University of California, Berkeley

Faculty Member, Education

Associate Professor

Graduate School of Education

About

I am a linguistic anthropologist in the field of education and I am especially concerned with understanding how young school-age children learn to see themselves as belonging (or not) to various social groups and how they experience learning in school and out-of-school. In my work I  examine how ideologies about language use intersect with ethnicity, race, class, and immigrant status. My work is an effort to join the work of many others who research the conditions to make learning as equitable as possible for all students.

I am a discourse analyst and I am a language socialization researcher. I received my training at UCLA’s program in Applied Linguistics (Ph.D. 1998) under the guidance of Elinor Ochs. After a year as a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education, I joined the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley in 2000. I am faculty in two areas there—the Language and Literacy area and the Social and Cultural Studies area. I am also affiliated faculty at the Center for Latin American Studies and the Designated Emphasis on Women and Gender Studies. From 2007-2009 I was the director of the Center for Latino Policy Research at UC Berkeley.

Last year, from January to May  2010, I was a visiting researcher at the Centre d'Analyse et d'Intervention Sociologiques (CADIS), at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France (http://cadis.ehess.fr). From April to June I returned to Paris and was affiliated with the Sociology Department  at Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense. Can't wait to return again to that great city and to wonderful colleagues there!

My research has examined processes of identity construction in the Mexican diaspora. I carried out two ethnographic studies that focused on the language socialization and literacy practices of Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant students enrolled in Spanish-based Catholic religious instruction in California parishes. These classes are called “doctrina” or catechism and are offered on Saturday mornings in parishes throughout California. In these classes teachers and students learn the precepts of their religious orientation and they are also socialized to Mexican identities and practices. These ethnographic studies also show forms of language and literacy socialization that many Latino students experience out of school.  A second project is a study of linguistic and interactional adaptation in science inquiry lessons in elementary schools. This work is particularly concerned with the construction of “time” in science learning – how teachers and students construct temporality and negotiate learning tasks through language, the classroom chronolect. An earlier project investigated the language socialization experiences of English-speaking children who receive care from Spanish-speaking nannies and how these young children developed an orientation in early life as “consumers of care.” My most recent project examines the migration experiences of Yucatec Maya speakers to the Bay Area of Northern California. This group of speakers constitutes a large number of Mexican indigenous migration to the U.S. In this work I am interested in understanding how immigrant identities are socialized among youth and their families and how different institutions coalesce in this process and practice of migration.

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