Kevin Donley

Kevin is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the MA Program in Educational Transformation , where he teaches and observes teacher residents in the Learning and Teaching Concentration. He also is a member of Project ELEECT , funded by a five-year National Professional Development (NPD) grant from the U.S. Department of Education that supports the preparation and professional development of teachers in the District of Columbia by widening the pipeline of teachers for multilingual DC students and preparing in-service teachers to meet the needs of their multilingual learners through equitable, culturally responsive pedagogy. As part of Project ELEECT, Kevin teaches a hybrid professional development program (Equity and Excellence for English Learners Professional Development Certificate) for in-service teachers in DC public and public charter schools without prior preparation in the effective education of multilingual learners. He has developed an antiracist teacher professional development curriculum that provides teachers across a variety of content areas and settings with the knowledge and skill they need to implement effective, culturally sustaining pedagogy for their multilingual learners.

Before coming to Georgetown, Kevin completed his Ph.D. in Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education at the University of Oregon, where he also worked for five years as a Spanish-English interpreter and bilingual family liaison for a local school district. Prior to his doctoral studies, Kevin was a secondary social studies and history teacher at a Spanish-English bilingual school in Quito, Ecuador, where he developed his passion for multilingualism and bilingual education, as well as his commitment to linguistic justice.

Kevin's research examines how teachers of multilingual learners navigate the complex personal, social, political, and curricular dimensions of language policy and literacy instruction. He primarily employs qualitative research methodologies to demonstrate how teachers draw on their practical experiences, knowledge, and judgement to implement culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies for their multilingual learners, like translanguaging. His dissertation research, titled Teaching with Translanguaging as a Critical Literacy Pedagogy in Elementary Bilingual Education , explores the purposes for which bilingual teachers draw on translanguaging pedagogy and the tensions that it provokes. He further shows how these purposes and tensions of translanguaging manifest locally through multiple case studies in which bilingual teachers drew on translanguaging to design and teach critical literacy lessons. In 2021, Kevin won an AERA Division G (Social Context of Education) Mini Grant to fund this research.

More generally, Kevin's research agenda aims to support the further definition and development translanguaging as a theory, pedagogy, and qualitative research methodology. He is also interested in how translanguaging theory and other concepts of culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy can be effectively integrated into the general teacher educational curriculum. This work can be found in the National Association of Bilingual Education's Journal of Research and Practice , as well as the International Multilingual Research Journal , among others. He continues this work with current DC public and public charter school teachers and administrators who are participating in the Project ELEECT professional development certificate. He also serves as a peer-reviewer for regional, national, and international journals, including the Journal of Teacher Education and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Kevin was recently recognized as a finalist for the National Association of Bilingual Education's 2023 Outstanding Dissertation Award.