Profile

Ryan Monroe is from Newport News, Virginia.  Although his first degree was a BS in Geology from the College of William and Mary, since that time, he has worked in a wide range of educational contexts, teaching adult literacy, ESL, and bilingual education, and also working as an administrator and teacher educator in these fields.

He received his MA in Instructional Systems Development from UMBC, with a major in ESOL/Bilingual in 1984, and then spent the next three years in Honduras, where he worked in adult literacy. As a result of that work, two of his literacy textbooks were published by the Honduran Ministry of Education:  Cartilla de alfabetizaction Garifuna and Alfabetizacion Garifuna: Guia del maestro.

After leaving Honduras, Ryan taught ESL and bilingual science at the secondary level for eleven years in a variety of locations including Maryland, Washington, DC, and Northern California.  While in California, he graduated from the Bilingual Instructional Leadership Training Program at California State University in Sacramento.  Ryan’s teaching is highlighted in Portraits of Teachers in Multicultural Settings: A Critical Literacy Approach edited by Lettie Ramirez and Olivia Gallardo (Allyn and Bacon, 1999).  He also contributed a short story, “El maestro tonto” for a collection, Erase que sera, edited by Alma Flor Ada and published by Harcourt-Brace in 1997.

In addition to his work in bilingual education, Ryan has wide experience in the area of training educational personnel to make schools safe for gay and lesbian youth.  One of his publications, “Laws and Court Cases Relating to Sexual Orientation and Schools” is published in Inclusive Curriculum: The Silent Minority Comes to the Classroom  (The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network of Los Angeles,1998).

Ryan is currently coordinator of Bilingual Education:  Training for All Teachers at McDaniel College in Westminster, MD, where he is developing a Master’s level training program for educators who work with language minority students in US public schools.

Ryan’s research interests are in teacher education, critical pedagogy, language rights and bilingual education.

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News

Ryan Monroe successfully defended his dissertation, Testing the "Low" Class: Standardized Assessment in the Lives of Hispanic ELL Students. Professor Sarah Shin chaired Ryan's committee.

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