In this episode, I had the honor of welcoming Latania Marr y Ortega to talk about her personal journey in educator, her Chicana heritage, the emergence of bilingualism, her doctoral work on the community cultural wealth of culturally linguistically diverse families, and much more!  To learn more about Latania's work, you can follow her on Instagram (@_my_own_muse) and Twitter (@LMarr98)!  

BIO: Latania Marr y Ortega is an Ed.D Candidate at Kansas State University (K-State) where she facilitates Teaching English as a Second Language courses in the Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy (CIMA). Most recently, she assisted in organizing and facilitating the inaugural conference, "Beyond Envisioning Equity: Situating Teachers of Color Voices".  A New Mexico native, Latania has been an educator for 19 years. She taught in a dual language elementary school program where she also was an instructor in the University of New Mexico (UNM) Family Literacy program in Albuquerque, NM. She continued her work with families when she taught adult ESL programs during her time as a secondary English Language Arts Teacher. Her passion to advocate for and engage BIPOC families in our school communities has continued by sharing strategies to current and future teachers to use the Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) to drive instruction as well as resist the injustice and systemic racism that is prevalent in our school systems.  Latania proudly earned her MA in Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies (emphasis: Bilingual Education) at UNM. She earned her BA in Elem.Ed (minors:Bilingual/TESOL & Sociology) from New Mexico Highlands University.