I am an Assistant Professor of TESOL and Bilingual Education in the School of Teacher Education at the University of Rhode Island. I have spent my career working with multilingual learners and their teachers, first as an elementary and secondary English teacher (in Indiana, Texas, Illinois, and Chile) and now as a teacher educator and educational researcher. In my teaching, research, and service, I am committed to cultivating more critically-oriented, affirming, and inclusive learning spaces for multilingual students, particularly in/through bilingual education.

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 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 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. After CU-Boulder, I worked as an Assistant Professor of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education (CLD) at the University of Northern Colorado, where I also served as the undergraduate CLD program coordinator. I began working in my current role at the University of Rhode Island in August 2022.