Dina C. Castro

Affiliation

Boston University

Biography

Dr. Dina Castro is the Bahamdan Professor in Early Childhood Well-Being and Director of the BU Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being. Her scholarship focuses on equity and quality in the early care and education of bilingual children in immigrant, indigenous and afrodescendant communities in the U.S. and Latin America, and is conceptualized at the intersection of language, culture, race, ethnicity, class and disability. Dr. Castro has developed and examined the efficacy of professional development programs to improve language, literacy and socio-emotional development of young bilingual children, developed measures to assess the quality of early education for bilingual children, and second language acquisition. She served as Director of the Center for Early Care and Education Research: Dual Language Learners, a federally funded national research center focused on increasing understanding of practices and measurement to improve early care and education for bilingual children. In the global context, she is investigating intercultural bilingual education policies and practices in Peru and the experiences of transnational students and their teachers in U.S. and Mexican schools.