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Alice Miano
Advanced Lecturer
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Dr. Alice (Ali) Miano teaches Spanish at all levels from an antiracist, social justice standpoint. She also incorporates and studies the effects of community-engaged language learning (CELL), both in her classes and in the Spanish-speaking communities in which she and her students interact. Her work examines reciprocal gains as well as challenges in CELL, and likewise interrogates traditional notions of "service" and “help” while underscoring the community cultural wealth, resistance, and resilience (Yosso, 2005) found in under-resourced communities and communities of color. She and her second-year students of Spanish have teamed up on joint art projects with a local chapter of the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula and currently collaborate with the Mountain View Dayworker Center. Many of her third-year students have co-created digital storytelling projects with ý workers.
Dr. Miano's current work examines the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytical tool for students of Spanish who wish to gain deeper understandings of some of the social, cultural, and historical forces linking race and language. This work has found that CRT vitally engages students in the language classroom and may likewise lead to more robust communicative proficiency. In addition, her ethnographic research has examined the literate practices and parental school efforts of Mexican immigrant mothers in the Silicon Valley, finding that regardless of the mothers' (in)access to formal education, they supported their children's schooling in a variety of ways, many of which go unrecognized by educators and the society at large.
Dr. Miano has also volunteered to assist asylum seekers through the CARA Probono Project at the South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, TX; Al Otro Lado in Tijuana, Mexico; the Services, Immigration Rights, and Education Network (SIREN) in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Freedom for Immigrants.
In addition, as a workshop facilitator certified by ACTFL in the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and Writing Proficiency Test (WPT), Dr. Miano has been privileged to engage with language instructors at various points around the globe--including Madagascar and Timor Leste, as well as a variety of Latin American countries from Paraguay to Mexico--on behalf of both ACTFL and the U.S. Peace Corps.
Dr. Miano's current work examines the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytical tool for students of Spanish who wish to gain deeper understandings of some of the social, cultural, and historical forces linking race and language. This work has found that CRT vitally engages students in the language classroom and may likewise lead to more robust communicative proficiency. In addition, her ethnographic research has examined the literate practices and parental school efforts of Mexican immigrant mothers in the Silicon Valley, finding that regardless of the mothers' (in)access to formal education, they supported their children's schooling in a variety of ways, many of which go unrecognized by educators and the society at large.
Dr. Miano has also volunteered to assist asylum seekers through the CARA Probono Project at the South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, TX; Al Otro Lado in Tijuana, Mexico; the Services, Immigration Rights, and Education Network (SIREN) in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Freedom for Immigrants.
In addition, as a workshop facilitator certified by ACTFL in the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and Writing Proficiency Test (WPT), Dr. Miano has been privileged to engage with language instructors at various points around the globe--including Madagascar and Timor Leste, as well as a variety of Latin American countries from Paraguay to Mexico--on behalf of both ACTFL and the U.S. Peace Corps.