Alba Franco

Alba Franco is a doctoral student in education with a focus on language and literacy at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. She is also a graduate research assistant at the Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being. Her research examines the intersections of language, identity, and power dynamics in multilingual classrooms. She is particularly interested in how language education policies and practices impact linguistically and culturally diverse learners and in fostering heritage language development in educational contexts. Through her work, she advocates for equitable policies and practices that empower linguistically minoritized students.

At BU Wheelock, Alba contributes to the Nuestros Niños Professional Development Program, conducting language assessments, classroom observations, and data collection to support bilingual education. She is a certified Early Childhood Montessori teacher with extensive experience teaching Italian and English as foreign languages. As a Fulbright scholar at CU Boulder, Alba specialized in educational policies, focusing on issues of equity and access for linguistically and culturally diverse students.

Her academic and professional experiences reflect a commitment to promoting inclusive and equitable education for all students, particularly those from marginalized linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

pronouns: she/her