Sandra Saco

Sandra M. Saco graduated with her doctorate in English Education from Arizona State University (ASU). Born and raised in Southern California, Sandra earned her undergraduate degrees in Chicana/o Studies and History from University of California, Los Angeles. She moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where she worked as a high school English teacher for seven (7) years in the west valley. She earned her master’s degree in English Education from ASU and began her doctoral degree Fall of 2020. She taught first-year writing courses as well as pre-service teachers in methods of teaching language courses at ASU. Her 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 utilizes a Chicana feminist epistemological framing (Delgado Bernal, 1998) in her research, as well as anticolonial ethnographic methodologies.  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. Sandra’s recent research focused on how Latinx youth respond to reading Latinx YAL in book clubs and how they can serve to cultivate spaces of acompañamiento (Sepúlveda, 2011).

When she is not teaching or completing research, she enjoys spending time with her pets, cooking, and traveling.