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 equity for racially, linguistically, and culturally marginalized children at the intersection of home, school, community, and society.

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 the broader societal, cultural, and educational contexts. During her graduate studies, Dr. Kaveh also served on multiple research projects, working to develop curricula and instructional tools to help teachers support bi/multilingual children to draw on all their linguistic resources for literacy development. Her involvement has resulted in multiple publications focusing on the use of metalinguistic methods to teach text structure and language use in literacy instruction for bi/multilingual learners. 

Dr. Kaveh is currently leading an ethnographic research collaboration with a dual language program in a Title I urban K-8 public school in Arizona. The project brings together community voices (children, parents/caregivers, and school staff) to examine language ideologies, practices, and challenges facing the program in early childhood grade levels while going through language policy reforms and the changes of online schooling during the pandemic.