From a young age, King-Chávez-Parks Fellowship winner Elizabeth Gil knew that she wanted to be a teacher. “I enjoyed school and helping my classmates,” Gil recalls, and so “as an undergrad I pursued teaching certification and then applied to graduate school. After earning my master’s degree at MSU, I returned to my hometown of New York City, eventually finding a job in the Department of Education.” Over the next ten years Gil worked in schools with high concentrations of immigrant families, an experience she calls an honor. “Coming from an immigrant family myself,” Gil says, “I could recognize the wonderful strengths our families possessed, but that were not always recognized in schools.”
Gil has carried this passion into her doctoral studies, where her work examines “how Latino immigrant families’ participation in a community-based program that teaches technology skills impacts their relationships with their children’s schools.” This work could have profound implications on how schools and districts serve Latino students and their families by developing what Gil describes as “responsive and inclusive environments.” It is amazing how this description of her research dovetails with the way that Gil describes herself as a person. She enjoys traveling and learning languages, and speaks vividly of her love for “talking to people and learning from others.” Connectivity and community development drives everything that she does.
In addition to exceptional scholarship, the King-Chávez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowship rewards active participation in the MSU community, and Gil is extremely involved in MSU community life. “I have been active,” she explains in a moment of marked understatement, “in the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) chapter on campus, including as a Steering Committee member. I have also served on the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) Graduate Student Council, and have been a faculty member with the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers Summer Workshop.”
The goal of the King-Chávez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowship, created in 1986 by the Michigan State Legislature, is to create a pool of post-secondary faculty and administrators within the state of Michigan. That suits Gil just fine. “After completing my studies at MSU,” she says, “I plan to be a professor in the field of education, working with pre-service and in-service educators. I look forward to supporting my students’ development in the classroom, but also through programs like AGEP. I also want to be a community-engaged scholar.” There is no doubt that Gil will do exactly that.
