María Fránquiz, winner of the 2013 Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education Award
Alumna María Fránquiz from UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School was given the 2013 Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education Award from the America Educational Research Assoication (AERA) Division K – Teaching and Teacher Education.
Dr. Fránquiz and co-researcher and awardee Dr. Cinthia Salinas’s project – Tejano Monument Curriculum Project – was selected to exemplify the area of innovation and impact on teacher education. Through the use of literacy journey boxes, Fránquiz and Salinas show the power that memoirs, testimonies, and counter-narratives have on the journey to affirm bilingual Laitno/a pre-service teachers’ cultural and linguistic identities, which in turn helps prepare them to do the same with students.
Dr. María Fránquiz earned her B.A. in Latin American Studies from UC Santa Barbara, M.A. in Educational Psychology, and Ph.D. in Language, Culture, and Literacy from the Gevirtz School’s Department of Education in 1995. Fránquiz is currently an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Bilingual-Bicultural Education program at the University of Texas at Austin. She previously taught in Bilingual-Bicultural Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio (2002-2008) and Literacy and Bilingual-Multicultural Foundations of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Her different areas of expertise include bilingual education, bi-literacy, ethnographic and sociolinguistic research, and migrant education. Fránquiz’s publications include Key Concepts in Bilingual Education: Identity Texts; Cultural Citizenship, and Human Pedagogy; Challenging Majoritarian Tales: Portraits of Bilingual Teachers Deconstructing Deficit Views of Bilingual Learners; and Inside the Latina Experience: A Latina Studies Reader.