Lisa Dorner

University of Missouri-Columbia

Biographical Abstracts

Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Missouri – Columbia (MU) and director of the Cambio Center, which was founded in 2004 to lead research and outreach about Latin American populations, immigration, and integration in partnership with communities undergoing demographic change.

Dorner’s research centers on the politics and planning of bilingual education, educational policy enactment, and immigrant childhoods, especially around family-school engagement and language brokering. Striving to work alongside communities to disrupt inequities, she co-founded the Missouri Dual Language Network in 2014 to connect people and resources for language education and understanding the immigrant experience. From 2017-2022, with partners from across Missouri, she co-led the U.S. Department of Education National Professional Development project Strengthening Equity and Effectiveness for Teachers of English Learners. In 2022, funded by the Spencer Foundation, she co-led a series of webinars with K-12 educators and scholars to support the development of equitable bilingual education and new research-practice partnerships in the Midwest.

As Cambio Center director since 2022, she has developed new connections throughout Missouri and integrated a storytelling festival into the annual Cambio de Colores conference, the core outreach effort designed to develop a community of practice among researchers/practitioners focused on building bridges and creating strong, integrated, caring communities. She has co-edited two books geared toward practice, which include many K-12 educators as authors (Critical Consciousness in Dual Language Bilingual Education and Educational Leadership for Immigrants).

Areas of Expertise

• Bilingual and language education
• Educational policy enactment
• Language brokering
• Family-school engagement
• Immigrant childhoods