Elsa Wiehe

African Studies Center Education Outreach Program Manager

Education
Ed.D. Education, University of Massachusetts–Amherst
M.Ed. Blingual, ESL, and Multicultural Education, University of Massachusetts–Amherst
1-6 Teaching Licensure (Massachusetts)
K-6 Teaching Licensure (Minnesota)
B.A. German Studies, Macalester College
Office
Room 404, 232 Bay State Road
Email
ewiehe@bu.edu
Phone
(617) 353-7303

Elsa Wiehe leads the K-16 Education Outreach program at the African Studies Center. Her areas of expertise are teacher education, anti-racist and social justice education, linguistically and culturally responsive multilingual education, place-based education, and international education. A licensed elementary teacher, she taught English and French in elementary and secondary schools and worked as an educational consultant in West and Southern African countries focusing on gender equity and educational access. Her work as an educator is driven by a commitment to educational justice in both pedagogical processes and the advancement of critical interdisciplinary content.  As an activist, Elsa supports a number of struggles for class, racial and linguistic equity in her home country of Mauritius as well as abroad. She holds an Ed.D. in Language, Literacy, and Culture, from Umass Amherst where she also earned an M.Ed. in Multicultural, Bilingual and E.S.L. Education. Her research explores questions of equity, language, identity, and power in educational practice and teacher education, and more recently, the ways the teaching about culture, language and history shapes teachers and students, and especially diasporic students. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses, including International Development in Education to Interracial and Intercultural Communication. She’s published and presented on a number of subjects. Her new book, with F. Crawford and F. Coleman is Contemporary Issues in Equity, Democracy, and Public Education: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from Education, Social Sciences, and Health (Routledge, 2024). Other recent publications include “The Struggle for Creole in Schools in Mauritius: Toward a Decolonial Interculturality in Language Policy and Practice” for the edited collection Intercultural Education: Critical Perspectives, Pedagogical Challenges, and Promising Practices (2019) and “Creating just classrooms for English Language Learners: Using translanguaging to validate all students” with E.Robinson in Educational Foundations: An Anthology of Critical Readings (2020). Her personal website is: https://www.elsawiehe.net

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