Maria Jose Botelho was born in Sao Miguel, Azores. Her family immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, five years before the Carnation Revolution, a process that transformed Portugal from a dictatorship to a democracy. She studied cultural anthropology and language, literacy, and culture. She worked as a children's librarian and teacher educator in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. She was a faculty member of the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education/University of Toronto. Presently she is Assistant Professor of Literacy Education in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Concentration of the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Maria Jose is interested in how school literacy practices can be re-imagined to affirm children's cultural and linguistic knowledge as well as to offer tools for cultural production and social participation and re/organization. Her three research areas of interest hold great promise for this work. Critical multicultural analysis of children's and young adult literature challenges researchers, teacher educators, and teachers to reconsider how multicultural children's literature and other texts are studied in elementary and secondary classrooms. She is also exploring how critical literacies, multiliteracies, and Waldorf language arts pedagogies, under-explored literacy literacy practices, converge and diverge in Waldorf-inspired and democratic public schools. Currently, she is writing a book on how critical collaborative inquiry and ethnographic research practices can contribute to the professional learning of experienced and preservice teachers. Maria Jose's research has taken her to Ontario, California, Massachusetts, and Finland.