Dr. Jenni Trujillo

Dr. Jenni Trujillo has worked as a bilingual multicultural educator for over 25 years serving in English Learner and Multilingual Learner education--ranging from classroom teacher to EL/Bilingual Director to college professor to author. She is passionate about languages, having grown up in an immigrant, Spanish-speaking home. Her publications include several articles and an EL literacy program for National Geographic that was used to teach English in 26 states, Mexico, China, Canada, and Costa Rica. She has conducted multiple academic presentations promoting effective education of English Learners at a variety of conferences at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels. She served as an advisory board member of Teaching Tolerance (part of the Southern Poverty law Center) where she focused on culturally responsive instruction and social justice in education. Dr. Trujillo also worked with teachers and students in the Southwest and the Navajo Nation for over two decades through the Native American Teacher Education Outreach Program at Fort Lewis College, as well as teaching in the on-campus program in the Teacher Education Department. In addition, she taught in a Service-Learning Program in Bahía de Kino, Sonora, Mexico and has also worked with the Ute tribes in Indigenous language revitalization. She was the National Director of English Language Acquisition for Pearson Education where she worked with educators in 40 states and 11 countries. She later served as the Director of English Language Learner Initiatives at Learning in Motion in Santa Cruz, CA. In that role, she worked on a variety of initiatives including the development of a tablet-based literacy program, collaboration on a large-scale research project in math with the American Institutes for Research, and a STEM curriculum with Stanford University. Most recently, she co-authored four textbooks and a curriculum for EL newcomers at the early elementary, elementary, middle school and high school levels with Vista Higher Learning. She returned to Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado where she served as Dean of the School of Education. In that role, she was very involved in state and national initiatives on diversifying the educator workforce and rural education. Under her leadership, and together with the faculty, Fort Lewis College’s undergraduate teaching program was recognized as one of the best in the nation in preparing future elementary school teachers to teach children to read. The program received an A+ distinction and national ranking from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Currently, she is the Director of Multilingual Learner Education and Literacy for ImagiNation, a project of the Bezos Family Foundation where she is working on generative AI for early childhood education with a focus on equity.