Dr. Meghan Corella
Assistant Professor
she / her / ella
Bilingual/multilingual education
Critical literacies/pedagogies
Discourse analysis
Gender, sexuality and queer inclusion
Identity
Language ideologies
Race and antiracism
Biography
I’m an applied linguist and educator who was drawn to the field of language and literacy education because I see it as having enormous and often untapped potential for helping build a more loving, thoughtful, and just society. I have a background in sociocultural linguistics, early childhood education, discourse analysis, ethnographic methods, antiracism, (intersectional) feminism, and Spanish literary and cultural studies. These specializations, along with my life experiences—particularly my own encounters with violence and my identity as a US-born White settler woman with English “native speaker” privilege—continually encourage me to place questions of power at the center of my work as a teacher and researcher. What is power? What does it mean to have—or not have—power? How do discourses about power shape the ways people position themselves and others, and how do these positionings relate to larger social structures and social (in)justices? What forms of power do we—and could we—enact through our language and literacy practices?
I address these and other questions through research on a variety of topics, including academic language practices and ideologies in elementary classrooms, children’s peer gestural socialization practices in classrooms, less visible forms of competence of multilingual kids, and experiences of racialization in school settings at all grade levels. In all of this work, my overall aim is to contribute to social justice by understanding how social structures and relations of power are reinforced and reconfigured through the agentive and nuanced ways people, particularly minoritized children, use linguistic, embodied, and other semiotic resources in interactions.
I teach courses on discourse analysis, power and politics in the practices of children and young people, applied linguistics, child language development, and language and literacy pedagogies for teachers.
If you’re a graduate student with similar questions and interests, I’m currently accepting a limited number of students who share both methodological and topical interests with me; feel free to email me with a concise description of yourself and the reasons for your interest.
Selected Publications
