Iliana Reyes

Iliana Reyes, Ph.D. UC Berkeley (2001), is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Community and International Partnerships at the College of Education, University of Arizona. She is the Co-Director of the Borderlands Education Center (BEC), focusing her research in a range of educational issues on early childhood education, multilingualism, and  Immigration and Borderlands Pedagogies impacting early childhood educators, families and their young children.  She has conducted research in Central México on multilingual education and community literacy issues in an indigenous, Náhuatl-Spanish, immigrant communities with family, children and teachers as collaborators to revitalize the indigenous language.  She is a board member of the Tucson Children’s Project, a non-profit organization focusing on teacher professional development of the Reggio Emilia approach. Previously, she was a Researcher Scientist at CINVESTAV in Mexico City, and is an affiliated faculty with the University of Arizona Center for Latin American Studies and the Second Language and Acquisition Teaching Program. Dr. Reyes’ projects have been supported by grants from the Foundation for Child Development, HELIOS Education Foundation, the International Reading Association, and UC-MEXUS-CONACYT among others. She is the author of multiple publications, including the book Advancing Educational Equity for Students of Mexican Descent: Creating an Asset-based Bicultural Continuum Model (2022). She has conducted international research and professional development programs in US, Italy, Mexico, Colombia, the Borderlands and abroad.

Research Interests:  Bilingual and biliteracy development in early childhood, First and second language acquisition, Education for linguistically and culturally minority students, Cognitive and linguistic development in typical an atypical populations