Henry Sales Leonel Hernandez, a first-generation college student from an Indigenous Maya Mam immigrant family from Guatemala, is a doctoral candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture cluster at UC Berkeley’s School of Education. His path as an Indigenous Maya Mam has been shaped by resilience and a dedication to his cultural heritage, driving him to become a recognized researcher and academic working to revitalize the Maya Mam language and culture. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and a lovely daughter.
Growing up in San Juan Atitán, Guatemala, Henry developed a profound...
Josephine (Josie) Ingram (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture cluster at UC Berkeley's School of Education. Her research interests include LGBTQ+ inclusivity in education, creative writing pedagogy, queer literacy frameworks, digital learning spaces, and artificial intelligence in education. Her current project explores how informal learning spaces can support literacy development and identity formation for transgender and gender-expansive individuals.
Prior to Berkeley, Josie taught English, creative writing, and film in LAUSD, where she also...
Ben is an MA student in the Language Literacy and Culture specialization. As a linguist in industry, Ben has worked at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Capital One before coming to Berkeley. For over ten years, they have also worked as a linguistic consultant with the Houma Language Project, an indigenous and women-led effort to reclaim the indigenous Houma language of Louisiana.
Ben's research interest is the relationship between motivation and autonomy in language learning, particularly for indigenous languages using language technology. They are working to develop a language-...
Cati V. de los Ríos is an Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture at UC Berkeley’s School of Education. She applies critical, sociocultural, and translingual theories to examine the literacy and language practices of immigrant, transnational, and racialized bi/multilingual youth populations. Her ethnographic, community-based, and participatory research is situated at the axes of literacy studies, educational anthropology, civic and political learning, and ethnic studies, with an emphasis on studying the linguistic-semiotic repertoires that Latina/o/x youth and families...
Patricia Baquedano-López is Professor of Educational Linguistics at the Berkeley School of Education. Trained as a lingusitic anthropologist and as an applied linguist, she is a scholar with a long-standing interest in the language practices and education of racialized and minoritized students in schools. A strand of her research focuses on Indigenous Latinx students and examines processes of settler colonialism in education. Her most recent projects address the dynamics of transnational Indigenous sovereignty, return migration, and education in the Maya diaspora Yucatan-California....
Dr. Yang is an associate professor of school psychology in the Berkeley School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Yang’s research interests focus on understanding how school members interact with their ecological contexts to find their resilience individually and collectively when facing risks and adversities, such as bullying, teacher-targeted violence, and mental health challenges. Three central questions focused in her research agenda are: (1) how to assess and counterbalance the risks and adversities experienced by vulnerable school members as...
Sarah Warshauer Freedman studies the teaching and learning of written language, as well as ways English is taught in schools. Her research focuses on US schools but also includes cross-national comparisons. Besides studying written language, she is interested in societal divisions that lead to conflict and inequality. She has conducted research on teaching and learning about civics and has studied how adolescents on varied sides of societal divides develop as citizens and civic actors. Her work on societal divides has included research on the role of education in reconstructing societies...
Merging my graduate degree training in developmental psychology (PhD, 2002) and in applied linguistics (PhD, 2004), I have developed a research program that is centrally concerned with the role of language and literacy practices in children’s development and education.
As a developmental psychologist, I have always been interested in discerning the sociocultural underpinnings of learning processes. The cognitive capabilities that our neurological apparatus enables us as human beings to attain do not pre-exist and are never abstracted from the social practices in which they develop...
