Multiliteracy Justice
Fulbright Scholar Imamatul Khair is positioning STEAM instruction within multiliteracy and dual language pedagogy.
Fulbright Scholar Imamatul Khair ('23 MEd) is a teacher/activist from Madura Island, a small island located off the northeastern coast of Java in Indonesia.
Prior to enrolling at UMass Amherst to earn her master's degree in Bilingual, ESL, and Multicultural Education, she worked for Saghara Elmo, a community school literacy organization in Madura. Working with multilingual students was a powerful lesson in educational equity, Khair said, because speaking only in English didn't achieve the engaged learning she knew her students were capable of.
"I thought I should find another pedagogical approach for multilingual learners like them," she said.
In the College of Education, Khair is actively researching multilingual interventions for the Indonesian education system. Her passion for STEAM disciplines constitutes an overall framework for her research on multiliteracies.
"I am now more able to see classroom teaching in more socially constructed ways...[and] more importantly, being responsible for bringing my students' cultural and linguistic assets into their learning."