Language Literacy and Culture School of Education








Welcome to LLC Concentration's Student Advisory Committee (SAC)

 

Student advisory committee (SAC) is a student group consisting of students in LLC master's, CAGS and doctoral programs, who work closely with LLC faculty in planning events such as LLC community meetings, and other initiatives based on students' and faculty's needs.
For more information about SAC, please visit:

http://sacllc.pbworks.com/ or contact us via email sac2009mailbox@gmail.com

SAC 2011-2012

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Jennifer ‘Lee’ O’Donnell
Lee just began her third year in the LLC doctoral program. She is interested in studying how social movements intersect with education to influence policy and promote community mobility. In addition to work in the LLC, Lee is pursuing a Latin American and Caribbean studies certificate and has taken courses on performance ethnography, cultural politics, feminist theory and politics, and politics of development.
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Charles Estus
Charles is a second year LLC doctoral student interested in the cultural influences on writing and the expectations related to writing by Chinese L1 writers of English in academic genres. Charles is also interested in technology and the impact on learning, photography, music and ultimate Frisbee.:Community Meeting Nov. 9:Charles.jpg

I-An Chen
I-An Chen is a doctoral student in Language, Literacy, and Culture. She taught ESL and EFL at the elementary and secondary levels in Taiwan and in the United States before earning her Master’s Degree in Education from Rutgers University. Her research interests center on the professional development of international graduate students earning TESOL degrees through coursework in the United States, systemic functional linguistics, genre-based pedagogy, and on-line learning environments.
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Leta Hooper
Leta is a second year LLC doctoral student. She is interested in researching how teacher education programs prepare pre-service teachers to work with culturally diverse children in either public and/or private schools that are located either in urban, suburban, or rural areas. She is also interested in how additional factors such as federal education policies, state and district standards, standardized tests, curriculum, and a school’s staff and faculty shape prospective and novice teachers’ perceptions about the school, location, parents, and students. During her spare time, Leta also enjoys reading, cooking, traveling, exercising, and scuba diving.    
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Siwen Zhang
Siwen recently graduated from the BEM Master’s program, and is currently enrolled as a CAGS student in BEM. A resident from China, she is deeply interested in looking at the influences of TESOL guidelines and British Council on the EFL policies and standards in China, and how they affect teachers’ knowledge and actions to promote learning as they engage themselves in global resources. Siwen is also interested in working with immigrant students, to see how they consciously make linguistic, academic and cultural choices that determine their social mobility, as divided by strategies, resources, and social classes. :Community Meeting Nov. 9:Siwen2.jpg

Hengjia Liu
Hengjia is a second year graduate student in the BEM program. Her interests are in teaching Chinese as a foreign language and doing research in how classroom assessments and testing affect language learning and teaching. She is also interested in second language curriculum design and test development. Hengjia loves music and is a skilled pianist. In her spare time, she would like to be involved in children’s music education.
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2010-2011 members:

Helmer, Kirsten

Kirsten started her studies at UMass in 2006. She received her M.Ed. as well as her ESL license for Massachusetts grades 5-12 through the BEM (Bilingual/ESL/Multicultural Education) program and continued as a CAGS (Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies) student in the same program. This semester marks her start as a doctoral student in LLC.
Her research interests focus on LGBT issues in the context of education. She is particularly interested in connecting efforts to combat anti-gay bullying and violence to curriculum changes and specifically the use of children’s and young adult literature with LGBT content in schools. She is also interested in a critical multicultural analysis of this kind of literature. Additionally, she would like to gain a better understanding of the experiences of lesbian and gay teachers/college instructors.

Huang, Weiwei

Weiwei is a  a second year Master’s candidate from China in the BEM program. She is interested in English as a foreign language at the college level, educational technology use, and distance language learning. During her study at UMass, Weiwei increasingly realized that Teaching English as a Foreign Language is a humanistic and international specialty and there is a specific communication between people which is beyond the limits of their languages and cultures. Weiwei will graduate in May, 2011 and plans to be a college EFL teacher in China.

 

Monteiro, Carolyn

 

Carolyn is in her second year of the BEM, M.Ed. program. Her interests focus around teaching English language learners in urban schools. After years of volunteer tutoring ESL in the community, she decided to come to UMass to pursue educator licensure. Teaching is a career change for her, as she spent over 15 years in sales and marketing. She loves being in this program so much that she hopes to continue on with CAGS and possibly doctoral work. Carolyn has 3 children, a 21 year old daughter, and 5 and 3 year old sons. She expects to start her teaching career in a local public middle or high school in spring 2011.

 

Schulze, Corrin

Corrin is a second year doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, Culture & Society (LLCS) program. While teaching 8th grade English Language Arts for eleven years, she saw significant changes in both students and pedagogy as a result of technology and strongly felt the need to investigate and understand these changes.  She could see that students are learning differently today than they did before technology became such a strong element of our culture.  She could also see teachers infusing their writing pedagogy with technology to catch student's attention and to help them with the skills they need in today’s world.  She is interested in looking at how technology has changed learning and then how do we best use that information to inform writing pedagogy. Her career goal is to teach at the college or university level in teacher education.

 

Schupack, Sara


Sara is a 3rd year doctoral candidate in the Teacher Education and School Improvement (TESI) program. Her main area of interest is community building in and across English classrooms at community colleges, in particular "Learning Communities". She is committed to community colleges and would like to teach in that setting, as well as support mid-career teachers through collaborative professional development.Sara is from Northern California and has an 11 year-old son named Ted who studies at the Chinese Immersion School. She loves swimming, dim sum, chocolate,  dancing, and 'creative' writing.

 

Zhang, Siwen

Siwen is a 2nd year Master’s candidate from China in the BEM program. Since her arrival in the U.S in 2009, she has been actively involved in research with a focus on incorporating critical literacy in elementary foreign language classrooms, use of multimedia tools in language education, long-distance learning, as well as Asian-American studies. She is involved in the Chinese online teaching community and has created and developed her own websites www.inchineseonline.com  and www.people.umass.edu/siwenz. Both are  interactive resource databases, to promote and encourage Chinese distance learning on a larger scale. Siwen is soon to graduate in May, 2011 and plans to start her teaching career at a Chinese Immersion school here in the US.

 

 

2009-2010 members:
Keiko Konoeda, Holly Graham, Mariana Montaldo, Jackie Chromey, Margaret Felis, Andreas Tzineris, Corrin Schulze

 

 


 
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