Laura Meinzen

Laura Meinzen (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in the School of Education concentrating in Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy and Teacher Learning, Research and Practice.   Laura was a secondary public school teacher for twelve years in New Orleans and Western Colorado, and an International Baccalaureate Diploma Coordinator for six. She is interested in social justice centered teacher preparation, Community-Based Participatory Action Research (particularly in partnership with multilingual, multicultural and transnational youth), and how YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research) might be a lever for educational policy change and linguistic justice. Through YPAR, Laura hopes to explore and investigate how multilingual youth can speak back to teacher education in multimodal ways about what they need it to look like for them.  She believes art and narrative methodologies are especially powerful at conveying stories that lead to transformational policy change and development/ownership of one’s own role as a policy actor towards collective liberation.