Marjorie Elaine is Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, where she serves as Associate Director of the International Program on Migration. Her research and teaching interests took root in her years as a bilingual classroom teacher in a new immigrant community in Los Angeles (from 1983 to 1993) and as an activist in the Central American Solidarity Movement during those years. It centers on the experiences of immigrant youth in urban schools and communities, including as language and cultural brokers for their families, and on designing dynamic spaces for learning in multicultural and multilingual communities. She directs an afterschool program (Bruin Club) that is linked to an undergraduate course (Ed 194). She is the author of three books:
Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2009),
Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love (Routledge, 2016), and
Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart, and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2019), as well as a co-edited volume (with Inmaculada García-Sánchez):
Language and Cultural Processes in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups (Routledge, 2019).