Education
- PhD University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2015
- MA University of Colorado, Boulder 2000
- BFA University of Colorado, Boulder 1994
Professional Roles
- Special Instructor, Department of Teaching & Learning, Oakland University, Rochester Hills, MI, USA
- Executive Director of Teaching & Learning, Summers-Knoll School, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
- Assistant Professor, Teacher Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
- Research Assistant, Language & Meaning Project, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
- Grade 4 Classroom Teacher, Mount Madonna School, Watsonville, CA, USA
- Grades 3 – 5 Classroom Teacher, Harrington Elementary, Denver, CO, USA
Scholarly Expertise
My teaching and research focus on teachers’ instructional practices that support literacy and language development for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Having been an elementary classroom teacher for 10 years, I am committed to keeping my research responsive to the daily work of teachers and students through building long-term, mutualistic, research-practice partnerships. Additionally, with my background in yoga, my work also involves collaborating with teams of teachers and community-based organizations to create cultures of mindfulness within schools. I can provide professional development on and speak to the following:
- Literacy and Language Instruction
- Asset-Based Instruction with Immigrant-Origin Youth
- A Linguistic Orientation to Meaning-Making Across Content Areas
- Arts-Based and Design-Based Research
- Pre-Service Elementary Literacy Teacher Preparation
- Creating Cultures of Mindfulness in Schools
Research Projects
- The Stories Project was an arts-based, educational research project created in partnership with the Refugee Development Center and a team of artists and fellow researchers. The Stories Project film is both a scholarly product and a work of art intended for use by educators to inspire and generate timely, social justice-oriented conversations that dismantle negative stereotypes about (im)migrants and refugees and why they migrate to and (re)settle in the United States.
- Linguistically Responsive Instruction for Immigrant & Refugee Youth: Critical Professional Development, July 2018 – This two-week summer workshop for K-12 teachers focused on how to facilitate emergent bilinguals’ reading comprehension and meaning-making through discussions of informational texts in content area classrooms. Teachers spent each morning observing two reading classes as I facilitated middle and high school (im)migrant-origin youth’s reading comprehension. After lunch, we spent the afternoon exploring the principles of linguistically responsive instruction and how to translate them into practice to ensure (im)migrant-origin students have rich, meaningful learning experiences that support their content-area learning. Michigan K-12 teachers earned 46 SCECHs for attending.
- Co-Constructing a Teaching Toolkit for ESOL Instructors – Building upon the previous RDC project (below), the purpose of this work was to further the development of our research-practice partnership with the Refugee Development Center (RDC). Dr. Peter De Costa in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, Christina Ponzio (CITE), Yue Bian (CITE), and I collaborated with the RDC director and the RDC senior school liaison to design and facilitate a series of professional development sessions to support the RDC teachers’ development of research-based instructional practices that can improve language learning opportunities for newcomers (recently arrived immigrants and refugees) in community-based ESOL classes (English for Speakers of Other Languages). This work is being supported by a grant from Michigan State University’s Diversity Network Research Launch Awards Program (LAP).
- Developing Local Literacies with Middle and High School Refugee Youth – Supported by an AERA Education Research Service Project award, this is a design-based research project conducted in partnership with the Refugee Development Center (RDC), a local nonprofit organization that provides educational support services for immigrant and refugee newcomers in our area. Through the iterative design of an asset inventory, we sought to identify the organization’s goals and visions for their summer camp, which serves 60 – 90 middle and high school refugee youth each year. The program’s asset-based orientation to youth’s diverse languages, religions, and cultural practices provides myriad opportunities to develop language, make new friends, and become acquainted with the community.
- Site-Based Versus University-Based Literacy Methods Courses: What Matters Most? – This study speaks to the rigor and relevancy of the pedagogy in clinical partnership settings. Although site-based courses are assumed to be better than university-based courses, there are few empirical studies to date that have investigated whether or not site-based courses truly are more beneficial and if so, in what ways and why. To redress this gap, we compare and contrast the perspectives of undergraduate, pre-service teachers enrolled in two sections of an elementary literacy methods course: one held onsite at an elementary school and the other held at the university.
- Pre-Service Teachers’ Views on Language and Language Learners – In this study, we examine how pre-service teachers’ perspectives on language and language learners evolve during a semester-long course on English language teaching, translanguaging, and assessment. The pre-service teachers enrolled in this course are pursuing a minor in TESOL and a TESOL endorsement in addition to their degree in education and elementary teaching licensure.
- Investigating Functional Grammar Analysis as an Instructional Tool for Meaning-Making with Fourth-Grade English Learners – This embedded case study investigates one fourth-grade teacher’s year-long enactment of a curriculum designed to support emergent bilinguals’ meaning-making with a functional grammar approach. Stemming from Systemic Functional Linguistics theory, functional grammar analysis is a technique that may support teachers in bringing, what I refer to as, a linguistic orientation to meaning-making with text to help make the language often found in academic texts more explicit and accessible for emergent bilinguals. This study demonstrates how functional grammar analysis provides a metalanguage with which teachers can facilitate discussions about key ideas that are central to the meanings in text. Through iterative readings of select text excerpts and visual representations of students’ emergent understandings, teachers can scaffold the analysis of word meanings and clauses to help students build causal relations while reading narrative texts and logical/referential relations while reading informational science texts.
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