Meet Dr. Mirta Maldonado-Valentin! Her last name is hyphenated due to her Spanish heritage, but you can call her Dr. Maldonado for short. She has a PhD in Philosophy with a concentration of Culture, Literacy, and Language. You can find her in the English department in room 274 in DBH.
Dr. Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico and did most of her post-secondary there. She got her Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics with a minor in Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. She got her Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics with a concentration in Secondary English Education.
After eventually moving to Texas, the professor got her PhD from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She then decided to narrow her focus and began studying linguistics landscape, which deals with the visibility of language.
She decided to come to California State University, Stanislaus (Stan State) to teach ESL (English as a Second Language), which is an area that she is interested in because she was intrigued as to how she learned to speak English fluently despite being raised in a family that did not speak English.
She says that she loves our “huge sense of community” between faculty and students, which is something one doesn’t see frequently in bigger cities.
QUOTE: “Language is everything. We think with language. We communicate with language. We perceive the world with language. We form ideas with language. It all comes down to language.”
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY: “I like to play dummy in the sense that I see myself more as a facilitator. I like my students to have ownership of their own learning process.”
We welcome Dr. Maldonado to Stan State!