Meet Our Team
Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul
Principle Investigator and Project Director
Carla Zembal-Saul, Ph.D., is the Principal Investigator for Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through School, Community, University Partnership. She is the Kahn Endowed Professor of STEM Education in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research agenda is focused on how pre-service and practicing elementary teachers learn to orchestrate discourse-rich scientific and engineering practices in their instruction, evidence-based argumentation in particular (Avraamidou & Zembal-Saul, 2010, 2005; Emig et al., 2014; Haefner & Zembal-Saul, 2004). Zembal-Saul is committed to practitioner inquiry in teacher education and intentionally connects research and practice in her work with teachers. She is heavily involved with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), and hosted two webinar series on teaching the NGSS in elementary classrooms in 2014-15, and she was also recognized as a NSTA Fellow in 2015. Zembal-Saul served on the Committee for Strengthening Science Education through a Teacher Learning Continuum, which recently published their report, Science Teachers’ Learning: Enhancing Opportunities, Creating Supporting Contexts (NAP, 2015). She will be responsible for providing leadership and expertise as they relate to the science professional learning opportunities for teachers, administrators, community educators, and parents. Zembal-Saul’s expertise in design-based research allows her to provide leadership in the development and implementation phases of the PD and research plans, as well as qualitative studies on teacher learning and development (Zembal-Saul, 2009). In addition, she has developed online case-based learning platforms for teachers through an NSF CAREER grant , positioning her to direct the development of the online PD platform.
May Lee
Project Coordinator
May Lee is the project coordinator for the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through Community, School, University Partnership. May is an Instructor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The Pennsylvania State University. She facilitates courses on teaching English learners. Through her project work, May works with in-service and supervises pre-service teachers engaged in professional development opportunities centered on ways to support and challenge their Emergent Bilingual students’ academic growth. With more than 17 years of teaching experience at various levels including elementary and middle school, and university levels, May’s main areas of instruction are centered on the instruction for English learners. May has taught in various places around the world including Hong Kong, Ecuador, and Columbia. Her current research is focused on ways to support Emergent bilingual learning through the use of professional development opportunities for in-service and preservice teachers.
Dr. Megan Hopkins
External Evaluator
Dr. Megan Hopkins, Ph.D., is the external evaluator for the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through Community, School, University Partnership. Dr. Hopkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is a formal bilingual elementary school teacher, and has conducted extensive research examining how schools and school systems organize for equity, with particular focus on the education of immigrant and multilingual students. In studies funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition, the Spencer Foundation, and the W.T. Grant Foundation, she has investigated the implementation of language policies and ELD course placement policies, as well as content-specific curricular reforms. She has also engaged in context-embedded teacher professional development focused on fostering science learning opportunities for multilingual learners in the early elementary grades.
Dr. Bernard Badiali
Research Associate
Dr. Bernard Badiali, Ph.D., is a research associate for the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learning into Focus Through School, Community, and University Partnership. Dr. Badiali is an Associate Professor of Education (Curriculum & Instruction) at the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Badiali's main teaching and research activities have been in the areas of school/university relationships, staff development, school reform, supervision, and curriculum. He has consulted with numerous colleges and universities throughout the United States as well as more than 100 school districts in the US and abroad. He has published articles in numerous educational journals including Education, American Secondary Education, the Peabody Journal of Education and School University Partnerships. He co-authored (with Anne Whitney), Writing as teacher leadership. (English Leadership Quarterly, October 2010, pp. 2-3.) which received the Best Article of the Year Award in 2010 from the National Council of Teachers of English. His last co-authored book is entitled Teacher Leader, 2001.
Dr. Allison Henward
Project Consultant
Allison Sterling Henward is a project consultant for the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through School, Community, and University Partnership. Dr. Henward is an Associate Professor of early childhood education (ECE), and core faculty in the comparative and international education program at Penn State. She is a former preschool and elementary teacher who received her training in Early Childhood Education, with a focus in Cultural Anthropology. As an educational anthropologist she applies comparative, ethnographic, and qualitative research methods to study the ways in which culture and class impact and shape ECE programs. Her research examines what is taught (curriculum), how it is taught (pedagogy), and how this takes place in classrooms that differ in geographic location, class, culture, and language use to show how and why local context matters. She is currently conducting a comparative ethnographic study of Head Start policy in four cultural communities in the United States. Her aim is to better understand what happens when federal policy is implemented across sites and how this policy impacts teachers and children in various cultural and linguistic contexts to improve educational equity for children.
Dr. Frances Bose
Post Doctoral Research Associate
Frances Nebus Bose, Ph.D., serves as a postdoctoral research associate for the Science 20/20 project. She has taught in the area of English Learner Education for 20 years. The majority of her experience includes teaching language and literacy in Pre-K-5 school contexts in Greater Boston, Puerto Rico, China, and Italy across public, private, urban, and suburban schools. Frances has also been involved in several professional development initiatives to support pre-service and in-service mainstream teachers working with emergent bilinguals in their classroom. Frances’ research-practice centers on advocating for young English Learners and their families, such that their multiple ways of knowing and communicating can enhance classrooms and schools. As a qualitative researcher, she is particularly interested in children’s translingualism in STEM literacies, professional development in linguistically and culturally diverse schools, video-based methodologies, and materialist perspectives in educational research.
Michelle Brown
PD Associate & Research Assistant
Michelle Brown is a Professional Development Associate and Research Assistant for the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus through Community, School, University Partnership. Michelle is a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State University in Science Education. Her research interests focus on collaborative work with teachers to better understand how to develop asset perspectives through engagement with emergent bilingual students and families in science sensemaking. Michelle has taught 6th – 9th grade science for eight years in Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, New York, as well as serving as a STEM instructional coach and educational equity consultant. When not elbow-deep in Oobleck with 2nd graders or making settling jars with K-2 teachers, Michelle enjoys spending time outdoors with her family.
Dr. Megan E. Lynch
PD Associate & Research Assistant
Dr. Megan E. Lynch currently serves part-time as a research coordinator for the Science 20/20 project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus through Community, School, University Partnership. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Florida in the College of Education & Human Services. Her research interest is in the development of socially just pedagogy and political activism alongside preservice and in-service teachers and P-16 students within school-university-community partnerships. Megan is a teacher educator that has supervised teacher candidates in a variety of clinical field experiences and has facilitated professional development for in-service teachers. She has experience teaching several undergraduate courses on teaching emergent bilinguals, language and power in the classroom, and STEM for emergent bilinguals. She has nearly 10 years of experience teaching emergent bilinguals in South Korea and in the United States.
Jennifer L. Cody
PD Associate & Research Assistant
Jennifer Cody is a Professional Development Associate and Research Assistant for the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus through Community, School, University Partnership. Jennifer is a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State University in Science Education. Her research interests focus on language learning in science education. Jennifer has taught 5th grade in the State College Area School District in central Pennsylvania for 13 years. When she is not teaching or researching, Jennifer loves to spend time with her husband and four children reading, camping, and cooking family meals.
Melanie Marcano
Beginning Teacher
Melanie Marcano was a spring 2020 student teacher with the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through Community, School, University Partnership. She is a recent graduate Pennsylvania State University Grade with a major in Elementary and Early Childhood Education. She is originally from Reading, PA. However, her family is from Humacao, Puerto Rico. She had the opportunity to pursue her dream of becoming an educator at Penn State. Following her dream has allowed her to travel to State College, Hazleton, and Lewistown. All of these locations have provided the opportunity to work with many different students from many different backgrounds. In State College, she worked closely with an ESL teacher as well as a few English Language Learners in the school. In Lewistown, she worked with students with varied socioeconomic statuses. In Hazleton, she collaborated with teachers from Science 20/20 to guide students in sustained investigations. Melanie believe this was also a great learning experience as she learned how to use science as a tool to help ELLs in the classroom. Although she may have graduated, she is still excited to learn and grow with Science 20/20 in order to better herself as an educator.
Carolyn Stoughton
Beginning Teacher
Carolyn Stoughton was a spring 2020 student teacher with the Science 20/20 Project: Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through Community, School, into Focus Through Community, School, University Partnership. She graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with bachelor’s degrees in Spanish and Elementary and Early Childhood Education. She is certified to teach PreK-4, ESL, and Spanish. She is thrilled to continue working within the Hazleton community. She started working for the project in August of 2018 and continued this work and learning as a kindergarten student teacher at the Hazle Township Early Learning Center. She is extremely excited to continue working with the project and learn more about how to integrate science to improve language development in Hazleton schools.