About me. I am a teacher and mentor, critical applied linguist, research consultant, and recently graduate of the Urban Education PhD program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. My research agenda focuses on nonprofit education with.of.by.for adult immigrants. As a scholar, I draw upon critical socioculturalism, women of color feminist philosophy and praxis, intersectional/multidimensional thinking, and decolonizing lenses to unearth and work creatively with concepts of contribution, silence, inclusion, and coalition in educational research and practice. I apply these insights and build new ones in my role as a research consultant with the Wallace Foundation, where I have contributed to qualitative and mixed methods research for education and the arts since May 2020. I defended my dissertation, entitled Coalition and creativity on the bridges and the fringes with adult immigrant student co-researchers, on February 26, 2021. In all of my social spaces and labor places, I seek dialogue and coalitional practice with other White, U.S.-born community members as well as Black, Indigenous, and people of color colleagues to collectively radically imagine alternatives to our current violent and dehumanizing reality, which is not a given but always in the making. I take an ethically engaged, restless posture of radical unknowing in my work, seeking to center and uplift Black, Brown, and immigrant perspectives while recommitting daily to a praxis of accountability as an ally and educator.

My writing. Since 2013, I have written to contribute to interdisciplinary and extra-institutional engagements at the intersection of education, critical applied/sociolinguistics, philosophy, political science, and other fields. In 2017, I published The limits of pedagogy: diaculturalist pedagogy as paradigm shift in the education of adult immigrants, which takes up issues of paternalism and homogenization embedded in pedagogical practice with adult immigrant learners and advances a “anti-pedagogical” approach where the voices, visions, and contributions of these students form the energetic core for new ways of doing teaching and learning. My recent publications include Unintelligible silence: Challenging academic authority in a new socio-dialogic politics of the real for collective justice and transformation, which explores silence outside the binary of omission or silencing, and asks what unseen yet active realities are possible beyond White Western-centric academic and rationalist thinking. I also published an alternative perspectives piece entitled From Support to Solidarity: Writing Tutors as Advocates for Multilingual Writers in College Composition Courses, which invites dominant-group writing tutors to recognize and activate their ability to stand in solidarity with multilingual college students as new writers. Most recently, I co-authored Playing with Conscientização: A Collectividual Project for a World we Wish to See, a piece aimed at probing the values and limitations of Paulo Freire’s concept of engaged political awakening at a moment of intersecting crises and transformational thinking.

My praxis. I have a BA in linguistics and Spanish and an MA in applied linguistics. I specialize in bilingual education, second language acquisition, ESL/TESOL, and adult learning, and I avidly consume work done by/about immigrant students, activists, and scholars, including undocumented people and DACA recipients. I am an adjunct professor at Hunter and City Colleges, where I teach graduate-level courses to NYC Teaching Fellows working in New York public schools. I also supervise NYC public school teachers working with students of color, immigrant students, and linguistically diverse students and work actively on projects that support educational, linguistic, and racial justice. In previous years, I worked as a teacher trainer for future ESOL/ESL/ENL teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse students in the U.S. and abroad.

What else? Outside of my academic and professional life, I work with immigrant youth and families as an academic mentor, language coach, interpreter, and advocate for legal empowerment for undocumented community members seeking asylum. In my spare time I belong to anti-racist, queer, and feminist learning groups and practice yoga. Science fiction and speculative fiction nourish and inspire me to think creatively and openly. In addition to all of that fun, my partner and I relish vegan meals and dig through garden centers to find our next plant baby.