UPB - Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana - Medellín

Faculty Member, Escuela de Educación y Pedagogía

Other Affiliations: Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas, Bogota, Colombia, Doctorado Interinstitucional en Educación DIE
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Curriculum & Instruction

Assistant Professor

School of Education and Pedagogy, Graduate Programs

About

EDUCATION:
I hold an M.A. (2004) and a Ph.D. (2010) in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I obtained my M.A. as a Fulbright Scholar (2002-2004). In addition, I have a B.A. in Foreign Language Education from Universidad Pontificia Boliviariana (1994).

CURRENT APPOINTMENTS:
I am currently a full-time Assistant Professor at UPB-Medellin, with a primary appointment in the Faculty of Education Graduate Program, and secondary appointments in the BA in Teaching program and the Language Center. Besides teaching, I am chairing the Student Research Group on Second Language, SRG-L2, working (for now) with preservice teachers interested in issues of second language literacy.

I am also a Visiting Professor at the Interinstitutional PhD in Education at Universidad Distrital in Bogotá, where I have taught courses on research methodology. At this university, I am also a dissertation committee member for one doctoral student.

CURRENT RESEARCH:
My present research interests features three main lines:
1. Qualitative inquiry as a field of study: I am particularly interested in understanding how to frame QI at all levels of tertiary education (BA, MA, PhD) and what it means to prepare researchers at every stage. I am also interested in framing QI from three complementary dimensions in the comprehension of educational phenomena: Historical-Political, Socio-Cultural, and Pedagogical. Another main area of work relates to ethics in QI, an area still under a lot of development in the Latin American context.

2. Literacy/ies: Stemming from my dissertation (Mora Vélez, 2010), I am interested in looking at the different ways in which we can understand literacy as "interpretation and creation of texts." Specifically, I want to look at how technology invites us to rethink how we read and write (Mora, 2011b) and how we can use different technologies in the context of preservice English education (Mora, Martínez, Zapata-Monsalve, Alzate-Pérez, & Gómez-Yepes, 2012)

As an extension of this idea of literacy, a colleague and I are currently designing a research project at UPB to explore English literacy practices in urban spaces in Medellín, using a framework that combines ideas from New Literacy Studies and Multimodality.

I am also working toward a larger framework to define "literacidad" (Cassany, 2006; Mora, 2011c) as a term that actually encompasses all the changes that the current definitions of literacy stemming from Critical Litearcy, NLS and Multiliteracies have triggered.

3. Second language: In the past couple of years, I have become deeply interested in the way we are talking about "second language". I am specifically questioning whether or not it remains feasible to talk about "foreign languages" in today's world. Technology and the different diasporas we are experiencing are reshaping how people learn and live languages and we need to frame these events with concepts that reflect those realities more accordingly. My most recent research reflections (Mora, 2011a) have begun to raise the question of whether the traditional ESL/EFL binary has run its course. In addition to this idea, I have also started questioning how we talk about bilingualism and how one should frame it in light of ideas such as nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism (Mora & Golovátina-Mora, 2011).

This idea of bilingualism is also becoming a second research project some colleagues and I are preparing about the readings and mis-readings of <bilingualism> (drawing from Dressman & colleagues, 1998) in the context of Medellín and the province of Antioquia.

PERSONAL LIFE:
When it comes to my personal life. I currently live in Medellín with my wife (Russian-born Dr. Polina Golovátina-Mora).

Besides sharing our lives, our passion for good food, wine and music, and our love for puppy dogs, we have also worked together in conference presentations and a keynote presentation last year, and we are still thinking of ways to do more joint research.

Contact Information