welcome!

Thanks very much for visiting my website. I am a professor of education at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development and chair of the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society department. Before earning a doctorate and joining BC, I had multiple roles supporting the education of multilingual learners. I was a 3rd and 4th grade dual language bilingual teacher (Spanish and English), a bilingual resource teacher (K-12), an education specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and a research scientist for CAST.

As a Spanish-English bilingual and biliterate educational researcher, I am focused on three broad areas: 1) How language and literacy develop among bilingual learners; 2) What goes on in classrooms where multiple languages are spoken; and 3) Designing and evaluating instructional frameworks that support teachers to recognize and include the languages and lived experiences of their students. To those ends, I have a number of ongoing projects. Click on the headers of each for more detailed overviews. But before you do that...see below for information on my new book!

Check out the new book!

Pursuing Language was a true labor of love. In the first four chapters, Renata Love Jones and I describe the theory and research that resulted in an instructional framework we call critical metalinguistic engagement. In the following chapters, teams of educational researchers provide their own theoretical and empirical interpretations of critical metalinguistic engagement across the K-12 spectrum. We wrote this book for pre- and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers. The beautiful cover art is an oil painting by Christian Faltis. 

current research projects

Bilingual Teacher Education

For the past 7 years, Boston College has been partnering with school districts around the state (including Boston, Chelsea, Lynn, Salem, Springfield, and Worcester) to provide coursework leading to state bilingual education endorsement. Research from these efforts includes explorations of teachers as policymakers as well as how teachers make sense of the complexities of bilingualism and bilingual education relative to their own practice.

Exploring how grouping affects literacy 

In a collaboration with Michael Kieffer and Elise Capella at New York University, and with funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (2020 - 2025), we explored whether small group literacy instruction is more effective when emergent bilingual 4th and 5th graders are grouped homogeneously or heterogeneously with monolingual English speaking peers. Our findings from this work will be published in the American Educational Research Journal later in 2025.

Scaling up the claves curriculum

Rebecca Silverman at Stanford University and I are continuing our decade-long partnership developing CLAVES, a language-based literacy curriculum and a broad program of research dedicated to promoting multilingual literacy instruction. With funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (2020 - 2025), we put CLAVES in the hands of dozens of teachers in Northern California in an effort to test the efficacy CLAVES in a large scale implementation. Results are forthcoming.

​CRITICAL METALINGUISTIC ENGAGEMENT

In collaboration with the Chelsea, MA Public Schools, I am working with bilingual teachers to explore the application of Critical Metalinguistic Engagement to promote student talk, build metalinguistic awareness, and cultivate students' dynamic idiolects. School-based, K-12 Practitioner Working Groups are documenting and inquiring into instruction that promotes students' literacy achievement and linguistic identities. Mixed methods characterize the data collection and analytic process.