Events @ TC

Please join Co-editor Bahar Otcu-Grillman and contributors as they discuss their research and experience in publishing Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism Beyond Heritage Languages in a Global City (Ofelia Garcia, Zeena Zakharia, Bahar Otcu, eds., Multilingual Matters, 2012). This book "explores bilingual community education, specifically the educational spaces shaped and organized by American ethnolinguistic communities for their children in the multilingual city of New York. Employing a rich variety of case studies which highlight the importance of the ethnolinguistic community in bilingual education, this collection [of essays] examines the various structures that these communities use to educate their children as bilingual Americans." Our guests will cover Turkish, Chinese, Russian, Haitian Creole bilingual community education, and the networks of bilingual community support in New York City.

Bahar Otcu-Grillman, Teachers College alumna, is Assistant Professor at Mercy College, New York. She has taught English both in the US and Turkey, and done teacher training for various colleges in New York. Her research interests include bilingual education, applied linguistics, language policies and ideologies, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Her recent publications include a book called Language Maintenance and Cultural Identity Formation: A Linguistic Ethnography of Discourses in a Complementary School in the US and a co-authored book chapter titled "Developmental Patterns in Internal Modification Use in Requests."

Wen-Tsui Pat Lo, is currently the Director of Asian Language Bilingual/ESL Technical Assistance Center (ALBETAC), supporting English language learners (ELLs) from Asian language backgrounds and students learning an Asian language as a foreign language. Prior to this position, Pat Lo had served as a Regional Instruction Supervisor for English Language Learners and the Director of Grants and Reporting with the New York City Department of Education. She taught ESL and Chinese Native Language Arts at Flushing High School for thirteen years, during which time she was nominated Teacher of the Year twice. In addition to her rich instructional and supervisory experiences in the United States, Pat Lo has had a solid background in the Chinese language. She earned a BA in Chinese literature from National Taiwan University, one of the most prestigious universities in Taiwan. She worked as a reporter and a newscaster and taught Chinese at the Stanford Language Institute, located at National Taiwan University.

Tatyana Kleyn, alumna of Teachers College, is an associate professor in the Bilingual Education and TESOL program at the City College of New York. In 2007 she received an Ed.D. in international educational development. Her dissertation focused on the intersections of bilingual and multicultural education in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Chinese and Russian bilingual classrooms. She is author of Immigration: The Ultimate Teen Guide (Scarecrow Press, 2011) and co-author of Teaching in Two Languages: A Guide for K-12 Bilingual Educators with Adelman Reyes (Corwin Press, 2010). Tatyana is an associate investigator with the CUNY-NYS Initiative for Emergent Bilinguals that supports administrators in developing school-wide bilingual ecologies.

Maureen Matarese, is Assistant Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. A graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University with a doctorate in International Educational Development (Language, Literacy, and Technology), she has focused her work around issues of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and literacy in multicultural, institutional settings. She also has taught at Teachers College, Long Island University, and North Carolina State University, in addition to working at a transitional homeless shelter in Washington Heights.

Marie-Michelle Monereau-Merry is an AGEP doctoral student who entered the Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences program at CUNY, The Graduate Center in Fall 2001 and completed her secondary documents in Spring 2008. She is a certified speech-language pathologist. After obtaining a masters degree in speech-language and hearing sciences, she provided speech, language, and swallowing remediation, predominately to the birth to five populations, prior to pursuing a doctoral degree.

Persons interested in attending this talk may rsvp by Friday, November 30th.

Where: 306 Russell