My Path
First classroom, first Words |
I grew up in the foothills of the mountains on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. I wanted to teach since I could talk, and was always fascinated teaching and the incredible--and I later recognized, problematic--power my teachers seemed to hold in the classroom.
In my community, people spoke many different kinds of English, as well as Chinese, Hebrew, and Makah, Clallam, and a number of other First Nations languages. I've loved language and been fascinated by it for as long as I remember. |
Power, privilege, language. |
I attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. I studied sociology and creative writing. I started to recognize both my own privilege as a White person with familial knowledge of college education, and the ways in which I was marginalized as a woman and a person from a working-class background. I realized my English wasn't always good enough for my classes. |
During this time, I met the person who made me become passionate about education. Jack was 10 at the time and I was his tutor. He helped me to see that inside of each person are untold stories waiting to be understood, and that every student is ready to learn and to be taught.
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Teaching Language, Learning Language |
Language and Comprehension |
I taught in a school for students who struggle with speech and language but who have average or above average IQ. As I considered the way I collaborated with my students on text comprehension in reading, writing, social studies, and math, I was inspired by the work of Maren Aukerman, who helped me to think about student language and understanding in new ways. |
Language in the Classroom |
During this time, I also worked with Domincan and Puerto Rican multilingual students and students who spoke varieties of Carribbean American English and African American English as the educational leader of an after school math program. I became more aware of the relationship between language and power in schools, and I wanted to question this relationship further.
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At Stanford, I became interested in the social psychological work of Stanford professors in the field of social belonging, including the scaling up of a belonging intervention for College Students via the College Transition Collaborative. Through this team, I became a part of two other academic teams pursuing work with students, including Race Rangers (a team of 5 women pursuing work on intergroup interactions and race on college campuses) and Lingua Eius (a team I lead working on examining language as an under explored dimension of belonging). More collaborations followed with colleagues at Stanford and across universities. I now belong to 6 collaborative research teams.
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Linguistic Belonging
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My research and teaching work center on pre- and in-service teachers. I continue to study linguistic belonging-- the way students seem themselves as valued (or not) based on interactions with teachers about their language use. |