Yalda (Marzieh) Kaveh

Yalda M. Kaveh is an assistant professor in Bilingual Education at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Her research, teaching, and service focus on language policy, bi/multilingualism in (im)migrant families, family engagement in education, and culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Before immigrating to the United States for her graduate studies, Dr. Kaveh taught English and Persian to adolescent and adult language learners for several years in her home country, Iran. As an immigrant, Kaveh became interested in language use between parents and children in immigrant communities she was a part of. Therefore, she focused her graduate studies on “family language policies” to understand language development in children of immigrants in relation to language practices that take place in families but are situated in broader societal, cultural, and educational contexts.

Since joining ASU as a tenure-track faculty, Dr. Kaveh's research and publications have focused on language planning in families (Kaveh, 2018), monolingual classrooms (Kaveh, 2022), and at the intersections of home, school, and state contexts (Kaveh, 2020). In recent years, she has expanded her scholarship, both methodologically and conceptually, by studying language and power relations in different contexts through critical discourse analyses of language policy reform at the state level (Kaveh et al., 2022), studying teachers' language ideologies and classroom instructions in dual language bilingual education contexts (Kaveh & Buckband, 2022; Kaveh & Estrella-Bridges, in press), and proposing a humanizing framework for conceptualizing and analyzing language policy in research, education, and language planning (Kaveh, 2023).

Dr. Kaveh was recently awarded the Racial Equity Grant through the Spencer Foundation to conduct a mixed methods study that examines the ways K-12 education and heritage language programs can contribute to racialization, language beliefs, and cultural identities of Iranian immigrant/refugee parents/caregivers and children in the United States. She is currently working with a group of MLFTC doctoral students to launch the project in Spring, 2024.