Mark Lewis ’10

(they-them-their-themselves)

Assistant Professor

Educational Studies

Contact

  1. Pearson Hall 204

Affiliations: Educational Studies

Smiling photograph of Professor Mark Lewis in jacket and tie on a black background

My career has spanned teaching, teacher education, academic research, and school district-based research and program evaluation. My research explores ways that schooling across the curriculum relies on tacit understandings about language and literacy. I investigate how these common-sense understandings of language, or language ideologies, are produced in educational institutions. Drawing on sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and educational studies, I have shown how teachers and other educational actors negotiate language ideologies in their daily work, as well as how these ideologies often marginalize students despite teachers’ best efforts to the contrary.

I have served as a staff researcher in two local school districts: the School District of Philadelphia and the William Penn School District, where I have worked to complicate descriptive monitoring and conceptualization of English Learners, coach school leaders on assessment data in ways that honored the complexity of instructional decision making, and advise program managers on evaluating their efforts to better serve students and communities. Prior to my graduate studies, I worked as a second grade teacher in Annandale, VA.

I have been a resident of the Greater Philadelphia area for over 10 years and joined the faculty of Swarthmore College in 2024.

 

Education

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Educational Linguistics

BA, Swarthmore College, Special Major in Educational Studies and Linguistics (with elementary teaching certification)

 

Selected Publications

Lewis, M. C., *Quimby-Moro, P., & *Sánchez, L. E. (2026). “It must be provided for by the school”: Academic language in United States mathematics education as curricularized register, 1700–1975. Linguistics and Education, 93, 101534.

Lewis, M. C. (2021). Creating and sustaining representations of academic language: Curricularization and language ideologies in second grade. Linguistics and Education.

Lewis, M. C. (2018). A critique of the principle of error correction as a theory of social change. Language in Society, 47(3), 325–346.

Flores, N., & Lewis, M. C. (2022). “False Positives, Reentry Programs, and Long Term English Learners”: Undoing Dichotomous Frames in U.S. Language Education Policy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 55(3), 257–269.

Flores, N., Lewis, M. C., & Phuong, J. (2018). Raciolinguistic chronotopes and the education of Latinx students: Resistance and anxiety in a bilingual school. Language & Communication, 62, 15–25.

*Swarthmore student co-authors

 

Courses

EDUC 014. Pedagogy and Power: Introduction to Education

EDUC 042. Teaching Diverse Young Learners

EDUC 045. Literacies and Social Identities

EDUC 053. Educating Emergent Bilinguals 

EDUC 065. Qualitative Research Methods: Educational Research for Social Change

EDUC 151: Curricularization and the Labor of Literacy

EDUC 165. School District-Based Research: Theory and Practice