Cory A. Buckband is a second-year doctoral student in the Educational Policy & Evaluation Ph.D. program at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. His research interests and teaching philosophies both center the pursuit of equity for racially, linguistically, and culturally marginalized children, families, and communities. He has written and collaborated on articles and chapters spanning several topics, including online educational ethnography, the history of settler colonial language education, and critically-conscious family engagement for dual language educators.
Before coming to Arizona, Cory was born and raised in Van Nuys, California, in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. A community college transfer, he attended UCLA for his B.A., double majoring in anthropology and ancient Near East & Egyptology studies. During this time, he conducted ethnographic research in Israel-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 which both shape and are shaped by ideologies of language.
Cory is currently a graduate research assistant working with Dr. Yalda M. Kaveh on 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.