Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica Transforms Research Into Action as School Board Trustee

Prof. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica has been sworn into the Woodland Joint Unified School District (WJUSD) Board of Trustees, marking the start of her first term. An expert in educational equity and a UC Davis alumna, Dr. Rodriguez-Mojica’s election to the Board represents an exciting opportunity to bridge the gap between academic research and grassroots reform in our local community.

As a scholar and former elementary school teacher who has dedicated her career to studying how teachers can best support bilingual youth, Rodriguez-Mojica sees her new trustee role as an exciting way to support teaching and learning in schools. “This is an opportunity to use my background in education research and classroom instruction to work towards improving schooling experiences for Woodland youth at a systems-level.” she said.

While serving on the WJUSD Board of Trustees, Rodriguez-Mojica plans to center student well-being in her work. Through this lens, her goals are to inform policy-related decisions with student perspectives, increase the number of graduates who meet UC and CSU enrollment requirements, expand student opportunities to engage with trades, and increase the number of licensed health professionals on K-12 campuses. Rodriguez-Mojica hopes that all these efforts will culminate in greater community collaboration that strengthens two-way communication between school representatives and local stakeholders.

Rodriguez-Mojica recently co-authored three articles on translanguaging-informed beliefs, practices, and assessment methods and Spanish-English reading materials and provided recommendations for improving these resources. Her goal is to support teachers’ development so that they can consistently work to identify multilingual students’ strengths and provide asset-based instruction that evolves with their learning.

Central to her research is the Bilingual/Biliterate Instruction for Bilingual Youth project, a $2.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition to support Spanish-English bilingual instruction in California and New Mexico. As Principal Investigator and Project Director, Rodriguez-Mojica works with a team of researchers to host online teacher workshops in Spanish that address strategies for supporting bilingual learners, collaborating with students’ caregivers, and enacting culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogies.

This work has the potential to have lasting systemic impacts by helping more students who speak only English at home become bilingual and by equipping emergent bilingual students with the support needed to excel in their learning and professional careers. With the Hispanic population expected to grow from 60 to 111 million by 2060, Spanish-language proficiency will become a major asset to U.S. industries, and federally funded projects like BBILY will inform the workforce and support the growing demand for Spanish-English-speaking employees.