Maria Sudduth strongly believes in the promise of public education as the vehicle for equitable opportunities in the 21st Century. She is an educator with 30 years of experience, primarily working with underserved populations. Her areas of expertise are linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy in emergent bilingual settings.
Mrs. Sudduth taught in a rural elementary bilingual setting for 12 years. Her Master’s Thesis was “The Harry Potter Project.” In this focused study, Mrs. Sudduth worked with emergent bilingual children at the intermediate level of English language proficiency, third through fifth grade. Using targeted learning strategies through story discussion, students actively engaged in reading The Chamber of Secrets (the second book in the Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling). The most important outcome of the project was that the participating students in this project felt empowered as self-motivated readers of quality literature. Students also demonstrated marked gains in reading achievement measures, across a wide range of data points.
Ms. Sudduth joined the Bilingual Faculty at California State University, Chico in 2003.
Her responsibilities included teaching research based bilingual instructional practices across content areas: Math, Language Arts, Social Studies and Science – K-12. She also was on the planning committee and taught in the Rural Teacher Residence program, in which she was responsible for teaching across content areas k-8 with a focus on English Language Development (English as a New Language), preparing pre-service candidates to teach in linguistically and culturally diverse settings.
Currently Ms. Sudduth is a Senior Scholar and Regional Director for National Urban Alliance for Effective Education.