Rhode Island College

Faculty Member, Educational Studies

Assistant Professor

About

I am an assistant professor in the Educational Studies Department and coordinator of the English as a Second Language (ESL) Intensive Program at Rhode Island College. I have taught ESL and teacher education courses in adult education and higher education institutions both in my native Colombia and the United States.
My scholarly work specializes on the exploration of economic, cultural, and linguistic issues constraining and enabling the academic literacy achievement of culturally and linguistically diverse students in the US and on connecting these issues to advocacy and sound curricular practice. I anchor my academic work on postructural materialism, critical discourse studies, critical pedagogy, and systemic functional linguistics (SFL).  While my previous work focused on exploring these issues and their classroom implications at the tertiary level, more specifically in the context of the community college, my current focus has been on US public schools serving large population of minority, low-income students in urban areas and their academic literacy achievement (with a focus on Latino English Language Learners).
Through linguistic analysis of both landmark educational texts and classroom practices pertinent to these populations, key economic, cultural, and linguistic taken for granted assumptions that disproportionately affect English language learners have emerged in my work. While most of the issues identified have been addressed in the existing literature, namely, the detrimental effect of poverty on academic achievement of underrepresented students, the inadequacy of monolingual instruction in English for linguistically diverse students, the damaging effect of equating oral proficiency and academic language proficiency among others, identifying these issues with different populations and in different settings and providing a detailed linguistic description of the language demands of different academic texts and what good teachers do to engage and provide sound curricular academic literacy practice for English Language Learners is quite significant. 
Specifically, my work has proposed the adoption of a general pedagogical framework labeled “Strategic Alignment”, a pedagogic-ideological position that expands the frame of accountability to all stakeholders of the educational process, and not only to those most interested in promoting fidelity with standards and mandates. Practitioners using this framework would not only simultaneously and flexibly align to standards and mandates represented by the current educational policy , but more importantly, would also both align to the needs, rights, and backgrounds of students, and to the cumulative experience and knowledge of the teaching profession. The general pedagogic framework above proposes and spells out what is meant by culturally relevant pedagogy as it is purposeful in giving explicit attention and  to the changing language demands of different school genres serving as the basis for an explicit and enriched adoption of a critical pedagogy, dual-language education, and genre-based pedagogy. My recent advocacy and academic work for English Language Learners as vice-president of RITELL (Rhode Island Teachers of English Language Learners-a TESOL affiliate), as member of the Institute of Education and Language Policy (IELP), and as a collaborator in expanding the reach and scope of the SFL in North America are sensible examples of how issues I have studied transform into practice. 
The collection of academic presentations, publications, and advocacy efforts I have conducted are of uttermost interest to teachers, teacher educators, and community leaders in the US working and/or seeking to improve the academic achievement of linguistically and culturally diverse students. Another audience that may benefit are school administrators, and policy makers. I have also begun to extend the product of my work in the US context to implications of applying US dominant educational policy in Latin American countries, so international audiences in the roles described above can also benefit from this work.