I am an Assistant Professor of English as a Second Language (ESL) and Bilingual Education in the School of Teacher Education at the University of Northern Colorado. At UNC, I also coordinate the undergraduate program in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education. Since 2015, I have also held a faculty position with the English as a New Language (ENL) program at the University of Notre Dame.

My research explores the language and literacy learning experiences of elementary emergent bilingual students. I am particularly interested in understanding how young learners make sense of be(com)ing bilingual at school and the role of translanguaging pedagogies in cultivating more equity-oriented and dynamic spaces for language learning. My work is ethnographic, classroom-based, discourse analytic, and increasingly partnership-oriented.

I completed my Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on ESL / Bilingual Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. Following my Ph.D., I completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship with the the Department of Equity, Bilingualism, and Biliteracy (EBB) in the School of Education at the University of Colorado-Boulder. In this role, I co-led a team of researchers exploring how a functional/genre-based approach to language could support teachers in designing more meaningful writing instruction for bilingual learners. I continue to draw upon a functional linguistics perspective in my coursework at UNC in the course “Content-Based Literacies for Diverse Learners.”

Finally, I am also a strong advocate for equity-oriented two-way immersion programs and am actively involved in efforts to cultivate and strengthen these types of bilingual education models. At the University of Notre Dame, I serve on the Dual Language Leadership Team and provide professional development and consulting to schools seeking to grow TWI programs. I am also a member of the design team for the Two-Way Immersion Network of Catholic Schools (TWIN-CS) at Boston College, a role that involves supporting research initiatives (e.g., exploring parental perspectives and experiences of TWI programs) and providing professional development workshops to TWI teachers and leaders.