My career has spanned teaching, teacher education, academic research, and school district-based research and program evaluation. My independent work explores ways that schooling across the curriculum relies on tacit understandings about language and literacy. I investigate how these common-sense understandings of language, or language ideologies, are produced in educational institutions. Drawing on sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and educational studies, I have shown how teachers and other educational actors negotiate language ideologies in their daily work, as well as how these ideologies often marginalize students despite teachers’ best efforts to the contrary.

In addition to my academic work, I have served as a staff researcher in two local school districts: the School District of Philadelphia and the William Penn School District, where I have worked to complicate descriptive monitoring and conceptualization of English Learners, coach school leaders on assessment data in ways that honored the complexity of instructional decision making, and advise program managers on evaluating and reflecting on their efforts to better serve students and communities. I have been a resident of the Greater Philadelphia area for over 10 years, and I have previously taught courses in the Educational Studies department as a Visiting Instructor.

Education

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Educational Linguistics

BA, Swarthmore College, Special Major in Educational Studies and Linguistics (with elementary teaching certification)

 

Selected Publications

Lewis, M. C. (2021). Creating and sustaining representations of academic language: Curricularization and language ideologies in second grade. Linguistics and Education.

Lewis, M. C. (2018). A critique of the principle of error correction as a theory of social change. Language in Society, 47(3), 325–346.

Flores, N., & Lewis, M. C. (2022). “False Positives, Reentry Programs, and Long Term English Learners”: Undoing Dichotomous Frames in U.S. Language Education Policy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 55(3), 257–269.

Flores, N., Lewis, M. C., & Phuong, J. (2018). Raciolinguistic chronotopes and the education of Latinx students: Resistance and anxiety in a bilingual school. Language & Communication, 62, 15–25.