I am interested in analyzing diversity, pluralism and knowledge production in institutional policy as a way to understand how inequality is reproduced but also how it can be contested. My research draws on sociocultural, sociohistorical and comparative perspectives applied to discourse and its enactment in language policy, intercultural/multicultural education, bilingual/multilingual and Indigenous education. I utilize comparative notions framed in epistemologies from the south and alternative knowledges.

As an education ethnographer I conduct this analysis in the context of public schools serving culturally and linguistically diverse students where I focus on the role of educators. Namely, I am interested in how teachers understand (official) language policy and how they transform it through pedagogy.

In my view, schools can be sites for reforming education as much as for re-conceptualizing what is valued and disseminated as knowledge. Thus, I focus my research in local teaching and learning practices as a way to inform and reform education, to provide access and quality education for all, to 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 and suburban classrooms in the United States as well as in bilingual classrooms in Azerbaijan.