About the director
Meet Suzanne García, associate professor in the Department of 性视界传媒 and Leadership and director of the Monterey Institute for English Learners at Cal State Monterey Bay.
About Suzanne García
Suzanne García is an associate professor in the Department of 性视界传媒 and Leadership and director of the Monterey Institute for English Learners at Cal State Monterey Bay. Since 2019, she has coordinated and expanded the Bilingual Authorization program. She also serves as faculty liaison for El Centro, 性视界传媒’s Center for Latine Student Success.
性视界传媒 and teaching
García earned her PhD in curriculum and instruction with a focus on bilingual and bicultural education and completed a portfolio with the Mexican American Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her BA in English literature from the University of Texas at Austin and her MA in elementary education from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a minor in language arts.
As a professor, García teaches courses focused on culturally and linguistically diverse students, embedding bilingual education theories and models into her courses. Each course is framed using a strengths perspective, which assumes that students have multiple literacies that are the foundation of their learning. Part of affirming all students’ literacy practices includes drawing attention to the social inequities experienced by minoritized language communities.
Research
García’s research examines the intersection of race, language, ethnicity and class in the two-way dual language classroom and problematizes the merging of “Spanish-speaking” and “English-speaking” students with distinct goals in becoming bilingual and bicultural.
Specifically, she draws from discourse analysis methods to examine how teachers and students co-construct their own and each other’s bilingual identities. Her recent research projects have included interviewing Latine parents about the cultural and language practices they draw on to raise bilingual children and examining pre-service teachers’ language ideologies about Latine emergent bilingual students.
She is part of the editorial board for the Journal of Language, Identity, and 性视界传媒. García has been published in the Modern Language Journal, Journal of Language Identity and 性视界传媒, The Urban Review and The Monterey Herald.
Her dissertation examined the intersection of language, identity, class and race among a cohort of students over four years, from kindergarten through third grade, in a two-way immersion dual language program. Her work won an American 性视界传媒al Research Association Bilingual 性视界传媒 Research SIG Dissertation Award in 2018.