Assistant Professor of Instruction, Bicultural-Bilingual Studies
Dr. Silva is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESL) program area at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Miami in 2008 and taught Portuguese at Middlebury College in Vermont in 2013. She serves on the TESOL Journal editorial advisory board and is the co-chair of the TESOL Intercultural Communication Interest Section. She also reviews conference abstracts for the TESOL International Association (TESOL), the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Dr. Silva is passionate about social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. Her work is driven by a commitment to creating a more equitable and inclusive learning environment for all students, especially multilingual learners. In her scholarly work, she challenges deficit views that impact multilingual learners’ learning development. She also creates, cultivates, and supports spaces for teacher candidates to prepare for working with multilingual learners.