M'Balia Thomas
School of Education and Human Sciences - Curriculum & TeachingM’Balia B. Thomas, Assistant Professor of TESOL, joined the KU faculty in the fall of 2014. Dr. Thomas holds a PhD from the Interdisciplinary Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona. As a Critical Applied Linguist, Dr. Thomas investigates the everyday creativity of non-native and non-standard varieties of American English. She draws upon a variety of qualitative (discourse) approaches—CDA, Conversation Analysis, Corpus Analysis, Rhetorical and Stylistic Analyses, Self-Study, and Narrative Inquiry—to investigate language use as it surfaces in oral and written narratives. Dr. Thomas uses the knowledge and experience gained through her research to lecture on the ways ideologies about language and language users surface through instructional practices, educational texts, and institutional policies.
In her spare time, Dr. Thomas engages in scholarship in the area of Mindful & Contemplative Practices in Higher Education, as well as Harry Potter Studies. Through this latter work she highlights the implications the novels hold for teachers and teacher educators.
Dr. Thomas is active in the Self-Study SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL). She is currently the Publicity Officer for the Poetics & Linguistics Association (PALA).
Education
Teaching
Courses:
C&T 896 The Internationalized Curriculum
C&T 818 Language, Discourse and Ideology
C&T 817 Contact, Change & American English
C&T 816 Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
C&T 491/825 TESOL Practicum / Advanced TESOL Practicum
C&T 331 Instructional Approaches to TESOL in Middle/Secondary
Research
Applied Linguistics, Language Use; Harry Potter Studies and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
