About Us

Magdalena Madany-Saa's academic interests include participatory, multimodal and decolonial methodologies: language trajectory drawings, Participatory Action Research, auto/duo/collaborative ethnography, lifescapes. 

Transdisciplinary: Exploring intersections of language teacher education, language reclamation, curriculum and instruction, and language policies. 

Her intellectual approach to educational research is southernizing, embedded in resisting western hegemony in the Global South. 

Juliana Reichert Assunção Tonelli is a post-doctoral researcher at the Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL) in Brazil, where she is affiliated with the Department of Modern Foreign Languages. Her academic profile reflects a strong focus on teacher education, methodology, and the teaching of English to young learners, with an emphasis on inclusive and context-sensitive pedagogy. 

 Her work is grounded in decolonial studies and Paulo Freirean praxiologies, emphasizing that teaching methods should be locally rooted, culturally sensitive, and reflective of the teacher’s identity and context ResearchGate. She advocates for action-reflection cycles in teacher education, rejecting top-down, standardized approaches in favor of context-dependent, equitable practices. 

  Dr. Kevin Donley   

Kevin Donley, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the MA in Educational Transformation Program at Georgetown University. He has previous experience as a secondary social studies and history teacher at a Spanish-English bilingual school in Quito, Ecuador. His research examines how teachers of multilingual learners navigate the complex personal, social, political, and curricular dimensions of language policy and literacy instruction. He primarily employs qualitative research methodologies to demonstrate how teachers draw on their practical experiences, knowledge, and judgment to implement culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogies for their multilingual learners, like translanguaging. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2473-428X 

  Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She earned her Master and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed her bachelor’s and licentiature’s studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Miryam is an active scholar with a distinguished record of teaching, service, and professional activity. Her teaching and research draw on decolonial indigenous feminist research methodologies. It is recognized by being transnational in scope yet intimately collaborative using poetry, testimonios, ethnography, and art-based qualitative methodologies. Miryam’s scholarly and artistic publications appear both in leading academic journals, handbooks, peer-reviewed books, and regional/local publications that evidence the broad interdisciplinary, community based, and intellectual curiosity of her engagement. Miryam is currently working on decolonizing research/teaching/learning through various scholarly projects. 

Karin Ann Lewis is an associate professor in the Teaching & Learning Department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Following a teaching career in public education, she earned her Ph.D. in Educational and Counseling Psychology from the University of Kentucky. Dr. Lewis teaches courses in Educational Psychology in the areas of cognition, learning, and human development at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. Her scholarly focus explores complexities of identity and agency from a social justice perspective intended to challenge the status quo and open transdisciplinary discourses. She seeks ways to transcend traditional educational paradigms through transformative, culturally responsive pedagogies. Dr. Lewis’s scholarship is grounded in qualitative, collaborative, collective ethnographic methodologies.   

     Erik L. Malewski is a Professor of Curriculum Studies at Kennesaw State University in the Bagwell College of Education. His scholarship has focused on cross-cultural international experiences for pre-service teachers, the implications of ignorance for curriculum and pedagogy, and synoptic study of the field of Curriculum Studies. He has taught courses focused on diversity, multiculturalism, equity, and global issues in education. His current research focuses upon ignorance in education and the implications of epistemologies of ignorance for current political and educational movements. Prior to his current faculty appointment, he served eight years as a chief diversity officer at Kennesaw State University and was an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at Purdue University. 

Dr. Karla O-Donnell is a senior instructor at Texas Christian University's Department of Spanish and Hispanic Studies.  Possessing a doctoral degree in Curriculum Studies, her pedagogical influence extends far beyond the confines of academia.  Dr. O'Donald's research interests span a diverse array of critical areas, including Chicana feminist epistemologies, Latinx education, translanguaging, world language teacher education, testimonio, and pláticas. Her involvement in supporting Spanish speakers within the community underscores her commitment to service-learning. Her teaching practices are enriched by the application of decoloniality, providing students with a nuanced understanding of diverse perspectives and empowering them to navigate complex educational and personal landscapes with critical insight.

Karina Oliveira de Paula, Ma in Applied Linguistics, is a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum and Instruction Program at Texas Tech University. Karina has previous experience as an English teacher in Brazil and a Portuguese teacher in the United States. She applies decolonial and translanguaging theories to investigate language learning and teacher preparation practices in multilingual borderlands and regions of international immigration in Brazil and in the US. Her research interests are emergent bilingualism, multiculturality, critical language teaching, global English, and raciolinguistics. karina-oliveira.de-paula@ttu.edu

         Alexander B. Pratt received his PhD in the Critical and Socio-Cultural Studies in Education program at the University of Oregon. He is currently an assistant professor of qualitative research theory/methodology at the University of Memphis. His research focuses on posthuman and antiracist curriculum theory and teacher education. Pratt loves teaching and has wanted to be a teacher his whole life. His favorite subject has always been social studies because of the great stories. His research is focused on teacher knowledge and how that knowledge develops in response to changes in curriculum. Pratt's hope is that this work will better foster teachers' ability to create equitable classroom spaces.