Di Stefano Receives Fulbright Global Scholar Award

Content

Associate Professor Marialuisa Di Stefano of the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been selected to receive a Fulbright Global Scholar Award for the 2026–2027 academic year. 

This highly competitive honor, awarded by the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, recognizes scholars whose work advances cross-cultural understanding and contributes to international knowledge exchange, and is designed to enable U.S. scholars to conduct research and collaborate with partner institutions abroad. 

With the Global Scholar Award, Di Stefano will spend the 2026–27 academic year building a comparative ethnographic case study examining how science and engineering teachers in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) public secondary school classrooms across Colombia, Spain, Italy, and the United States engage with models of dual language bilingual teacher preparation. In the process, she will partner with Universidad de Córdoba in Spain and Universidad del Norte in Colombia to document practices, build transnational networks, and generate new knowledge at the intersection of STEM pedagogy and bilingual teacher education.  

Di Stefano’s classroom studies will also take her to Sicily, Italy the country of her birth, where she will partner with Università degli Studi di Messina, where she studied communication as an undergraduate. “I’m kind of going home,” she says. “Emotionally, this touches me very deeply. I was there as a student at university, and now I’m coming back as a scholar with a prestigious scholarship. I never would have thought I could achieve this. As a first-generation college student and first-generation immigrant, to be recognized as a U.S. scholar—while serving my home country in this new way—is so affirming.” 

Di Stefano expects her study’s findings to enrich the programs of the UMass Amherst Bilingual Hub at the College of Education, where she serves as founder and director, and provide practical insights for school districts in Massachusetts and the U.S. that are working to strengthen STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) disciplinary biliteracy development in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) and content settings. 

“I’m interested in learning more about how these dual-language education programs in other countries integrate language learning objectives along with the content learning objectives into their curricula,” Di Stefano says. “How do they make sure these goals reinforce each other—not just academically, but through linguistically and culturally sustaining praxis that position students’ languages and identities as assets? What is the sociocultural piece of all this, especially in shaping students’ development as bilingual scientists and engineers? And finally, how do educators understand these approaches shaping student outcomes, particularly in terms of students’ identity development?” 

Marialuisa Di Stefano is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she has also served as the ESL License and Bilingual Education Endorsement programs coordinator. Her scholarship focuses on dual language bilingual teacher preparation, STEAM disciplinary biliteracy development, and the intersections of language, identity, and educational equity. She has served on the faculty since 2018. Under her leadership, the UMass Amherst Bilingual Hub has grown into a regional center for dual language bilingual educator development, partnering with school districts across Massachusetts to advance language justice for multilingual students.