About Sonia Nieto
Dr. Nieto’s
scholarly work has focused on multicultural and bilingual education,
curriculum reform, teacher education, Puerto Rican children’s
literature, and on the education of Latinos, immigrants, and other
culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. She has
written numerous book chapters and articles on these issues, and
her articles have appeared in such journals as Educational Leadership,
Theory into Practice, The Harvard Educational Review, and Multicultural
Education. Her publications, widely used in multicultural education
and professional development include: Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical
Context of Multicultural Education, 4th Edition (Allyn & Bacon)
and Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools (Erlbaum),.an edited volume. Dr. Nieto has
served on many local, regional, national and international commissions,
panels, and advisory boards that focus their efforts on educational
equity for all students. Among these have been the Massachusetts
Advocacy Center, an advisory committee for California Tomorrow,
and the National Advisory Boards of both Facing History and Ourselves
(FHAO), and Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR). She has received
many awards for her research and advocacy, including the Human and
Civil Rights Award from the Massachusetts Teachers Association (1989),
the Community Change of Boston Drylongso Award for Anti-Racist Activists
(1995), the Teacher of the Year Award from the Hispanic Educators
Association of Massachusetts (1996), the Educator of the Year Award
from NAME, the National Association for Multicultural Education
(1997), and the New England Educator of the Year Award from Region
One of NAME (1998), among others. She was also a recipient of the
Annenberg Institute Senior Fellowship for 1998-2000, and she has
received two honorary doctorates, one in Humane Letters from Lesley
University in 1999 and the other in Intercultural Relations from
Bridgewater State College in 2004. In November 2005 she will receive
the Outstanding Educator award from the National Council of Teachers
of English. In June 2000, she was awarded a month-long residency
at the Bellagio Center in Italy and in 2003, she was named to the
Críticas Journal Hall of Fame as the Spanish-Language Community
Advocate of the Year. She is married to Angel Nieto, and they have
two daughters and eight grandchildren.
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Sonia
Nieto is Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the New York
City public schools and then St. John’s University, where
she received a B.S. in Elementary Education. After graduation, she
spent a year in Madrid, receiving her M.A. in Spanish and Hispanic
Literature from the New York University Graduate Program in Spain.
She became a junior high school teacher of English and Spanish in
the Ocean Hill Brownsville community in Brooklyn in 1966, and then
a fourth grade teacher at P.S. 25 in the Bronx, the first completely
bilingual school in the Northeast and one of the first in the country
to be funded by the new Title VII Program. Her first position in
higher education was as an instructor in the Puerto Rican Studies
Department at Brooklyn College, where she worked in a joint program
in bilingual education with the School of Education. Moving to Massachusetts
with her family in 1975, she received her doctoral degree from the
University of Massachusetts, concentrating in curriculum studies
with special concentrations in multicultural and bilingual education.
