Suárez awarded 2022 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship

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Assistant Professor Enrique (Henry) Suárez, math, science, and learning technologies, has been selected as a 2022 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. Suárez is one of only 25 recipients this year, out of a pool of more than 250 applicants. This prestigious award comes with a stipend of $70,000.

According to NAEd, these fellowships are intended to fund researchers whose projects "address critical issues in the history, theory, or practice of formal or informal education, at the national and international levels."

Suárez’s project is titled “More Than Words: How Emergent Bilingual Students Laminate Multiple Semiotic Resources When Investigating Justice-Oriented Natural Phenomena.” His work will investigate translanguaging--a theoretical and pedagogical lens for understanding how bi-/multilingual speakers flexibly leverage their full semiotic repertoires—to explore how bilingual students in elementary grades investigate phenomena and co-construct knowledge, particularly when interacting with their material environments. This methodological approach encourages drawing on students’ full communicative abilities to support science learning, rather than assimilating them into dominant forms of knowing and communicating.

Part of Suárez’s research will involve partnering with elementary school teachers to design science learning activities that are justice-oriented. These activities will also promote bilingual students’ sophisticated translanguaging practices. The findings from Suárez’s research will further inform how to design justice-oriented science education for bi-/multilingual children, while also disrupting the deficit-based science pedagagoies that frame these students’ ways of communicating as insufficient and inappropriate.

"For me, this fellowship represents a great opportunity to develop mutualistic relationships with local elementary school teachers and make science education more equitable, especially for bi-/multilingual young children," said Suárez. "Moreover, this award is a recognition of the scholarship I’ve developed here at UMass, which aims to disrupt oppressive language ideologies in science learning environments."

More about Enrique Suárez

Enrique (Henry) Suárez is an Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Drawing on a range of learning theories, his scholarship focuses on making science learning equitable and just for students and teachers, emphasizing the importance of understanding and relating to the natural world through investigations. Specifically, Henry’s research focuses on designing and studying learning environments that create opportunities for elementary-aged multilingual students to leverage their translanguaging practices for learning science. Ultimately, Henry’s work aims to disrupt linguistic injustices in science learning environments, which police and denigrate students’ multilingual, multimodal, and multisensory forms of communication. His scholarship has appeared in Science Education, Cognition & Instruction, and Journal of Research in Science Teaching, among other journals. Most recently, he was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on Enhancing Science and Engineering Education in Pre-Kindergarten Through Fifth Grades. Henry received his PhD in Science Education from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2017 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Science and Math Education at the University of Washington 2017-2019. He also holds a B.S. in astrophysics from the University of Oklahoma and a M.S. in science education from Tufts University.