Francisco Torres

Francisco L. Torres is a Puerto Rican Assistant Professor in the School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies. He received his PhD in Literacy from the University of Colorado Boulder, his Master’s degree in English Education from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, and his Bachelor’s degree in English and History at the University of Connecticut Storrs campus. His research focuses on how children, especially Latinx children, take up and complicate the connections among social justice, popular culture, and current events that matter to them. At its core, Torres’ work is theoretically driven by critical theories of race, translanguaging, and revolutionary love. His most recent work engaged fifth-grade elementary students enrolled in a bilingual school in conversations of language, representation (race, class, gender, etc.) and advocacy. In this work, students created comics, newspapers, and poems arguing against injustices that mattered to them, like monolingual ideologies at the school, LGBTQIA+ issues, and climate change. His work has appeared in Language Arts, Journal of Literacy Research, English Journal, The ALAN Review, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, and the book Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom. He has been awarded the Cultivating New Voices NCTE Fellowship and the 2019 English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Geneva Smitherman Cultural Diversity Grant.