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Emerging Scholars Circle SIG Meeting 11/13/25
Online Meeting
Thursday, November 13, 2025, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM EST
Category: Special Interest Groups

 

Emerging Scholars Circle SIG is for international and domestic undergraduate and graduate students interested in social justice-oriented research centered around equity, diversity, inclusion and empowerment. The Emerging Scholars Circle SIG is a bridging space for these students who are engaged in scholarly research and undergraduate/graduate school coursework.. Visit the Emerging Scholars Circle SIG page for more information.

 Juan David Gutiérrez, Ph.D.​​

Student Voice Across Time: Narrative Inquiry into Multilingual Transitions in Higher Education
How do multilingual students make sense of their academic journeys across time? In this presentation, Dr. Juan D. Gutiérrez shares a narrative inquiry study tracing the first-year experiences of multilingual university students navigating language, learning, and institutional transitions. Through a three-phase interview process, the study highlights how students’ voices and self-perceptions evolve across an academic year. The session foregrounds the methodological value of temporally grounded narrative research for capturing complexity in student development and informing inclusive practices in higher education.


Juan D. Gutiérrez, Ph.D., is Director of Curriculum and Instruction for Pathways and Multilingual Programs at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His work bridges research and practice in higher education, with a focus on multilingual learners, narrative inquiry, and transitional academic experiences. He specializes in longitudinal qualitative methods to examine student voice, identity development, and academic success. Gutiérrez has taught and led programs across the K–16 continuum and currently oversees instructional design, technology integration, and faculty development for pre-collegiate and collegiate programs in a public urban university context.
Minh Nghia Nguyen, Ph.D.
Storytelling Literacy Pedagogy: Stories from the Vietnamese Diaspora
This talk presents a community-based study that developed a culturally sustaining pedagogy for the holistic literacy development of Vietnamese immigrants in Massachusetts. Grounded in sociocultural and critical perspectives, the pedagogy used storytelling as a cultural practice to honor learners’ knowledge, promote multilingual literacy, and advance multilingual justice in adult education. Drawing on 28 weeks of classroom data, oral and written stories, and interviews, the study shows how literacy learning became a site for cognitive, emotional, and identity development, positioning learners as active participants in shaping pedagogy and community life. This work reimagines adult literacy education as a socially committed praxis that bridges the community and the university, challenging neoliberal approaches while fostering relational, community-led knowledge creation.


Minh Nghia Nguyen, Ph.D., teaches MA courses in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on promoting holistic bilingual literacy development among immigrant adult language learners through the cultural practice of storytelling. She conducts critical multimodal discourse analysis, particularly on the necropolitical discourse of collective memory, multimodal classroom interaction, digital discourse of collective identity, gesture, and critical narrative inquiry through duoethnography. Beyond academia, she is committed to community-based work and has collaborated closely with Vietnamese and broader AAPI communities and organizations—including ATASK and AAPI Women Lead—on intergenerational, participatory research projects addressing linguistic violence, domestic violence, and gender-based violence.
This meeting will take place online via ZOOM Meeting: 
Emerging Scholars Circle Meeting Link