Kevin Pérez, Bilingual Education

Published in ConnectED Newsletter - Volume 8 - Issue 3 - May 2025

Kevin Pérez has been an Adjunct Professor in the Bilingual Education program since 2022. He holds a B.A. in Education Sciences and Korean Literature and Culture from the University of California, Irvine, as well as a Multiple Subject Teaching Credential with a Bilingual Authorization in Spanish and an M.A. in Education with a Concentration in Dual Language and English Learner Education from San Diego State University. Working with multilingual learners in Dual Language Immersion (DLI) spaces inspired him to pursue doctoral studies. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Bilingual Education at New York University.

Prof. Pérez’s professional experience before joining the School of Education team includes working as a bilingual instructional assistant (Spanish) at a local elementary school district in Orange County, California, where he primarily worked with emergent bilingual students, assessing their English language proficiency. While working as a classified employee, he was admitted into a Classified Employee Grant Program that gave him supplemental resources to earn his bilingual teaching credential. Furthermore, he has previous experience working as a sixth-grade DLI teacher and as a migrant education instructor with newcomer students at the Butte County Office of Education.

When asked what it means to him to be involved in the education of pre-service teachers, Prof. Pérez says, “I feel like I am living my wildest dreams.” He made the difficult decision to pause teaching at the elementary level because he wanted to give the next generation of bilingual teachers opportunities he missed out on during his formative years. As a Mexican-American and heritage language learner of Spanish growing up during California’s Proposition 227 era, he was systematically deprived of enrolling in bilingual schooling. During his master’s program at San Diego State University, he had the privilege of participating in a transborder study abroad program in Tijuana, Mexico. This program inspired him to center teacher identity as a focal point of exploration during the teacher induction process, all the while grappling with his own language ideologies. “Working with pre-service teachers allows me to uplift their rich experiences navigating educational systems while supporting their ideological clarity in transforming the lives of the students they serve,” he states.

Prof. Pérez was recently admitted into the Social Sector Leadership Diversity (SSLD) Fellowship at NYU. The SSLD program is an 18-month leadership development experience that equips graduate students with the skills, knowledge, and networks needed to take on leadership roles in organizations across the social sector. It centers on the experiences, voices, and needs of graduate students of color. Due to his strong commitment to bilingual education and social justice, he has been acknowledged for supporting the next generation of bilingual teachers.

Lastly, Prof. Pérez’s current research explores how language allocation policies in DLI classrooms shape teachers' and students' sociocultural and linguistic identities. Specifically, he is interested in how these policies interact with intersectional forms of identity, such as race, class, gender, and dis/abilities, and how educators negotiate these complexities in their daily classroom practices. Through this work, his broader goal is to support future bilingual educators in affirming their own lived histories and cultural repertoires, while equipping them to cultivate multilingual and multicultural identities in their students. By centering teacher and student agency, he aims to inform more equitable and culturally sustaining approaches to bilingual education policy and practice that reflect the diverse realities of the communities we serve.