Director of Research and Innovation
Internationals Network of Public Schools

Affiliated Faculty, International Education and Development
Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science and Humanities
Steinhardt School of Education, Culture and Human Development
New York University
New York City
[email protected]

I am a researcher / practitioner with my academic roots in applied linguistics and education. My work focuses on how language policies in educational institutions, both formal and informal, serve as facilitators or barriers to access, inclusion, integration and equitable outcomes.

Of particular interest in my work has been how immigrant-receiver nations address broad misconceptions about language learning and multilingualism in their public school systems as they seek to integrate immigrants, guest workers and their children, refugees and unaccompanied minors, as well as the role of native language literacy in second language acquisition. I have worked across the sectors of research, policy and practice in the U.S., Central and South America and in Germany.

Currently I serve in a dual role: as director of research and innovation at Internationals Network for Public Schools, where I lead our efforts nationally to use mixed methods research to examine equity issues for immigrant language minority youth in U.S. public schools, as well as differential impacts of a range of programs and policies on their well-being and academic success. Central to this work is a focus on how language policies in educational settings — both explicit as well as implicit — impact the access and success of language minority youth and their families and how language is used as a stand in for race and other racialized categories to exclude and marginalize different subgroups.

In addition, I serve as an affiliated faculty member in the program for international education and development in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science and Humanities at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, Culture and Human Development, where I teach graduate courses on immigration and education.

My research examines how schools and classroom teachers respond to and adapt their pedagogical approaches to meet the needs of newly arrived immigrants and refugees in their classroom who are new to the host country language and how teachers understand and address widely held beliefs about language and learning. As part of this work, I spend a great deal of time in schools, classrooms and in nonformal or community-based educational settings speaking to students and teachers about how language and meaning are negotiated in the curriculum. I am particularly interested in the explicit and implicit messages and beliefs about minority language speakers in educational settings.

My recent work has taken me to Europe, to Germany in particular, to understand how teachers in settings where dominance in a language other than German has long been considered a problem are facing the challenge of integrating newly arrived immigrant students into their classroom. Speaking to adolescent and young adult students is central to my research as I seek to understand the role of language in identity formation, equity and access.

Areas of Interests

• Language policy and planning
• Second language acquisition
• Linguistic hegemony and linguicism in the curriculum
• Code-switching/code-meshing
• Second language writing
• Racialization of minority language speakers
• Immigration history
• Race and racism in educational settings
• Critical race pedagogies
• Qualitative and collaborative methodologies
• Multilingual/multicultural education
• Transnational movement in schools

Selected Publications

• Lukes, M. & Blagg, K. (2022). Leveraging Nuanced Data to Inform Research and Policy for Immigrant Students and Families. Learning Curve. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. June 9, 2022.
• Lukes, M. (2021) Linguistically diverse immigrant youth chart a pathway to their futures in innovative public high schools for transnational youth.
• Lukes, M. (2021). Deconstructing the Dropout Factory. Redesigning Secondary Schools to Better Serve Immigrant Youth. In Heidrich, Karakaşoğlu, Mecheril, & Shure (Eds.), Regimes of Belonging — Schools — Migrations. Teaching in (Trans)National Constellations. Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer VS.
• Internationals Network for Public Schools (2021). Serving New York City’s Multilingual Learners During Covid: Reflection, Re-Enrollment, Re-Engagement and Recovery. Sept. 20, 2021. Prepared by Marguerite Lukes, Kevin Davies, Cora Kobischka and Dennis Caindec.
• Internationals Network for Public Schools (2021). Engaging Multilingual Learners Post-Pandemic. June 23, 2021 Prepared by Marguerite Lukes, Kevin Davies and Cora Kobischka
• Clark-Gareca, B., Lukes, M. Short, D. & Sharp-Ross, M.  (2019). Long-term English Learners: Current Research, Practice, and Policy. TESOL Journal. May 2019.
• Lukes, M. (2015). Latino Immigrant Youth and Interrupted Schooling: Dropouts, Dreamers and Alternative Pathways to College. Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications.
• Wiley, T.G. & Lukes, M. (2015). English-Only and Standard English Ideologies in the United States. In T. Ricento (Eds.). Language Policy and Planning: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, Vol. III, (pp. 106-29). London: Routledge.
• Lukes, M. and Lyons, J. (2015). Educational Programming for Low-Literate Adult Migrants in the U.S., In Whiteside, A. and Simpson, J. (Eds). Challenging agendas: Policy and practice in Language Education for Adult Migrants. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Lukes, M. (2013). Dropouts, Dreamers and Alternative Pathways to College. In, Gastic, B. & Verdugo, R. The Education of the Hispanic Population. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. 
• Lukes, M. (2013). Seeing Art, Seeing the World: Modern Art and Literacy Development for English Language Learners K-12. In Chappell  & Faltis (Eds). The Arts and Emergent Bilinguals: Building Culturally Responsive, Critical and Creative Programmes in School and Community Contexts. Routledge.
• Lukes, M. (2011). “I understand English but can’t write it””: The power of native language instruction for adult English Learners. International Multilingual Research Journal.  Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 19-38.
• Lukes, M. (2009). “We thought they had forgotten us”: Research, policy and practice in the education of Latino immigrant adults. Journal of Latinos and Education. Vol 8, No. 2, pp 161-172. 

Courses