MELEd 2019 Keynote Speakers
Friday, November 22, 2019 – Luciana de Oliveira
Luciana C. de Oliveira, Ph.D., is Chair and Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, Florida. Her research focuses on issues related to teaching multilingual students at the K-12 level, including the role of language in learning the content areas and teacher education, advocacy and social justice. Currently, Dr. de Oliveira’s research examines scaffolding in elementary classrooms and multimodal representation in picture books. Her most recent book, Handbook of TESOL in K-12 (de Oliveira, 2019), is the first handbook to explore the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages in elementary and secondary education (K-12). She is the author or editor of 21 books and over 180 publications in various outlets. She is currently Past President (2019-2020) of TESOL International Association. She was the first Latina to ever serve as President (2018-2019) of TESOL.
Her keynote address, “Scaffolding for Meaningful Interactions through the Teaching-Learning Cycle: Language and Content Integration for Multilingual Learners," explores a specific pedagogical tool for language and content integration in the context of writing instruction: the Teaching-Learning Cycle (TLC). Using classroom examples of English language arts (ELA) content-and-language-integrated units based on the TLC, we explore ways in which teachers can draw on scaffolding techniques to help multilingual learners write in different genres. In order for multilingual learners to access the content and linguistic information in the texts they are required to read and write across subject areas, they first must understand the distinct ways that language works. With this pressing issue in mind, this keynote demonstrates how the TLC can be used to facilitate a meaningful understanding of language and how language works in different genres.
Her 60-minute follow-up session, “Advocacy for Multilingual Learners: What, Why, and How“discusses how advocacy for multilingual learners has become a necessity in our profession. We often find ourselves in situations in which we need to advocate – for our students, ourselves, or our profession. This presentation explores the what, the why, and the how to effectively advocate for multilingual learners, drawing on research on how to prepare teachers and leaders for advocacy. Participants leave with some tools to use as they advocate in schools and beyond.
Saturday, November 23, 2019 – Ofelia García
Ofelia García is Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. García has published widely in the areas of multilingualism and bilingual education, the education of language minoritized bilinguals, sociology of language, and language policy. Among her best-known books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective; and Translanguaging; Language, Bilingualism and Education (with Li Wei), which received the 2015 British Association of Applied Linguistics Award. In 2017 she received the Charles Ferguson Award in Applied Linguistics and the AERA Lifetime Career Award in Bilingual Education. She is a member of the National Academy of Education.
Her keynote address is titled “Language education for Multilingual Learners: The Wolf and The Lamb." Building on Aesop’s fable of “The Wolf and the Lamb ,“ this Keynote will focus on how language in the education of minoritized multilingual learners in the U.S. has often functioned as the wolf, leading to injustice. We will examine the ways in which language and bilingualism have been constructed to minoritize those who are then deemed to be inferior. And we will focus especially on two instruments of language/power that have been misused in education in the last decade: standards and academic language. We will end by proposing that leveraging what we call translanguaging in educating multilingual learners can resist the tyranny of language that the wolf proposes. By providing some translanguaging classroom examples, we show how the renewed focus on engaging multilingual learners’ creativity and criticality has the potential to transform their education.