A current doctoral candidate at Southern pursuing her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Kristin Bengtson Mendoza is a scholar-practitioner committed to equity and access in multilingual education. She is currently the Lead Teacher and Instructional Coach of the International Academy at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, where she facilitates professional learning and instructional improvement with a team of teachers and their multilingual students. With two decades of experience in education, leadership, and advocacy for immigrant students and families, Kristin has served in public schools in Guatemala, New York City, and New Haven. She has also taught dualenrollment ESL courses at CT State Gateway, and as an adjunct faculty member for the TESOL & Bilingual Education program here at Southern. In addition, she has been a Fulbright Scholar to Guatemala, and she was named the 2021 New Haven Public Schools Teacher of the Year. Kristin shares:
“The word that comes to mind is transformative. I am not only a different professional at work; I am a profoundly different reader, writer, and thinker than the woman who started this doctoral journey. I have discovered a passion for critical participatory action research and am excited to explore how this methodology can generate actionable findings here in New Haven and beyond. As I prepare to defend my dissertation, which explores how content teachers in a high school newcomer program can learn about translanguaging and develop critical language awareness, I’m very grateful to my professors for the ways they have pushed me to develop my conceptual understanding, my capacity as a leader, and my research and writing skills. The cohort experience of our program has also been very meaningful to me, as I have had the chance to grow alongside such diverse and talented individuals. My advice to current or prospective graduate students is to push themselves to present at conferences and take advantage of the funding available at Southern for conference travel. Workshopping your ideas and learning from others in this setting will always lead to new insights and connections”.
