CFD Team Spotlight: Noah Veloz, Graduate Fellow
The Newsletter Team sat down for an interview with one of our graduate fellows, Noah Veloz, for an interview about their work, passions, hobbies, and special CFD projects. The transcript of our interview is below.
CFD Team: Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m originally from Southern California. I have moved around a lot including Utah, New Jersey, New York City, Paris, and now Boston. But a recent trip to California reminded me of the connections I still have to the sequoias, the mountain sage, and the open beaches of my home state.
I am a third year PhD student and graduate worker at the Wheelock School of Education and Human Development, Language and Literacy Education program. A central focus of mine is adult immigrant education that takes place in community-based organizations such as ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes, GED/HSE classes and Citizenship classes, particularly focusing on adults with interrupted formal education and literacy. Because this is an intersectional issue, I have been lucky to engage in research that touches in multiple sectors including immigrant family engagement in K-12 schools, English Learner’s access to post-secondary education, and representations of equity seeking groups in English teacher education textbooks.
CFD Team: What is your role within the Center?
I am a graduate research assistant. I have been helping especially with some of the pedagogy focused projects such as the recent teacher education workshop and a workshop with a local refugee resettlement agency.
CFD Team: What experiences most directly led you to your role with the Center?
Prior to coming to BU, I worked for six years in the non-profit based adult immigrant education sector. I taught French to migrants and refugees in a community center in Paris while doing my Master’s thesis in the same topic. Then I moved to the Bronx, NYC, where I taught English at a settlement house to a diverse population of adult migrants. I eventually became the program coordinator of that program for four years. I developed a lot of critical questions about how we support migrant adults, and how our educational approaches and priorities shape their experiences in ways that too often didn’t match up with what they were looking for and asking for. I am hoping to explore these issues through my PhD and with the Center.
CFD Team: What inspires you about this work?
There are many things that inspire me, because sometimes this work can be hard. I enjoy teaching and love my experiences with the adults in my classrooms. I just finished substitute teaching a class of formerly refugee students, and after just three weeks I felt emotional saying goodbye. I also love languages, both teaching and learning them. I speak Spanish, French, some Japanese and my language learning experiences have fundamentally changed how I view the world and who I am as a person. I grew up in a high demand, high control religious community, and my experiences with language allowed me to develop a larger sense of my identity and of the world before I had the agentive tools to do so. I have been moving into new communities, cultures, and languages ever since.
But ultimately, I think that my instinct in trying to make a difference in the world is to think about how we treat our most vulnerable. Most of what I learned in my undergrad and masters programs just didn’t apply to or resonate with the learning needs and experiences of adult migrants, especially those with limited formal education and literacy. Most of the hypothetical learners we talked about in my programs looked like me: White, western, college educated, elective bilinguals. I am grateful for my experiences, but in the end it’s a very narrow slice of experiences. If you want to see how language works, let’s look first at the people for whom the way we think about language and education isn’t working so great.
CFD Team: Tell us about some of your passions and hobbies outside of academia. What makes you, you?
This question always makes me feel a little guilty because I don’t think I attend to the non-work parts of myself enough. But I enjoy nature, reading, walking along my local reservoir and learning to recognize our more-than-human plant and animal neighbors, particularly the local sumac and oak trees. I enjoy cooking and eating out, video games, and my partner and I have recently decided to learn how to weave fabric on a rigid heddle loom.
CFD Team: Where do you see yourself in five years?
Another difficult question! Professionally I hope to have my PhD completed with a few publications under my belt. I think there is a lot to learn and accomplish through research, but I also do not want to divorce myself from teaching, community-based practice and the non-profit world. I also think that academia is better suited to some kinds of knowledge than others, so I want to keep engaging in more creative endeavors such as writing and art.
CFD Team: What is your current passion project with the Center you would like to highlight? Why does this project resonate with you?
I am pretty new at the center. I look forward to their support in my dissertation work, once I get that going. But I particularly learned a lot from the teacher’s workshop on forced displacement that we offered during the summer. We worked with an incredible group of teachers and it got me thinking about what a good research-community collaboration can look like.
CFD Team: What drew you to this position?
I think that work with forcibly displaced persons is inherently a very interdisciplinary affair. I am excited to work with a really smart team with such diverse backgrounds and interests. I come from a pedagogy and applied linguistics background, but look forward to looking through other lenses.
CFD Team: Can you tell us a fun fact about yourself/can you tell us about something you’re proud of?
My ancestors, Frank Veloz and Yolanda Cassaza, were children of immigrants and a famous dancing couple. One fun fact is that they owned a famous hot-dog stand in Los Angeles, created in 1946, that is in the shape of a hot dog called the Tail of the Pup. Although not in my family anymore, it’s now a historic landmark in LA.