Cory Buckband

Cory A. Buckband, Ph.D. is a 2024 graduate from the Educational Policy & Evaluation Ph.D. program at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. He is currently a Faculty Associate, and has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Educational Language Policy and Diversity in Family and Community Engagement for bilingual teachers. 

Cory's anti-colonial and transdisciplinary research agenda incorporates critical social theories and blends justice-oriented qualitative and quantitative methodologies to illuminate the connections between school choice and related education policy, language policy and ideology, and the reproduction of social inequities and hierarchical power dynamics. Partly informed by his undergraduate training in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, Cory uses critical ethnography and other (post)qualitative and geospatial methods to investigate issues of language, race, class, and power in multilingual and multicultural education in the United States. He is driven to explore resistance to trends of gentrification and expropriation in DLBE through education and language policymaking, critically conscious family/community engagement and translanguaging pedagogies for bi/multilingual teachers, and strategies for bi/multilingual teachers to engage students’ creative language use and biliteracy. He has also published about innovative applications of critical online ethnography and other post-qualitative, historical, and blended methodologies to study these phenomena from multiple, complementary angles.

For his Ph.D. dissertation, Cory designed and successfully implemented a yearlong critical ethnographic study of a charter elementary school (K-6) in suburban Arizona that uses a trilingual immersion model with Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and English as languages of instruction. The study employed a values-driven critical ethnographic methodology to collaborate with a highly multilingual group of novice and veteran language teachers, school leaders, and third and sixth-grade students from a diverse range of racial-ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, including heritage speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, Chicano Spanish, and Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Findings from an ethnographically oriented critical discourse analysis show that a competitive school choice market and Arizona’s restrictive language policy (Proposition 203) influence school leaders, teachers, and some students to prioritize English and English-privileged students in classroom instruction, language policy, and recruitment strategies. However, ten months of ethnographic observations, interviews, and an art-based identity project illuminate the resistive agency of intersectionally minoritized students and teachers who center their dynamic bi/multilingualism and community cultural wealth to make space for themselves while pushing back on White-centering discourses of expropriation.

Before coming to Arizona, Cory was born and raised in Van Nuys, California, in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. A community college transfer student, he attended UCLA for his B.A. and double majored in cultural anthropology and ancient Near East & Egyptology studies. During this time, he conducted ethnographic research in Palestine with Jewish Ethiopian Israelis, which opened his eyes to the ways in which racial and economic inequities are (re)produced through education and discourse. He then attended Arizona State University to pursue a Master's degree in Education while teaching high school social studies courses during the day. For his Master's applied project, he investigated how racialized bilingual students perceived the use of Spanish cognates in social studies vocabulary instruction. Cory's experiences as an educator in Arizona, being limited to the use of English as the only medium of instruction, drew him to interests in language, education policy, and educational equity.