About Us

Dr. Alison G. Dover is a professor in the Department of Secondary Education at California State University, Fullerton. She holds a doctorate in social justice education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has taught English Language Arts and service learning in diverse urban school districts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Dr. Dover works extensively with local and national students, educators, and school communities to advance social justice, agency, and culturally sustaining pedagogies in K–12 and teacher education. She is co-author of Preparing to Teach Social Studies for Social Justice: Becoming a Renegade (2016, Teachers College Press) and Radically Inclusive Teaching with Newcomer and Emergent Plurilingual Students: Braving Up (2022, Teachers College Press), and has written numerous journal articles and book chapters related to literacy, equity-oriented approaches to teacher education, and teaching for social justice. Dr. Dover holds leadership roles in the American Educational Research Association (Division K: Teaching and Teacher Education) and the California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education (CARE-ED), and is the principal investigator for a Spencer Foundation Research-Practice Partnership Grant titled Project LEARN: Language, Equity and Action Research with Newcomer Students.  To learn more about Dr. Dover, visit alisongdover.com 

Dr. Fernando (Ferran) Rodríguez-Valls is a professor at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). Dr. Rodríguez-Valls has created partnerships with school districts and local educational agencies to develop and implement community-based [bi/-multi]literacy programs. At CSUF, Dr. Rodríguez-Valls coordinates the Bilingual Authorization Program and the World Languages Program. In this capacity, he recruits and prepares future educators to design, implement, and evaluate asset-based and heteroglossic practices. Dr. Rodríguez-Valls’s publications, including his first book Teaching and Supporting Migrant Children of Farm Worker Families: A Cultural Proficiency Approach (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), focus on equitable and linguistically inclusive methodologies for emergent plurilingual, newcomer, and [im]migrant students as well as on the sociocultural factors affecting their academic achievement, educational continuity, and school engagement. Dr. Rodríguez-Valls has directed and co-directs grant projects in which teacher candidates have the opportunity to create brave learning spaces where teaching overpowers instruction, where learning surpasses drilling, where languages conquer monolingualism, and where critical thinking eradicates fanaticism and a fake sense of monoglossic and univocal identity.