I am interested in analyzing policies that promote pluralism and diversity issues in institutions and society as a way to understand how inequality is reproduced but also how it can be challenged. As an education ethnographer I conduct this analysis in the context of public schools serving culturally and linguistically diverse students where I focus on teachers. Namely, I am interested in how teachers understand (official) language policy and how they transform it through pedagogy. Local implementation of policy in schools has the potential to inform and reform education to provide access and quality for all in ways that impact and transform society at large. My work has taken place in bilingual schools in a variety of contexts in the Americas, from Andean rural Peru to Haiti, to urban classrooms in the United States.
Articles
Vertical and horizontal approaches to ethnography of language policy in Peru, International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2013)
In this article, I discuss my ethnography of the bilingual intercultural education (EBI) policy in...
Indigenous knowledge and education from the Quechua community to school: beyond the formal/non-formal dichotomy (with Elizabeth Sumida Huaman), International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2012)
In this article, we propose to approach Indigenous education beyond the formal/non-formal dichotomy. We argue...
Adolescent Literacies in Latin America and the Caribbean (with Lesley Bartlett, Dina Lopez, and Erica Mein), Review of Research in Education (2011)
In 2000, approximately 36 million youth and adults living in Latin America and the Caribbean...
Class-first Analysis in a Continuum: An approach to the Complexities of Schools, Society, and Insurgent Science, Cultural Studies of Science Education (2010)
This essay addresses Katherine Richardson Bruna’s paper: Mexican Immigrant Transnational Social Capital and Class Transformation:...
Indigenous Worldviews in Intercultural Education: Teachers’ Construction of interculturalism in a bilingual Quechua–Spanish program, Intercultural Education (2010)
This article examines teachers’ implementation of the bilingual intercultural education (BIE) program in Peru. BIE...
Contributions to Books
"El niño debe aprender en su idioma": A Teacher's Approximations to Language Policy in an Indigenous Peruvian School, Bilingual Education and Language Policy in the Global South (2013)
“Angles Make Things Difficult”: Teachers’ Interpretations of Language Policy and Quechua Revitalization in Peru., Negotiating language education policies: educators as policymakers (2010)
This chapter explores bilingual teachers’ interpretations of indigenous language revitalization in the Bilingual Intercultural Education...
"Don't you want your child to be better than you?": Enacting ideologies and contesting intercultural policy in Peru., Critical approaches to comparative education: vertical case studies from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas (2009)
The shifting agendas of international organizations during the 1990s emphasized universal educational access, or education...