Editor's Note: A Spanish version of this article is also available.
Throughout her career in academia, nothing has made Melissa Arabel Navarro Martell’s imposter syndrome creep in quite like writing.
It’s a remnant of her experience of coming to the U.S. from Tijuana as a sixth grader, and transitioning from one nation’s school system to another. Mexican schools, she explains, typically do not teach writing composition until middle school. In the U.S., that usually happens at the elementary level.
“I never had a teacher show me how to write a sentence or how to write a paragraph,” said the assistant professor in San Diego State University’s Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education. “Just being able to publish by myself was a big deal because I hated writing growing up.”
Not only is she a published writer, she’s now an award-winning writer.
Navarro Martell recently learned she will receive the 2022 Early Career Researcher Best Paper Award from the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Science Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group. The honor will be conferred at the group’s April 25 annual business meeting.
The winning paper — “Growing Globally-Conscious Citizens: Documenting Two Dual Language Maestras' Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Science” — highlights educators in dual-language settings who succeed at teaching science and language simultaneously from asset-based perspectives while making a global impact.
“It feels good to be recognized,” Navarro Martell said. “But it also feels good that my paper is representative of my community, of my family in Tijuana, of the education I got here in Chula Vista, of the teachers that are here and of the children that we serve.
“I was very intentional about highlighting teachers who were doing amazing work.”
Navarro Martell said she was also pleased to share the honor with two COE alumni who were co-authors on the paper, Jennifer Yanga-Peña and Gisel Barrett. All three carried the label of English Learners as children — a label Navarro Martell finds problematic.
“My teachers didn't see beyond that — you're just the kid who can't speak English,” she recalls. “My math teacher in seventh grade had me sit in the back of the room coloring pages with crayons. I was trying to ask a question and he got frustrated that I couldn't communicate, so he just threw me to the back of the room.
“I've always had issues with fitting people in boxes, especially based on the deficit term.”
When she accepts the award, Navarro Martell plans to have a special guest at her side — her mother, Olivia Martell Sotelo. A retired night nurse in Tijuana, Olivia was her daughter’s biggest cheerleader on her path to academic success.
“We recently invited her to give a talk with me at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, so she's in my CV now,” Navarro Martell said, smiling. “She's been a huge part of my accomplishments. It's going to be a virtual ceremony so I think I'm going to have her come over and sit next to me.”
