Please join us in welcoming Dr. Sandra Saco to the Department of English as a visiting assistant professor of English Education!⁠

Sandra Saco is a Peruvian-Chilean-American scholar and educator. Born and raised in Southern California, she holds a PhD in English Education from Arizona State University, where she taught first-year writing as well as teacher preparation courses. Saco earned her master’s degree in English Education from ASU and her undergraduate degrees in Chicana/o Studies and History from the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Phoenix, Arizona, she worked as a high school English teacher in the West Valley for seven years.

Saco’s research interests are on the effects of culturally sustaining pedagogical practices and culturally diverse young adult literature (YAL) on culturally and linguistically diverse youth in the secondary English Language Arts classroom. She is the 2023 recipient of the English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Graduate Student Research Award, and her publications can be found in The ALAN Review and English Journal.

Her recent research utilized a Chicana feminist epistemological framing, as well as anticolonial ethnographic methodologies that aimed to learn how Latinx youth respond to reading Latinx YAL in book clubs and how they can serve to cultivate spaces of acompañamiento.

Saco shared she’s excited to be here at Colorado State and is looking forward to learning from both her colleagues and students. This coming fall, she will be teaching three undergraduate courses at CSU:

• E 301 Framing Texts with Critical Theories and Teaching Equity, Justice, and Activism
• E 401 Teaching Reading
• E 405 Young Adult Literature

We’re thrilled to have you join our community, Dr. Saco!