The School of Education’s Diego Román was selected as a 2020 Somos Profssional Development Award recipient, alongside Katya Garza, a junior CLS certificate student majoring in neurobiology and Spanish.

Román is an assistant professor with the No. 1-ranked Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
He received the award, given by UW–Madison’s Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program, for a project titled “Are bilingual books being written for Latinx children? Examining authors’ uses of Spanish-English translanguaging in children’s fiction books.”
With the aid of student research assistants, Román will examine the mixing of Spanish and English in children’s’ literature with an eye to the way publishers and authors tailor books to different groups of readers and how these publications relate to social inequality among students in dual-language immersion programs.