NEPC Topic Experts on Language Policy

Leonard Baca is professor emeritus of education and former director of the BUENO Center for Multicultural Education (www.colorado.edu/education/BUENO) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Baca is a member of several professional organizations including the National Association of Bilingual Education, Teachers of English as a Second Language, the Council for Exceptional Children, the National Association for Multicultural Education and the American Educational Research Association. He served on the editorial boards of several journals including the Bilingual Research Journal, Multicultural Perspectives, and Remedial and Special Education.

Email Leonard Baca at: leonard.baca@colorado.edu

E-mail Antonia Darder at antonia.darder@lmu.edu

Kathy Escamilla is a Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Escamilla's research centers on educational issues related to Spanish-speaking language minority students in U.S. schools. She is specifically interested in issues related to the development of bilingualism and biliteracy in early elementary grades for this Spanish speaking population. Dr. Escamilla has served two terms as the president of the National Association for Bilingual Education. She is a co-editor of the Bilingual Research Journal, and has served as the chair of the Bilingual SIG for the American Education Research Association.

Email Kathy Escamilla at: kathy.escamilla@colorado.edu

Dr. Mileidis Gort is Associate Dean of Students and Professor of Bilingual Education and Biliteracy at CU Boulder. She brings an interdisciplinary orientation to her research and teaching. Her primary research efforts focus on emergent bilingualism and biliteracy in early childhood, and to bring that knowledge to pre K-12 teacher education and practice in order to create culturally- and linguistically-responsive learning contexts for emergent bilingual learners. Her scholarship converges at two interrelated lines of research: (a) the language and literacy processes of young, Spanish-English emergent bilingual children, and (b) instructional practices and educational policies that support the dual language, biliteracy, and academic development of emergent bilingual children.

Email Mileidis Gort at: mileidis.gort@colorado.edu

Kris D. Gutiérrez is Professor of Language, Literacy and Culture. She was most recently a professor of Learning Sciences/Literacy and the Inaugural Provost’s Chair, University of Colorado, Boulder and Professor Emerita of Social Research Methodology at GSE&IS at UCLA. Professor Gutiérrez is a national leader in education, with an emphasis in literacy, learning sciences, and interpretive and design-based approaches to inquiry. Gutiérrez is a member of the National Academy of Education and is the Past President of the American Educational Research Association and the National Conference on Research on Language and Literacy. Gutiérrez was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a member of the National Board for the Institute of Education Sciences where she served as Vice Chair.

Her research examines learning in designed learning environments, with attention to students from non-dominant communities and English Learners. Her work on Third Spaces examines the affordances of hybrid and syncretic approaches to literacy, new media literacies, and STEM learning and the re-mediation of functional systems of learning. Her work in social design experiments seeks to leverage students’ everyday concepts and practices to ratchet up expansive forms of learning. Professor Gutiérrez's research has been published widely in premier academic journals and is a co-author of Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory.

Gutiérrez has received numerous awards for her empirical work, including the 2014, Distinguished Contributions to Social Contexts in Education Research – Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2014 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education, (Division G, AERA), the 2005 AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award for influencing the field of learning and instruction. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, an AERA and NEPC Fellow, and an Osher Fellow, Exploratorium Museum of Science. Gutierrez received the AERA Hispanic Research in Elementary, Secondary, or Postsecondary Education Award and the Inaugural Award for Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education, Division K (AERA). She served on the U.S. Department of Education Reading First Advisory Committee and a member of President Obama’s Education Policy Transition Team. Professor Gutiérrez was also identified as one of the 2009 Top 100 influential Hispanics.

Email Kris Gutiérrez at: gutierrkd@berkeley.edu

Dr. Francesca López is the Jim and Georgia Thompson Distinguished Professor of Education in the Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison . She began her career in education as a bilingual (Spanish/English) elementary teacher, and later as a high school counselor, in El Paso, Texas. López is an AERA and APA Division 15 Fellow. Her research is focused on educator knowledge and behaviors that promote achievement and identity outcomes for marginalized youth in various educational settings. 

Email Francesca López at: flopez5@wisc.edu

Jeff MacSwan is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the University of Maryland. He is also Professor of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and affiliate Professor in the Department of Linguistics. His research program focuses on the linguistic study of codeswitching, translanguaging theory, on the role of language in the education of multilingual students, and education policy. His work has appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Lingua, the Bilingual Research Journal, World Englishes, and Language Teaching Research, among others. He served on the Committee on Fostering the Development and Educational Success of Dual Language Learners of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. MacSwan is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and the 2021 recipient of the AERA Bilingual Education Research SIG Lifetime Achievement Award and the Second Language Research SIG Leadership through Research Award. MacSwan previously taught linguistically diverse middle and high school students in Los Angeles public schools.

Email Jeff MacSwan at: macswan@umd.edu

Dr. Elizabeth Birr Moje is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Education, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan. She is also a faculty associate in the Institute for Social Research and in the Latino/a Studies program. Moje began her career teaching history, biology, and drama at high schools in Colorado and Michigan. In her current research and community engagement work, Moje uses an array of methods to study and support young people’s literacy learning in Detroit, Michigan. She is particularly interested in the intersections between disciplinary literacies of school and the literacy practices of youth outside of school studies how youth draw from home, community, ethnic, popular, and school cultures to make cultures and to enact identities. In related work focused on teacher learning, Moje developed and co-directs Teaching and Learning the Disciplines through Clinical Practice Rounds, with colleagues Robert Bain and Emily Rainey. The Rounds Project advances discipline-based literacy teacher education and was awarded the provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize at the University of Michigan in 2010. Moje is a member of the National Academy of Education and serves as AERA vice president for Division G (research on the social contexts of education).

Email Elizabeth Moje at: moje@umich.edu

Deborah Palmer is a Professor in the program in Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder.. A former two-way dual language bilingual teacher in California, she conducts qualitative research using ethnography and discourse analysis in linguistically diverse settings. Her interests include bilingual education policy and politics; critical additive bilingual education; teacher preparation for linguistically/culturally diverse teaching contexts; language, power and identity; and bilingual teacher leadership. In particular, Dr. Palmer examines issues of race and class in bilingual settings, and the impact of critical awareness of teachers for mitigating hegemonic discourses. She explores various ways to open equitable spaces/opportunities for learning for linguistically diverse children in school. She is interested in how bilingual children can be positioned or position themselves in academically powerful ways within a classroom.

Recent publications include:

Palmer, D., & Henderson, K. (2016) Dual language tracking and teacher discourses on emergent bilingual students. International Multilingual Research Journal, 10(1), 17-30.

Palmer, D. & Martínez, R. (2016) Developing biliteracy: What do teachers really need to know about language? Research Commentary, Language Arts 93(5), 379-385.

Fitzsimmons-Doolan, S., Palmer, D. & Henderson, K. (2015). Language ideologies and district-wide dual language program implementation. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

Carrie Sampson, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University. Her scholarship focuses on how educational leadership and policymaking at the K-12 level influences equity and social justice for minoritized youth and their families. Dr. Sampson has conducted research on school desegregation policies. Her most recent line of research is centered at the school district level with an emphasis on governance, particularly the role of school boards, community advocacy, decentralization, and school choice policies. Her methodological expertise is in case study and qualitative methods. Dr. Sampson’s research on school boards was recently funded by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Email Carrie Sampson at: csampso4@asu.edu

Jamy Stillman is an Associate Professor of Education in the division of Educational Equity and Cultural Diversity at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research explores the factors that shape teachers’ capacities to deliver equity-oriented, responsive instruction in high-poverty schools serving minoritized youth, especially Spanish-English bilingual students. Using qualitative methods, Jamy focuses primarily on two factors—education policy (e.g. high-stakes accountability policies and standards-based reform) and features of university teacher education—to generate understandings about pre-service and practicing teachers’ learning and work across contexts, and the implications of this work and learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students’ opportunities to learn. Jamy is also becoming increasingly interested in questions surrounding the preparation of urban teacher educators.

Email Jamy Stillman at: Jamy.Stillman@colorado.edu

Dr. Terrence G. Wiley is President of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC, and he serves as Special Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership and Graduate School, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He is also Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, where he served as Executive Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education and Director of the Division of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies. He has also been serving as a Visiting Professor in the School of Foreign Languages for Renmin (Peoples’) University of China’s International Programs.

Professor Wiley’s teaching and research have focused on educational and applied linguistics, concentrating on educational language policies; language diversity and immigrant integration; teaching English as a second and international language; bilingualism, literacy and biliteracy studies; and bilingual, heritage and community language education. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in Education with an emphasis in Linguistics, has two Master’s degrees, in Linguistics and Asian Studies, and a B.A. in History. He has won numerous awards for scholarship, teaching, and service.

Professor Wiley’s scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in the Modern Language Journal, the TESOL Quarterly, Language in Society, the International Journal of Sociology of Language, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, the Bilingual Research Journal, Educational Policy, and Teachers College Record.

Among his books are: Handbook of Heritage, Community, and Native American Languages: Research, Policy, and Practice (co-editor, Routledge, 2014). The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States (co-editor, 2009, Multilingual Matters), Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States, 2nd Ed (author, 2005, Center for Applied Linguistics), Ebonics in the Urban Education Debate, 2nd Ed (co-editor, 2005, Multilingual Matters), Professor Wiley has also published numerous chapters in volumes published by Cambridge and Oxford university presses, Blackwell, Taylor and Francis, Routledge, Sage, John Wiley & Sons, Lawrence Erlbaum, John Benjamins, Mouton, UNESCO, the University of Hawaii Press, and Professor Wiley's editorial service includes co-founding and co-editing the Journal of Language, Identity and Education (Routledge, Taylor & Francis), and the International Multilingual Research Journal (Routledge, Taylor & Francis), guest co-editing the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and Bilingual Research Journal, and AERA’s Review of Research in Education (in press, 2014). He has also served on numerous editorial boards, including the TESOL Quarterly, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Language Planning, and Language Policy,

Professor Wiley’s research collaborations have included projects with UCLA’s National Heritage Language Resource Center; ASU’s Confucius Institute in partnership with Sichuan University; and UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, and he serves as Fellow with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In addition to his work in China, Professor Wiley and has done visiting professorships and lectured at universities in Africa, East and South Asia, Europe and the UK, North, South, and Central America, Australia, and New Zealand. He is also organizer of the international Language Policy Research Network of AILA (Association Internationale de la Linguistique Appliquée).

Professor Wiley is the 2014 recipient of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award.

Email Terrence G. Wiley at: twiley@CAL.org