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Dr. Shelley D. Wong
EdD, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York
Associate Professor Emerita of Education
Teaching Culturally, Linguistically Diverse & Exceptional Learners

Contact Information

Send email to Dr. Wong

Phone: (703) 993-3513
Fax: (703) 993-5300
Email: swong1 (@gmu.edu)

George Mason University
Fairfax Campus
Thompson Hall 1505
4400 University Dr.
MS 1E8
Fairfax, VA 22030

Curriculum Vitae

View Shelley Wong's curriculum vitae in PDF format.

Profile

Dr. Shelley Wong is an Associate Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia in Multilingual/Multicultural Education. She received a BA in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) at UCLA and an Ed.D.in Applied Linguistics from Columbia Teachers College. Her research interests include womanist, Critical Race and interfaith perspectives on justice, peace and reconciliation; dialogic inquiry, socio-cultural approaches to literacy, and critical multiculturalism. Dr. Wong is author of Dialogic Approaches to TESOL:  Where the Ginkgo Tree Grows, Taylor & Francis and co-editor with Ilham Nasser and Lawrence N. Berlin of Examining education, media and dialogue under occupation:  The case of Palestine and Israel, Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.  She is also co-editor with Elaisa Sánchez-Gosnell, Anne Marie Foerster-Lu, & Lori Dodson of (2018) Teachers as Allies:  Transformative Practices for Teaching DREAMers and Undocumented Students.  New York: Teachers College Press. (https://www.tcpress.com/teachers-as-allies-9780807758861 )

 

Dr. Wong became involved in the peace movement in high school when she joined Yalim (Daughters of Peace) at the Los Angeles Hollywood Los Feliz Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles and attended demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. She was a founding member of the Asian American Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament in New York in the 1980s.  Most recently she was a Fulbright Scholar at Birzeit University in the Occupied West Bank, Palestine.  She wrote “From the U.S. Mexican border to Palestine: A call to critical literacy and action for the Scholars Speak Out column of the Journal of Language and Literacy Education: (http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SSO_May2019_Wong.pdf ). 

Research Interests

My research investigates multilingual, multimodal learning and literacy for students of all ages, subject matters and (dis)Abilities. Through my research with international and immigrant students, I have identified four features of dialogic pedagogy:  

1) learning in community

2) problem posing, or learning how to ask

3) learning by doing

4) knowledge for whom or posing the question, “who does knowledge serve?”  (Wong, 2006).  

I am interested in the intersectionality of language, culture and power, particularly at understanding how to identify and overcome the barriers that students who come from communities who have historically been excluded from education due to their race, economic class, ethnicity, religion,  gender and immigration status.   As a professor in applied linguistics and second and foreign language education,  I am particularly interested in Critical Race Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis as tools to identify educational policies and practices which remedy injustice and inequality. 

Recent Publications

Wong, S. (2019). From the U.S. Mexican border to Palestine: A call to critical literacy and action. Journal of Language and Literacy Education. 15(1). Available at http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SSO_May2019_Wong.pdf

Wong, S. & Crewalk, J. with R. Velasquez-Soto (2018) Undocumented students, families, and communities in our schools: What every teacher should know. In S. Wong, E. Sánchez Gosnell, A. Foerster-Luu, & L. Dodson (Eds.) Teachers as Allies: Transformative Practices for Teaching DREAMers and Undocumented Students (pp. 1-16). New York: Teachers College Press.

Wong, S., Sánchez-Gosnell, E., Foerster-Lu, A. & Dodson, L. (Eds.). (2017) Teachers as Allies: Transformative Practices for Teaching DREAMers and Undocumented Students. New York: Teachers College Press. 

Other Publications:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shelley_Wong

Examining Education, Media, and Dialogue under Occupation: The Case of Palestine and Israel
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