Featured speaker: Mary Jane Begin

Mary Jane Begin is an award-winning children’s book illustrator, author, and professor. She collaborated with Hasbro and Little Brown and Company to create the picture books Under the Sparkling Sea and Dragons on Dazzle Island for Hasbro’s My Little Pony franchise. She’s worked with Celestial Seasonings, Mead Johnson and Disney, and has received multiple awards for her picture books, Willow Buds, The Tale of Toad and Badger and Ping Meets Pang.

Read her full bio here.

Featured speaker: Andrea Chen

Andrea has over 10 years of experience teaching multilingual learners and worked within historically underserved populations in New York City and San Francisco. She partners with school leaders and educators to write and revise effective curricula, and most recently implemented new social emotional curriculum across her district. Andrea holds her Masters in Childhood Education from Hunter College and a Masters in TESOL from St. John’s University. She is passionate about engaging local community to create inclusive and welcoming learning environments, and applies this passion to her roles as a volunteer for Earth Love United Foundation and as a co-leader for an organization aimed at training and retaining new teachers.

Featured speaker: Dr. Carola Oliva-Olson

Dr. Carola Oliva-Olson is the Executive Director of Language Justice and Multilingual Education at the Institute for Racial Equity and Excellence. Dr. Carola Oliva-Olson has over 30 years of experience in early childhood education with a focus on advancing equity and quality in education for all children. She’s a leading expert on multilingualism and in applying her experience to workforce development and preparing early childhood education professionals for teaching in diverse and inclusive classrooms. Carola was appointed to the California Governor’s Early Childhood Policy Council and has been instrumental in advancing multilingual education in early childhood education in California classrooms.

Featured speaker: Dr. Adriana Oniță

Adriana Oniță is a multilingual educator, poet, artist, and researcher. She holds a PhD in language education from the University of Alberta, where she researched how youth can maintain their heritage languages through arts-based practices. Having taught languages and pedagogy for 14 years in Canada, Italy, Spain, and Romania, Adriana is passionate about building and sustaining creative multilingual learning spaces for children, teens, adults, and seniors. (You’ll want to read our full conversation with Adriana about this topic). She is the founding editor of The Polyglot, which has published over 160 poets and artists working in 45 languages. Adriana writes în limba română, English, español, français, and italiano, and was recently shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize with her bilingual (Romanian/English) poetry. Discover her pedagogy and publications on her website adrianaonita.com.

Featured speaker: Dr. Olenka Bilash

Dr. Olenka Bilash is an award-winning educator, researcher, practitioner, and former Associate Dean at the University of Alberta. She has been on the frontier of several new fields of practice in education: immersion bilingual pedagogy, Aboriginal language education, and Heritage/International languages. She was awarded the Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Faculty of Education Undergraduate Teaching Award at the University of Alberta, Northern Alberta Heritage Language Association 20th Anniversary Award and the Tribal Chiefs´ Association Award for her contribution to Developing Cree Language Materials, among other awards. She is also the recipient of the prestigious 3M Teaching Fellow award.

Read our conversation with her, here!