Renata Love Jones is a PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College specializing in language, literacy, and culture and critical perspectives. She spent nearly decade as a K-12 language and literacy teacher working with bilingual students in the U.S. and abroad before her recent years as a literacy-based researcher and teacher educator. Renata primarily explores bi/multilingualism, (critical) content-area literacies, metalinguistic development, dialogic approaches, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. She is especially interested in pedagogies and curricula that affirm, sustain, expand, and enhance the literacies— existing and future—of culturally and linguistically diverse youth within classroom spaces. She applies socio-cultural-historical and sociolinguistics perspectives in her dissertation to explore teachers’ and their bilingual learners’ metalinguistic (thinking about language) activity and discourse during literacy instruction. Renata earned a Master of Arts in Teaching TESOL (Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages) from Rossier School of Education at University of Southern California and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Berea College, and is an alumna of The Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) at Philips Academy Andover. Beyond literacy development, she is also involved in projects related to the international landscape of research on race and education, formative—or holistic—education, and (Urban) teacher development and pipeline programs.
