Sara Exposito

Assistant Professor of Education

department: Education
program: Teacher Education
office: 420 Rogers Hall
phone: 503-768-6127
e-mail: sarae@lclark.edu

Professional Biography

Dr. Sara Exposito is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Education at Lewis & Clark College. Sara has worked as a teacher, consultant and professor in education for the past twenty years. Her area of expertise is language, literacy and culture.

Sara began her career in education as an elementary and middle school teacher in Southern California. She later worked with schools at the district and state level as a teacher on special assignment, administrator and consultant. Sara has served as an educational consultant with districts in California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington. Her work is focused on improving teaching and learning for diverse children and families.

Sara served as a Master Practitioner for UCLA’s Advanced Management Program working with principals and teachers in Los Angeles Unified School District's (LEARN) reform effort. She was Regional Director for the California Reading and Literature Project (CRLP), a statewide Subject Matter Project at California State University in Los Angeles. Sara also served as Director of Educational Services for the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE), a statewide non-profit organization serving the needs of California educators working with English language learners.

Sara has taught at Claremont Graduate School and at Pacific Oaks College in California. She is a faculty member for the ESOL Endorsement at Lewis and Clark College.

Academic Credentials

Academic Credentials
Claremont Graduate University May 2004
Ph.D. in Education
Dissertation: Immigrant Dreams: A Study of Mexican Mothers and Language Choice

Claremont Graduate University 2001
M.A. in Education
Thesis: Proposition 227 and Literacy in California Schools

California State University, Los Angeles 1984
B.A. in Liberal Studies
Thesis: Liberation Theology in El Salvador

Research and Current Work

Dr. Exposito research is focused on the social and cultural capital immigrant students bring into the classroom. Her work centers on establishing partnerships between educational agencies and families in order to effectively use the assets of language, history and culture to improve programs and practice.

Designing literacy instruction that incorporates narrative writing as a way to bridge the public and private lives of students. The use of storytelling practice to guide students in exploring identity, family and community. Creating and using asset based instruction.
Exploring ways immigrant parents use network systems to access funds of knowledge.
The relationship between networks, funds of knowledge, social and cultural capital.
Interviews focused on the hopes and struggles of immigrant women as they reflect on their lives prior to entering the U.S. and compare these experiences to their current reality.

Presentations

Institutions of Higher Learning and the Non-Traditional Student; Challenges and Opportunities. Re-conceptualizing Early Childhood Conference, hosted by the University of Waikato. Rotorua, New Zealand, 2007.
Tapping Immigrant Resources for Culturally Responsive Professional Development. AERA, Chicago, Illinois, 2007.
Reflective Voices: Valuing Immigrant Students and Teaching with Ideological Clarity. University of California Linguistic Minority Research Conference, Berkeley, California, 2003.

Publishing

Reflective Voices: Valuing Immigrant Students and Teaching with Ideological Clarity. The Urban Review Journal, March 2003.
Institutions of Higher Learning and the Non-Traditional Student; Challenges and Opportunities. (Submitted to The Review of Education and Cultural Studies Journal)
- This essay creates a theoretical frame for the use of narrative in teaching non-traditional students in institutions of higher learning. The paper includes specific strategies used to bridge content with student funds of knowledge.
Tapping Immigrant Resources for Culturally Responsive Professional Development. (Awaiting peer review for Latinos in Education)
- This paper describes the Oregon Language Literacy and Culture Institute as an innovative professional development opportunity for teachers working with diverse student populations.
Notes on Change: School Reform in Costa Rica. Targeted Leadership Consulting Web
- This paper is based on consulting work with the American International School (AIS) in Costa Rica. The work centers on restructuring schools through an instructional focus. For AIS the selected focus is writing. Consulting includes creating and training an Instructional Leadership Team (ILT), coaching administrators, conducting school walkthroughs and working with the Board to create more informed practitioners and high quality student writing.

Sara Exposito

Resume (.rtf)

"The practical reality is that when we fail to recognize and make our own choices, we allow others to make them for us."
--Patricia H. Hinchey, Finding Freedom in the Classroom

I have worked in education with diverse populations for my entire professional career. I am the granddaughter and daughter of immigrants and I am an immigrant myself so I have always had a passion for understanding how language and culture develop and influence identity. My father is Cuban and my mother is Spanish and I grew up crossing multiple linguistic and cultural realities. As a result of these experiences I have always questioned what it means to be an immigrant learning in American schools.

I have worked in bilingual schools for most of my elementary teaching career and am fascinated with how the private self becomes altered within the public arena. For students who are learning a new language and are adjusting to a new way of being this is a stressful process. Creating opportunities for students to tell their story alleviates this stress and helps teacher and student become more fully human. This is why using narrative not only improves a student's literacy it also helps students to reclaim their voice.

For the last two years I have been interested in looking at what schools outside of the United States are doing to work with diverse populations. I have traveled to New Zealand and visited the Maori language nests and have been working in Costa Rica with an international school that provides instruction in English and Spanish. Having been a bilingual educator I believe strongly in the power of learning in two languages. I also acknowledge that this is not always possible. For this reason it becomes imperative that we create schools that not only teach English in authentic ways but also honor the knowledge, history and realities that diverse students bring.

I have been living in Portland for two years. I am eager for my son, Joshua to come join me in Portland when he finishes high school.