I received my M.Ed. and Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in Curriculum and Teaching with a concentration in Reading and Language Arts; after working for several years as a classroom teacher and as a professional developer. I am a researcher/practitioner, eager about working in K-12 classrooms with students, teachers and administrators from diverse backgrounds, in high-poverty areas. My research interest is also my passion. It involves multilingual classrooms, written academic language, African American Language, sociocultural and sociolinguistic perspectives of education for African American students and other non-dominant language speakers as they learn the academic language in urban settings.