Claire Elizabeth White

Adjunct Lecturer on Education

Profile

Claire White, formerly an ESL and bilingual teacher, completed her doctoral dissertation at HGSE on Latino parents' support for their children's literacy development. As a doctoral student at HGSE, White held numerous teaching fellowships and research assistantships related to language and literacy development of English language learners. Her coauthored article, “Closing the Gap: Vocabulary Needs of English Language Learners” appeared in Reading Research Quarterly in 2004.
She currently serves as research coordinator for the Strategic Education Research Partnership coordinating a middle school literacy project in partnership with the Boston Public Schools. Prior to this work, she worked as an education specialist at the Massachusetts Department of Education, in the Office of Language Acquisition and Academic Achievement providing training in ELL literacy issues to teachers, administrators and state education leaders. White is certified to teach in Massachusetts in both English as a Second Language and as a reading specialist.
White has taught courses on second language acquisition and literacy development of second language learners at HGSE, Wheelock College, Lesley University, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She was a tenured professor at the National University of Colombia in the Foreign Languages and Linguistics department. She also worked for several years as a program officer for Oxfam in Mexico City in their Central American region office.
White also has Master’s degrees in English as a Second Language and in Latin American Literature. White spent 17 years living and working in various Latin American countries and is bilingual and bicultural.

Degrees

• Ed.D., Harvard University