Laura Alvarez is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Saint Mary’s College of California. She brings 20 years experience as a teacher, researcher, and teacher educator with a focus on improving the educational experiences of bilingual and immigrant students. Her research and teacher education work is informed by 12 years as a classroom teacher in Oakland, California, where she has taught all subjects in grades 4–8 in bilingual, dual-immersion, and sheltered English programs. Alvarez’s research focuses on bilingual students’ language and literacy development in the context of disciplinary learning. She is co-author (with Samway and Pease-Alvarez) of Supporting Newcomer Students: Advocacy and Instruction for English Learners and (with Valdés and Capitelli) of Latino Children Learning English: Steps in the Journey.
Sarah Capitelli is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. She brings over 20 years of experience as a teacher, researcher, and teacher educator with a focus on improving the educational experiences of linguistically diverse students as well as supporting the teachers that work with these students. Prior to teaching at USF, Sarah taught in a Kindergarten classroom in Venezuela and was a 1st/2nd grade Spanish-bilingual teacher in Oakland, California. Capitelli’s research focuses on the skills and dispositions teachers need to develop in order to support the needs of English learners. In addition to her role at USF, Capitelli facilitates a teacher inquiry group for teachers in San Francisco Unified focused on improving teacher practice for linguistically diverse students. In 2019, Capitelli received the Sarlo Prize, USF’s highest teaching honor. She is the author and co-author of numerous peer-reviewed articles as well as co-author (with Valdés and Alvarez) of Latino Children Learning English: Steps in the Journey.
Marguerite L. De Loney is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests broadly include relations of power, alternative knowledge production, community-based research praxis, and research justice.
Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University. Much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities. Her books include Bilingualism and testing: A special case of bias (Valdés & Figueroa, Ablex, 1994), Con respeto: Bridging the distance between culturally diverse families and schools (Teachers College Press, 1996), Learning and not Learning English (Teachers College Press, 2001) Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003), Developing minority language resources: The case of Spanish in California (Valdés, Fishman, Chavez & Perez, Multilingual Matters, 2006) and Latino Children Learning English: Steps in the Journey (Valdés, Capitelli & Alvarez, Teachers College Press, 2010). Valdés has also carried out extensive work on teaching, maintaining and preserving heritage languages among minority populations. Her early publications in this area include edited volumes, journal articles and language textbooks. Valdés is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Education as well as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Modern Language Journal, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, and Research on the Teaching of English.
Helen Quinn received her Ph.D in physics at Stanford in 1967. She has taught physics at both Harvard and Stanford. Dr. Quinn’s work as a particle physicist has been honored by the Dirac Medal (from the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Italy) and the Klein Medal (from The Swedish National Academy of Sciences and Stockholm University) as well as the Sakurai Prize (from the American Physical Society), the Compton medal (from the American Institute of Physics, awarded once every 4 years) and the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics (from the Franklin Institute). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science and the American Philosophical Society. She is a Fellow and former president of the American Physical Society. She is originally from Australia and is an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia.
Dr. Quinn has been active in science education for some years, and since her retirement in 2010 this has been her major activity. She was a founding member of the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP) which produced a well-known standard-model poster for schools in 1987 (https://particleadventure.org/). She served as Chair of the US National Academy of Sciences Board on Science Education (BOSE) from 2009–2014. She was as a member of the BOSE study committee that developed the report “Taking Science to School” and chaired the committee for the “Framework for K-12 Science Education”, which is the basis of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and similar standards now adopted by about 30 states in the US, and has been influential internationally as well. She also contributed to follow-up NRC studies on assessment and implementation of NGSS. From 2015–2018 Helen served at the request of the President of Ecuador as a member of the “Comision Gestora” to help plan and guide the initial development of the National University of Education of Ecuador.