Past Members

Diego Román is a PhD candidate in the Educational Linguistics Program at Stanford University. After receiving his B.S. in Sustainable Agriculture (with Honors) from Zamorano University in Honduras, he earned aM.Sc. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and a M.Sc. in Biology from Stanford University. He is concurrently working on a Masters in Linguistics at Stanford as well. An experienced teacher and teacher educator, Diego holds science teaching credentials from Wisconsin and California, in addition to ESL and BCLAD certificates from these two states. At the international level, he has also worked with students and teachers in a variety of science and education projects at the Galapagos Islands trying to connect science and bilingual education with environmental protection. For his dissertation, Diego is studying the linguistic and multimodal characteristics of science texts that are used at the middle school level in California, with a special focus on the language used to discuss environmental issues. Currently, he is a Graduate Scholar in Residence at El Centro Chicano/Latino at Stanford and the John Evans Gessford Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow in K-12 Education.

Ilana is a sociologist and uses quantitative methods to study educational trajectories, course placement, and access to academic content among immigrant and English learner (EL) students. She is currently collaborating with several school districts in California and Oregon as they work to improve educational opportunities for their EL students. Her background is in educational equity and quality research in Nicaragua, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, and other countries in Latin America. She has a Masters degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and returned to academia after working with the World Bank, the Organization of American States, Research Triangle Institute, and Sesame Workshop.

Lorien Chambers Schuldt is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Teacher Education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on writing instruction and classroom discourse in classrooms with English Learners. Her dissertation study explores teachers’ oral feedback during writing instruction, examining the content and quantity of the feedback along with how teachers’ feedback relates to students’ language proficiency and writing performance. Lorien’s interest in writing instruction and classroom interactions between teachers, students and their peers began with her own experiences as an elementary teacher in public and charter schools serving culturally and linguistically diverse students.