Where I have been shapes what I learn to notice.

I began as an English language arts teacher across elementary, middle, and high school settings. Teaching made literacy concrete and relational. It showed me that students always bring histories, languages, and ways of knowing into a classroom, even when schools do not know how to recognize them. The questions that still guide my work began there: What counts as literacy, and whose competence becomes visible?

At The Ohio State University, I moved from classroom questions into research. Graduate study in teaching and learning, work in writing across the curriculum, and family visits to museums opened new sites of inquiry. I began tracing how multilingual families make meaning through talk, gesture, gaze, objects, and institutional texts. Research in science museums and an architecture design studio taught me to see competence as something built moment by moment in interaction.

At Francis Marion University, my first faculty appointment brought research and teacher education into closer conversation. Working with preservice teachers sharpened a practical challenge: noticing family competence does not automatically lead to equitable teaching. I became more interested in how professional learning can interrupt deficit assumptions and help educators build from the multilingual and cultural resources families already use.

At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I developed the Family Learning Observation and Analysis cycle in literacy methods courses. Preservice teachers entered informal learning spaces, gathered evidence, analyzed family interaction, reflected on their assumptions, and redesigned instruction. Louisiana helped turn a long-standing research commitment into a pedagogical structure for learning to notice differently.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences, I am carrying these questions into libraries and other public institutions. I am interested in how storytimes, collections, program designs, and professional routines shape what multilingual participation can look like. The setting is new, but the throughline remains: helping institutions recognize, sustain, and design for the competence that children and families already bring.