Research

Develop and conduct original Bilingual/Bicultural graduate research projects as part of your graduate studies at Teachers College. Through research work with world-class faculty, you’ll expand your classroom learning and impact the future of bilingual learners in New York City and beyond.

Approaching literacy and learning as socially and culturally mediated, Dr. Martínez-Roldán's research focuses on bilingual children's literate thinking-'"how children construct meanings from texts in English and Spanish and the contexts that mediate their interpretive processes.

Current projects:

• Immigrant Children's Responses to Wordless Texts: This study is part of the international project "Visual Journeys: Understanding Immigrant Children's Responses to the Visual Image in Contemporary Picturebooks."
• Literature Discussions as Expansive Literacy Learning for Bilingual Children. This study examines bilingual and immigrant children's learning in two contexts:
• As they participate in polticas literarias or literature discussions.
• As they participate in an after school program that provided a digital mediated environment, in which the children used online games and produced multimodal texts.

Dr. Martínez-Álvarez's areas of interest include bilingualism, special education and the STEM disciplines. Specifically, her research aims at identifying the contextual and child-level factors that promote language and literacy development such that having two languages is indeed an asset. She is interested in finding out the effect of combining verbal and non-verbal information on dual language learner's scientific conceptual knowledge and reading comprehension, and accessing and making sense of science using language. Another area she is interested in exploring is the co-construction of knowledge and how it helps bridge everyday language to scientific discourse.

Current projects:

Dr. Martínez-Álvarez's is currently involved in two research projects in NYCPS. Both projects involve the use of instructional technology to help students use their cultural tools and bring their home and communities into the classroom. As part of the project, Dr. Martínez-Álvarez's explores teachers' dispositions toward teaching minoritized learners as they learn about students' funds of knowledge and lives outside of school.

Dr. Sharon Chang is a Lecturer and Student Teaching/Practicum Coordinator in the Bilingual/Bicultural Education Program, Teachers College, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington. Working with ethnolinguistic communities has urged Dr. Chang to be a cultural broker and an advocate for historically marginalized and underrepresented students, making bilingual education and teacher preparation more equitable. Her scholarly interests are sociocultural perspectives of language pedagogy and learning, Chinese languages and linguistic diversity, Bilingual/Multicultural Teacher Education. Her research focuses on how languages (attitudes/ideologies), cultures, and ethnicities interact with the social process of racialization that influence students’ identities and their learning experiences, shaping teachers’ pedagogical practices and their dispositions.

Current Projects:

• Mandarin Expansive Tactics Available (META) for Glocalized Chinese Bilingual Educators

• Methodological Innovations in Change Lab (CL) for Bilingual Student Teaching Seminar