Ysaaca Axelrod

Ysaaca D. Axelrod is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education, where she works in the area of early childhood and elementary education, preparing future early childhood and elementary teachers. A former kindergarten teacher, her research focuses on early childhood language and literacy development, with particular attention to emergent bilingual and multilingual children, the intersections of language and identity for young Latinx children, and the role of play, climate justice, and literacy in children’s learning.

Axelrod has published scholarly work on young emergent bilingual children’s language, identity, and translanguaging practices in venues such as the Journal of Latinos and Education and other education journals. In Multicultural Literature for Latino Bilingual Children: Their Words, Their Worlds, she co‑authored the chapter “Culturally relevant literature for Latino children in the early childhood classroom”, contributing to a collection that examines social, cultural, academic, and linguistic issues affecting Latino bilingual learners.