Samuel David

My work as both a teacher and researcher at the University of Minnesota are centrally concerned with improving instruction for minoritized multilingual students across diverse classroom contexts. I began my career in education as a Spanish-English bilingual special education teacher in elementary and middle grades in Brooklyn, NY. Since transitioning to higher education, my scholarship has focused on developing literacy-based instructional strategies that build on students' linguistic and cultural strengths, and on helping teachers develop the skills to enact these strategies successfully. This work is grounded in the understanding that there are no one-size-fits-all strategies that meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Teachers must create or adapt instructional strategies that elicit and build on student strengths to achieve the specific disciplinary objectives of their curricula. In my teacher education courses, we learn how to create a classroom ecology where students feel safe to bring all of their linguistic resources to academic tasks, and then build on those resources to design instruction that meets students academic and social-emotional needs. 

Since 2011, I have worked with Project TRANSLATE, a multi-institution partnership of researchers, to develop and study an instructional approach that uses collaborative translation to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension skills across their linguistic repertoires. This work was recognized in 2015 with the Alan C. Purves Award from the National Council of Teachers of English, an award given annually for an article published in Research in the Teaching of English judged as "likely to have the greatest impact on educational practice." I also collaborate with practicing teachers to adapt this approach, and other translanguaging strategies, for a wide variety of subject areas, student populations, and program models. Through analysis of expert teachers adapting these new practices into their curricula, I aim to develop tools that all teachers can use to successfully enact culturally and linguistically responsive teaching.

Awards

• Alan C. Purves Award, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). 2015
• CUNY/Americorps Education Award. 2009
• CUNY/Americorps Education Award. 2006

Associations/Memberships

• AERA, American Educational Research Association 
• LRA, Literacy Research Association 
• AAAL, American Association for Applied Linguistics 
• MinneTESOL

Sponsored projects

• TRANSLATE (Teaching Reading And New Strategic Language Approach To Emergent bilinguals), project will run three years and yield findings in late 2021. Sponsored by the Spencer Foundation.
• SLATE (Strategic Language Approaches for Teachers of English learners), Robert T. Jiménez, PI, June 2012. Sponsored by the Peabody Small Faculty Research Grant

News stories

Vanderbilt University - “Reading curriculum for immigrant children funded by Spencer Foundation," Nov 30, 2018