Mina Hernandez Garcia selected as 2023 AAAL Conference Graduate Student Awardee

Each year the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference announces Graduate Student Awards made to the authors of the best proposals for papers submitted by graduate students.

Mina Hernandez Garcia recently earned a PhD in Educational Studies. Mina is committed to supporting bi/multilingual and immigrant students who are new to English in U.S. subject-matter classrooms. She has taught English as a foreign/second language in a variety of educational contexts, and has also worked as a teacher educator, training new teachers who work with emergent bilingual students. Mina’s research studies translanguaging in middle school inquiry-oriented social studies classrooms. Her work offers important insights into the ways teachers can support emergent bilingual students to expand their bilingual repertoires as they develop disciplinary literacy and language. After finishing her PhD, Mina plans to become a professor, and to continue training teachers to discover their enthusiasm for teaching and to support emergent bilingual learners and other minoritized students. She hopes her work will help more students experience education as just and equitable, and help teachers create inclusive and welcoming classroom environments for all. She believes that supporting bilingual children recognizes and respects their identities and futures as multilingual citizens.