March 3, 2023 - Literacy Research Association

2022 Ethnicity, Race and Multilingualism Committee Travel Award Winner – Phylicia Anderson

Posted on March 3, 2023April 12, 2023 by Jodi Metzgar

The Ethnicity, Race and Multilingualism Committee (ERM) is committed to supporting and promoting the work of scholars from diverse backgrounds. This year, the ERM awarded four doctoral student or early career scholars of color the ERM Travel Award.

Read more about one of our award winners below.

Phylicia Anderson

Phyliciá Anderson is a doctoral candidate, adjunct professor, and in the first cohort of the AACTE Holmes Scholars program at Texas Woman’s University to support women of color in pursuing higher education. Her latest publications include a chapter in the book “Engage and Empower: Expanding the Curriculum for Justice and Activism” titled “Cultural (mis)representations in the media: Challenging hegemonic ideas,” a journal article published in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education titled “Language, literacy, and love: A critical framework for teaching adolescent emergent bilinguals,” and a chapter in the book “Leveraging Languages, Literacies, and Cultures: Innovative Approaches for Teaching Multilingual Students” titled “BookSnaps: Reading and analyzing young adult novels across languages.” which is scheduled to be released December 2022.

She has also presented at national and international conferences including the bi-annual European Conference on Literacy in Dublin, Ireland, the Puerto Rico Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages annual conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the World Education Research Association annual conference in Galicia, Spain, and the American Educational Research Association annual conference in San Diego, California.

Phyliciá’s research explores the ways in which multilingual adolescents use and understand language. She positions criticality in education to counter the hegemonic ideas often perpetuated through traditional, monolingual forms of education. Her recent project investigated the instructional implications of bi/multilingual adolescence reading and writing using another language in a classroom setting which included Spanish, Italian, French, and Black language to name a few. Through this and other research projects she contributes to the dialogue around ethnicity, race, and multilingualism by offering various perspectives of what it means to be bi/multilingual and how these abilities can be leveraged in pedagogical practices.

2022 Ethnicity, Race and Multilingualism Committee Travel Award Winner – Mariana Lima Becker

Posted on March 3, 2023March 3, 2023 by Ian O'Byrne

Read more about one of our award winners below.

Mariana Lima Becker

Mariana Lima Becker is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum & Instruction at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. Before starting her doctoral studies, Mariana was an English as a Foreign Language teacher at schools and several language institutes in her hometown of Recife, Brazil. She is also a licensed English as a Second Language teacher in the U.S. state of Massachusetts.

Her research explores the intersection of bilingual education for language-minoritized students, language and literacy studies, and im/migration. Co-advised by Dr. Jon M. Wargo (Boston College) and Dr. Gabrielle Oliveira (Harvard University), her dissertation examines the experiences of education and literacy practices of Brazilian immigrant children across their homes and classrooms in a dual language bilingual education program (Portuguese-English) in Massachusetts. She is a 2022 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow and has published research reports in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Childhood, and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

Mariana’s research critically considers how U.S. public schools respond to increased waves of migrants from non-dominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In a recent research project, for example, she explored how young children of Brazilian descent constructed ideas about and avenues of belonging in their K-1 U.S. bilingual classrooms through their language and literacy practices. Additionally, Mariana’s scholarship approaches how transnational communication has been leveraged by im/migrant children and their families to create spaces for the maintenance of kinship ties, affinity, and collaboration, affording key opportunities for language and literacy learning. Mariana’s scholarly work contributes to current dialogues around ethnicity, race, and multilingualism by assembling holistic portraits and understandings of immigrant childhoods as well as the educational trajectories of Portuguese-speaking Latinx populations. Her scholarship also offers insights into how pre-service and in-service educators can prepare to meet not only the academic needs of culturally and linguistically diverse children but also promote well-being, critical consciousness, and robust bi/multilingual identities.

A pesquisa de Mariana considera criticamente como as escolas públicas dos EUA respondem ao influxo de populações migrantes advindas de contextos culturais e linguísticos não-dominantes. Em um projeto de pesquisa recente, por exemplo, ela explorou como um grupo de crianças de ascendência brasileira construíram ideias e formas de pertencimento em suas salas de aula (alfabetização e primeiro ano do ensino fundamental) nos Estados Unidos por meio de suas práticas de linguagem e letramento. Além disso, Mariana aborda como a comunicação transnacional tem sido utilizada por crianças imigrantes e suas famílias para criar espaços para a manutenção de laços familiares, afinidade e colaboração, proporcionando oportunidades importantes para o aprendizado de língua(s) e letramento(s). O trabalho acadêmico de Mariana contribui para os diálogos atuais sobre etnia, raça e multilinguismo por gerar retratos holísticos das infâncias imigrantes, bem como das trajetórias educacionais de populações latinas de língua portuguesa. Sua pesquisa também oferece insights sobre como educadores podem se preparar para atender não apenas às necessidades acadêmicas de crianças imigrantes, mas também promover seu bem-estar, consciência crítica e identidades bi/multilíngues robustas.

Cover Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

2022 Ethnicity, Race and Multilingualism Committee Travel Award Winner – Chaehyun Lee

Posted on March 3, 2023March 3, 2023 by Ian O'Byrne

Read more about one of our award winners below.

Chaehyun Lee

Dr. Chaehyun Lee is Assistant Professor in Elementary and ESL/Bilingual Education in Educational Instruction and Leadership at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. She earned her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Elementary Literacy and Bilingual Education from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

She teaches undergraduate courses on teaching reading and writing, language arts, and social studies for elementary/middle-school pre-service teachers. She teaches graduate courses in English as a Second Language (ESL) and Bilingual Education for in-service teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse students. Dr. Lee also works with emergent bilingual students as a Korean heritage language teacher at a local elementary Korean language school. Her research interests include bilingualism, biliteracy development, heritage language learning, multicultural education, and teacher education.

Dr. Lee’s research advances the field of multilingual/multicultural education. Dr. Lee’s recent study demonstrated how multilingual and transnational individuals build, construct, and negotiate their hybrid, sophisticated, and multifaceted social and cultural identities through translanguaging and translingual practices as they reflect their funds of knowledge, ideologies, and social/cultural practices. Her work assists teachers in culturally and linguistically diverse classroom settings to value the presence of students’ culture and language abilities and to enhance their educational experiences. Her overall research supports educators becoming well-versed and trained in inspiring multilingual students to reflect on their unique life experiences and multiple identity construction through transnational positioning and translingual writing. Her findings further provide teaching implications for transnational families to better support their children’s language learning, literacy development, and multifarious identity construction.

이교수의 연구는 다언어 및 다문화 교육 발전에 이바지 하고 있다. 이교수의 최근 연구는 다언어를 사용하는 학생들의 탈언어 사용 및 연습을 통하여 어떻게 학생들이 자신의 복합적이고 다면적인 정체성을 형성하고 타협하는지를 보여주었다. 연구 결과는 문화적으로 언어적으로 다양한 교실에서 학생들을 가르치는 교사들에게, 학생들의 언어와 문화의 다양성을 존중하고 그들의 포괄적인 경험을 포용할 것을 권장 한다. 이교수의 전반적인 연구는 학생들의 복합적이고 다면적이지만, 특별하고 고유의 정체성 형성과 문식성 발달을 위하여 숙련된 교사들의 필요성과 가족들의 지지의 중요성을 시사한다.

Cover Photo by John Schaidler on Unsplash

2022 Ethnicity, Race and Multilingualism Committee Travel Award Winner – Andrew del Calvo

Posted on March 3, 2023March 3, 2023 by Ian O'Byrne

Read more about one of our award winners below.

Andrew del Calvo

Andrew del Calvo is a third-year Ph.D student in Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and a National Board Certified Social Studies Teacher. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws from history education, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and critical social justice studies in education, Andrew’s work seeks to create a bridge between historical thinking and students’ lived experiences and identities, through curriculum design and teacher education.

Andrew’s current projects include developing dialogic reading and writing interventions for history specific writing conferences, designing professional development to support teachers in enacting culturally sustaining pedagogies around historical writing instruction, and designing and enacting a model for teacher education that centers high school student voices.

Previously, Andrew was a ninth and tenth grade social studies teacher and department chair at Harvest Collegiate High School, a public high school in Lower Manhattan. Prior to this he taught history, civics and economics in the Bronx. He has also served as an adjunct lecturer at The City College of New York, and led professional development in the New York metro area and nationally.

The two projects that I presented at LRA speak to the ways that my work challenges normative discourses around writing instruction in social studies classrooms, and teacher education. In my in-process practitioner research study, my co-researcher and I explore the ways in which “language policing” – when the pre-service teachers (PSTs) that we work with understand their job to be upholding normative racialized language practices – infiltrates how they conceptualize and teach writing to students. While many PSTs want to attend to race, identity, and power in their teaching, they often struggle to see the ways that what Baker-Bell calls, “white language supremacy,” functions in their student teaching placements. Drawing from Patel’s work around “pausing,” we had teachers critically reflect on the theories of language that guided the instructional choices they made around the teaching of writing, finding that this form of anticolonial reflection can destabilize PSTs’ internalized ideologies connected to language policing, and promote more critical awareness of language.

My work with another collaborator illustrates how high school students can give feedback to PSTs’ on their facilitation of social studies discussions. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore the qualities and social languages in their feedback, surfacing the ways in which it is qualitatively different from feedback PSTs would traditionally receive from teacher educators, instructional coaches, or classroom mentors. In short, a large part of my work centers on bringing a critical perspective on language to both social studies education and teacher education, to highlight the power of student voice.