Gladys Aguilar
Gladys Aguilar is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in the Human Development, Learning and Teaching strand at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Drawing on her background as an immigrant from México, as well as on her professional experience as a child and family therapist and as a bilingual classroom teacher working with Latinx immigrant families, her research agenda has as a central focus the educational success and psychosocial well-being of immigrant-origin Latinx children and youth..
Guided by Garcia Coll and Colleagues’ (1996) integrative model of minoritized children’s development, Gladys’ work applies an ecocultural framework to investigate Latinx children’s bilingual and ethnic-racial identity development and the individual and contextual factors that inform these culturally adaptive developmental competencies. Her dissertation analyzes longitudinally the Spanish and English language development of young Mexican-origin children across the ages of 3, 4 and 5 years and examines the language features, cultural characteristics and family ethnic socialization practices of their immigrant-origin mothers that shape this development. Through the findings of her dissertation and other research projects, her work endeavors to deepen our understanding of the positive development of Latinx children and elucidate the linguistic and cultural resources of their families.
