Welcome Dr. Heather Macias - Assistant Professor, Teacher Education

I’ve wanted to work at a CSU for a long time because of the strong commitment they have to providing stellar teaching for their students – something that I value as a scholar and educator. CSULB in particular has a wonderful Teacher Education program and I knew this would be a place where I could enact change in the field of education surrounded by like-minded colleagues who are dedicated to scholarship and developing best teaching practices.

Teaching is something I love to do (I will reluctantly admit that I feed off of the attention of performing for students); I love working and learning about new teaching practices with others and through my research. For me, teaching is something that never gets old, can always be improved, and is always presenting a new challenge. Given all that, education is a field that has the kind of environment that I want to contribute to and create for future teachers to embrace.

My research focuses on the role that professional development plays in helping teachers expand their teaching practices, particularly surrounding literacy and multilingual students. I’m interested in understanding how teachers across content areas view and use different types of professional development to better teach all types of students and to create equitable classrooms that support students, seeing them as assets to knowledge-building in the classroom.

I see teaching as a way to help students unpack, question, and critique the ideas being presented to them. I work to create spaces where students feel comfortable asking difficult questions and working through ideas as a class, helping us to collectively build knowledge together as they develop their own ideas and identities.

I want my students to see me as someone who wants them to succeed and who wants to support them to develop into professionals who in turn, will support their own students to succeed academically and emotionally, regardless of background or identity.

I want my students to understand the larger systems and hierarchies at play in the U.S. educational system and how they can work to create equitable, inclusive, and supportive learning environments for all of their future students.

I want to inspire my students to be unafraid to critique what they see around them so that they can actively work to create educational experiences for their future students that push against the status quo, while embracing the power and assets their students bring into the classroom.