, and Latinx community cultural practices.
Mentor: Laura Alamillo, a proud former CNV scholar, is a researcher in the area of language and literacy, specifically looking at additive approaches in multilingual classrooms. She is the Interim Dean of the Kremen School of Education and Human Development and the Executive Director for Programs for Children at California State University, Fresno. In addition to these roles, Alamillo recently published a co-edited book, Voices of Resistance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chican@ Children’s Literature, published in 2018 by Rowman and Littlefield. In addition to these roles, Alamillo is a proud mother of three children, all of whom attend dual-language (Spanish-English) immersion programs.
Teaira McMurtry is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy at Cardinal Stritch University (Milwaukee, WI) and currently designs and facilitates professional development for teachers and instructional leaders in the areas of adolescent literacy and culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogical practices at Milwaukee Public Schools. Her dissertation study, “Leveling the Linguistic Landscape: A Formative, Sociolinguistically Informed Professional Learning Series for Teachers of African American Adolescents,” aimed to actuate authentic social wellness and true academic success of African American students by focusing on teachers’ awareness of and appreciation for the linguistic dexterity of African American language. Situated at the intersection of sociocultural, sociohistorical, and critical (i.e., Paulo Freire) theories about language, teaching, and learning, this formative design and experiment, in part, sought to examine teachers’ stated and tacit beliefs and attitudes about the language and literacy practices of African American students by employing critical ethnographic methods to meaningful segments of her participants’ verbal and written discourse. Out of the recent research endeavor emerged deeper inquisitions about the multiplex realities (and promises) of the teaching/learning landscape in an ever-evolving, increasingly pluralistic society that is deeply entrenched in a tradition of standardization and cultural reproduction. Select activities from McMurtry’s study will be featured in a chapter she co-authored for the forthcoming (2019) book, Teaching Language Variation in the Classroom: Strategies and Models from Teachers and Linguists (Eds. Michelle Devereaux and Chris Palmer).
Mentor: Arnetha F. Ball is the Charles E. Ducommun Endowed Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University in the Curriculum Studies, Teacher Education, and Race, Inequality and Language programs. She currently serves as chair of the Race, Inequality and Language program and is co-director of Stanford’s Center for Race, Ethnicity and Language, past director of the program in African and African American studies, 2011–2012 president of the American Educational Research Association, and the past US representative to the World Educational Research Association. A sociocultural theorist, her areas of specialization include language and literacy studies, research on writing and linguistics, and teacher professional development.
Joaquin Muñoz is currently an assistant professor at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he teaches in the Elementary Education department, focusing on diversity, American Indian history and culture, and literacy studies. His current research centers on the Civic Literacy Service Learning Project (CLSLP) which seeks to provide a field experience for teacher-candidates that emphasizes deep, meaningful collaboration. In the project, we create a learning community between teacher-candidates, university professors, elementary school faculty, and fifth-grade students. Instead of just observing, teacher-candidates work directly with students, receive close and intensive mentoring and support from university faculty, and engage in planning sessions with other teacher-candidates and classroom teachers from the cooperating school. Muñoz’s research for CNV will examine various aspects of the impact and efficacy of this program for teacher-candidates and collaborating faculty. He grew up on the Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation in southern Arizona, where he specialized in searching the surrounding deserts for snakes and lizards. He attended public schools around the reservation and found an early calling to teaching by asking his first-grade teacher if he could make presentations to the class. Eventually, Muñoz came into his own teaching career, first as a middle school literacy teacher in a predominantly Puerto Rican school in Philadelphia, and then at the community college he attended as student. He studied at the University of Arizona, where he earned a Master’s and Doctorate in the Language, Reading and Culture program, focusing on Critical Pedagogy, Indigenous Education, Waldorf Schooling, and humanizing pedagogy.
Mentor: María E. Fránquiz is a professor in the Department of Education, Culture and Society and Deputy Chief Academic Officer for Faculty Development at the University of Utah. Previously she served on the faculty at CU–Boulder, University of Texas–San Antonio, and the University of Texas–Austin. Her research interests are in bilingual/multicultural education and in language/literacy studies. In her work she examines the intersectionality of languages and identities in discourse between children and adults or among children both in and out of classroom settings. She has co-edited a book with Norma Cantú, Inside the Latin@ Experience: A Latin@ Reader, that showcases the research and literary works of Latin@ scholars, both senior and early career. Another co-edited book with Cinthia Salinas, Scholars in the Field: The Challenges of Migrant Education, is comprehensive in its coverage of this underserved group. Her publications appear in national professional journals including Language Arts, Journal of Latinos and Education, English Leadership Quarterly, Multicultural Perspectives, California English, The High School Journal, Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Classroom Interaction, TESOL Quarterly, among others. As a consultant of the National Writing Project she has examined which identities children background or foreground in their writings and helped establish the MayaWest Writing Project in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Since 2008 she has been co-editor of the Bilingual Research Journal.
Arturo Nevárez is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside, in the Education, Society and Culture program, and was previously a middle school and high school English teacher in South Central Los Angeles and Hawthorne, California. Arturo’s dissertation focuses on the schooling experiences and critical literacies of Latinx/Chicanx youth in secondary Ethnic Studies classrooms. His research seeks to understand the roles of Ethnic Studies content and teacher pedagogy in preparing Latinx youth to critically navigate, process and confront the increasingly anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx political climate. Informed by critical race theory, Latinx critical race theory and decolonial frameworks, Nevárez examines how Ethnic Studies classrooms and Ethnic Studies teacher pedagogy contributes to the development, sustenance, and extension of Latinx/Chicanx youth’s racial literacy across two factors: a) students’ structural analysis of racism, and b) students’ abilities to connect that analysis to social action. Nevárez’s hope is to effect change at the student-learning, teacher training, and policy levels to help maintain the emancipatory potential of critical Ethnic Studies approaches for Latinx/Chicanx youth in US schools.
Mentor: Korina Jocson (Ph.D.) is an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Central to her work are arts-informed sociocultural approaches that examine literacies, pedagogies, and issues of equity among historically marginalized youth. She is the author of Youth Media Matters: Participatory Cultures and Literacies in Education (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Youth Poets: Empowering Literacies in and Out of Schools (Peter Lang, 2008), and also the editor of Cultural Transformations: Youth and Pedagogies of Possibility (Harvard Education Press, 2013). Other publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Curriculum Inquiry, Teachers College Record, Daedalus, English Education, and Urban Education; her work has also been included in a number of anthologies and edited books. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief of Equity and Excellence in Education. She received her PhD in Education in the area of language, literacy, and culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stanford University School of Education.
Tiffany M. Nyachae is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary Education, Literacy, and Educational Leadership at Buffalo State College (SUNY) where she teaches literacy, social studies, and social foundations courses. She earned her PhD in Reading Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and the Sciences of Learning at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). At the heart of her research agenda is, has been, and will be improving the educational experiences of students of color. This agenda is evident in her dissertation research on supporting the racial literacy, social justice ideological becoming, and classroom practice of urban teachers committed to social justice through “race space” critical professional development. As a former middle school teacher of urban Black youth, Nyachae is interested in the continuous transparent and reflective work that is required from those who claim to center social justice in their instruction and research. Thus, in addition to her dissertation research, she facilitates social justice-motivated literacy workshops and programming for youth of color broadly—and for Black girls specifically at times—interrogating the degree to which these spaces are liberatory in actuality. Nyachae finds her greatest joy in learning with and from young people. Finally, she also volunteers her service to various community and professional organizations and is published in Gender and Education and Qualitative Inquiry.
Mentor: Keffrelyn D. Brown (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is professor of Cultural Studies in Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds appointments in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for Women and Gender Studies. She is the co-founder and co-director (with Anthony Brown) of the Center for Innovation in Race, Teaching, and Curriculum.
Ah-Young Song is a doctoral candidate in the English Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research explores ways in which young women and nonbinary students engage with multiliteracies and world-building in out-of-school spaces. She is particularly indebted to critical theorists and post-qualitative thinkers whose visions for an ongoing liberatory praxis guide her work. Her research interests include multimodal learning, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and sociocultural studies. She has taught high school English in Massachusetts, South Korea, New Hampshire, and Taiwan, and she has served as a teaching assistant at Barnard College in New York City.
Mentor: Allison Skerrett is associate professor of language and literacy studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. 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 inservice 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.