Laura D. Turner is a doctoral candidate in Bilingual Bicultural Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. In addition to her experience at UT Austin, as an educational professional, Laura has served as a School Designer in the Northeastern United States, and as Director of The American Space Madrid in Spain. As a former bilingual special education teacher, Laura's research interests include the disproportionate representation of bi/multilingual children in special education programs, preservice teachers' perspectives and orientations towards language and bi/multilingualism, and developing holistic multilingual portraits of children in both bi/multilingual settings and monolingual contexts. She is particularly interested in the complex intersections that exist between the constructions of language, dis/ability, and race, and how these intersections affect the lives and educational experiences of children in educational spaces.
Laura serves on the editorial board of the Texas Education Review and is the Project Coordinator of Refuteach: Lingüística Aplicada para la inclusión de personas refugiadas. She also serves as an Applied Linguistics Coordinator with Madrid for Refugees.
Translanguaging praxis and multilingual pedagogies; holistic bi/multilingual approaches to language and bi/multilingualism; transdisciplinary research methods
Maria E Franquiz (Supervisor)
Examines ethnographic language and literacy practices in K-12 classrooms, specifically focusing on how Latinx critical race theory explains the relationship between heritage language and culture and the evolving identities of future teachers.
Paty Abril-Gonzalez (Committee Member)
Studies long-term relationships with Latinx bilingual students and teachers using arts-based biliteracy approaches to affirm and amplify silenced perspectives, build connections, and develop bilingualism and biculturalism.
Doris L Baker (Committee Member)
Develops and evaluates interventions and assessments using technology to support the academic success of Latinx students and other students whose home language is not English.
Refuteach: Lingüística aplicada para la inclusión de personas refugiadas
El proyecto Refuteach nace como una iniciativa interdisciplinar de Investigación-Acción que busca explorar, desde la práctica pedagógica y el diseño de materiales didácticos, contextos de aula novedosos y singulares, como son aquellos que acogen a estudiantes que provienen de contextos migratorios (personas refugiadas y solicitantes y beneficiarias de protección internacional).
Peabody Scholarship in Education, The University of Texas at Austin (2022 - 2023)
Graduate School Summer 2021 Fellowship, The University of Texas at Austin (2021 - 2021)
Cora Merriman Martin Scholarship, The University of Texas at Austin (2021 - 2022)
Professional Development Award, The University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Education (2021 - 2021)
Professional Development Award, The University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Education (2021 - 2021)
Graduate School of Arts and Science Scholarship, New York University (2011 - 2012)
Orientations to Language that Separate, Exclude, and Dis/able, Dean's Forum on Racial Literacy, The University of St. Thomas School of Education, (2021)
Developing Holistic Portraits: Exploring Language Orientations in Pre-Service Teacher Education, World Education Research Association (WERA), (2021)
Collaborative Linguistic Analysis in Pre-Service Teacher Education, Congreso Internacional de Educación Bilingüe (CIEB), Valladolid, Spain (2021)
