About

Teresa McCarty is a core faculty member at UCLA in the American Indian Studies Department. Her academic focus includes Indigenous education, language planning and policy, Indigenous language revitalization, and ethnographic studies of education both in and out of school settings. Her research encompasses social research methodology, educational-linguistic anthropology, youth language practices, education equity, and issues related to language endangerment, revitalization, and rights. She is involved in exploring educational practices and policies affecting Indigenous and minority communities, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural preservation.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• History
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• 16 Indigenous Literacies, Bilingual Education and Community Empowerment: The Case of Navajo

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2025-11-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What for, What More, and the Practice of Praxis: A Commentary on Edmund “Ted” Hamann's CAE Past‐Presidential Address

  Anthropology & Education Quarterly · 2025-11-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT In this Commentary I engage the vital questions posed by Dr. Edmund T. Hamann in his 2022 Council on Anthropology and Education Presidential Address: What do we do educational anthropology for —and what more can we do to ensure our work makes a positive difference in an increasingly unjust and precarious world? In the spirit of Ted Hamann's “scholarly generation‐spanning,” I look backward and forward in responding to these questions, highlighting the ways in which educational anthropologists have addressed “what for” and “what more” over the years. I suggest that a commitment to relationships and relational accountability constitutes a distinctive quality and practice of transformative educational‐anthropological research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 3 Local Knowledge, Border Thinking and Activism: Keystones in Terrence Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Scholarship for Indigenous Language Education

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2025-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  3 Local Knowledge, Border Thinking and Activism: Keystones in Terrence Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Scholarship for Indigenous Language Education was published in Language Diversity, Policy and Social Justice on page 28.

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword—Humanizing Language Policy Research

  2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Indigenous Revitalization-Immersion Education in Native American Settings

  2023-08-18 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Indigenous dual-language bilingual education shares attributes with dual-language models for other language groups and is also highly distinct. In this chapter, we focus on Native American language education – settings with a shared history of Euro-American colonization in which compulsory English-only schooling has been a prime instrument of Native-language loss and education disparities. Thus, the combined goals of many contemporary Native-language programs are language and culture reclamation and education equity. Here, we center Indigenous community-driven revitalization-immersion programs as an increasingly popular and innovative pathway toward these goals. We present findings from research on these programs across four cross-cutting themes: academic parity and equity, family-community engagement, language and culture reclamation, and new language-learning tools, spaces, and places. Together, these findings suggest that well-implemented revitalization-immersion promotes holistic learner and communal well-being and academic success. We conclude by discussing ongoing challenges and future prospects for Indigenous revitalization-immersion research, policy, and practice, emphasizing the need for anticolonial, antiracist pedagogies and concrete, significant public support. Despite the challenges, the revitalization-immersion movement continues to grow, providing a “unique pathway” to bi/multilingualism, bi/multiliteracies, and the self-determination and thrivance of Indigenous Peoples.

  PublisherDOI

• Anthropology and Education

  2023-01-11 · 7 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The field of anthropology and education, also referred to as educational anthropology, was formally organized in the mid-twentieth century, with primary research interests at the time in infant and childhood socialization as this took place in everyday life in families in non-Western, smaller-scale societies. This focus on early enculturation was informed by the cultural relativist perspective of Franz Boas in American anthropology and its assumption that everyone learns to be human, and by the psychodynamic perspective of Sigmund Freud and its assumption that early childhood learning is what is most consequential for later development. The key contribution of anthropology was the notion that education, broadly conceived, is culturally shaped, and that parallels and differences exist in educative processes across cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts. In subsequent years, research interests broadened to consider teaching and learning of cultural practices across the life span and in myriad societies, including socialization in and across global immigrant flows and in a wide array of interactional environments in and out of schools. Educational anthropology is characterized by its interdisciplinarity and the diversity of topics, sociocultural settings, and education processes it investigates. To capture this complexity and the trajectory of scholarship over more than one hundred years of its development, some sections of this article are divided into Early Works—publications prior to the mid-1990s—and Contemporary Works that have shaped the field from the late twentieth century to the present. As a consequence, the entire bibliography presents a history of the field as it has evolved across disciplines, topics, and research settings, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the countries of the European Union. In selecting entries, emphasis is given to books and monographs, but seminal book chapters and journal articles that are particularly useful for research and course readings are also included. While entries are divided into categories based on their salience to particular strands of scholarship, a great deal of overlap is found among the categories. Finally, entries are limited to those published in English, which, as noted in Anderson-Levitt 2012 (cited under General Overviews: Contemporary Works), disguises the “voluminous but less visible” educational-anthropological scholarship published in other languages. Readers are referred to the global guide in Anderson-Levitt’s 2012 for publications in languages representative of the diverse regions of the world in which educational anthropologists conduct research.

  PublisherDOI

• Qualitative methods in language policy and planning

  2023-09-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter introduces readers to the concept of ethnographic monitoring—a methodology that includes participant and non-participant observation, in-depth interviews, document collection, and analysis in collaboration with stakeholders—and explores its utility as a framework for the critical qualitative evaluation of language planning and policy (LPP). This chapter argues that ethnographic monitoring sits at the intersection of description, interpretation, and evaluation, where evaluation refers not to causal impact assessment, but to a form of valuing in which researchers and stakeholders actively collaborate to determine a policy's worth.

  PublisherDOI

• Indigenous Language Immersion Schools: A Crucial Link to Sustainable and Healthy Indigenous Community Futures

  Wicazo Sa Review · 2023-03-01

  article

  Abstract: While the term Indigenous futurisms was coined to convey ideas through literature and the arts (Dillon 2012), this article argues that visioning a world from an Indigenous perspective must include Indigenous languages. Indigenous language immersion (ILI) schools and programs provide present-day models for challenging colonial educational practices and centering Indigenous worldviews, pedagogies, curricula, and designs that promote community building and Indigenous futures. This seven-year, multi-method, multi-site, U.S.-wide study investigated ILI, an instructional innovation for which a systematic database is lacking. The study's rationale stems from rapid changes in Native American students' sociolinguistic environments, coupled with enduring education disparities for Native students. The study includes a U.S.-wide survey of Indigenous language programs; case studies of eight ILI sites to examine their processes and practices; and comparison of immersion-site learning opportunities and outcomes with those of matched non-immersion sites. Our study demonstrates three major findings. First, hundreds of Indigenous language education programs exist across the United States, serving infants to adults within and outside of schools. Reflecting diverse community goals there is great variation in instructional models. These programs convey Indigenous experiences and knowledge systems, demonstrating the significance of Indigenous languages for Indigenous community futures. Second, on assessments of math, English, and IL development, ILI students achieve on par with or better than their peers in English-medium programs. These findings show that ILI schooling secures Indigenous futures as those futures interact (and compete) with the English-based world. Third, in-depth case studies at diverse ILI schools reveal a common innovative practice: a relational pedagogy that connects learners and academic content to people and place; emphasizes responsibility to self, others, and the natural world; and builds a familial school culture. The overall effect is an Indigenous present and future rooted in holistic academic well-being, including academic attainment, positive Indigenous identities, and strong school-community solidarity.

  PublisherDOI

• New Speakers of Irish in the Global Context: New Revival?

  Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development · 2023 · 31 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

• Critical Ethnography in Education Research

  2023-06-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter introduces critical ethnography as an ontological, epistemic, and axiological paradigm for approaching education research. As such, critical ethnography is much more than a set of methods. We outline the parameters of a critical ethnographic approach, explain its current place in the field, and historicize current work within a larger intellectual tradition and social-political movement. We then explore a diversity sample of work in the field, organizing our discussion around five salient topic areas: language and bi/multilingualism, education policy studies, Indigenous education and de/anticolonial methodologies, critical youth studies, and the relationship between carcerality and schooling. We conclude by reflecting forward on the utility and possibilities for critical ethnography/ies of education and propose the de/anticolonial nature of critical ethnography as a central component of the paradigm.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy

  Northwestern University

  21 shared

• K. Tsianina Lomawaima

  17 shared

• Ofelia Zepeda

  16 shared

• James Collins

  National University of Malaysia

  16 shared

• Rodney Hopson

  American University

  16 shared

• Sheilah E. Nicholas

  13 shared

• Stephen May

  Chartered Society of Physiotherapy

  12 shared

• Serafín Coronel-Molina

  Indiana University

  10 shared

Labs

• UCLA American Indian StudiesPI

Education

• Ph.D., American Indian Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2000

• M.A., American Indian Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1995

• B.A., American Indian Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1993