story by Claire Miller
Lindsay McHolme’s first teaching job was at a school in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where she taught high school English. Her three years at the school gave her firsthand experience working in a bilingual setting and sparked her interest in studying the connections among language, identity and educational policy.
“At the time, I was thinking a lot about my own Spanish language learning as an English-dominant American and how being bi/multilingual is such an asset and a joy. And yet, educational policy often frames the bi/multilingualism of immigrants and refugees to the U.S. from a deficit perspective,” she said. “I want my research to support a shift from explicit and implicit English-only ideologies to asset-based multilingual ideologies at the individual and systemic levels.”
After returning to the U.S. in 2007, McHolme worked as a literacy coordinator, an English language arts and English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher and the director of a community literacy coalition. She also went back to school to earn her master's degree in literacy studies and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Grand Valley State University and her doctorate in curriculum, instruction and teacher education from Michigan State University.
In 2023, she joined the College of Education & Human Development’s Adult Literacy Research Center (ALRC) as a postdoctoral researcher in adult literacy – a position that has brought opportunities to work alongside experts in adult literacy and pursue her own research agenda.
McHolme has co-authored articles on adult multilingual language learners published in the Journal of Language, Identity and Education, the Journal for Research on Adult Education and Language and Education, among others. She has also worked with Associate Professor Sarah Carlson to study reading comprehension in adult education from a cognitive sciences perspective and collaborated with Iris Feinberg, associate director of the ALRC, on evaluating multilingual diabetes education videos.
“I've learned from both projects the importance of deep community building and authentic, reciprocal collaboration,” she said.
At the Frontiers in Adult Education Research Conference this spring, McHolme gave a poster presentation alongside fellow ALRC postdoctoral researcher Gal Kaldes entitled, "When Adult Education Honors Multilingual Communities: A Translanguaging Literacies Approach to Adult Literacy Assessment," which was named a Top Poster at the conference.
The presentation highlighted Kaldes and McHolme’s quantitative study on the literacy practices of adults living in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood in the midwestern U.S.
Ninety-three English speakers and 95 multilingual adults participated in the study, which asked them to complete a survey on reading in English and their home language(s). Study participants also completed the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment Systems (CASAS) Form 80 reading appraisal, an assessment for English language learners that highlights their reading abilities.
“Our findings underscore the cognitive and cultural strengths that multilingual adults bring to reading tasks, and challenge monolingual frameworks that often dominate adult literacy assessments,” she said. “Our study suggests that incorporating an asset-based, translanguaging literacies approach can lead to more equitable, accurate assessments that reflect the full range of adult skills and lived experiences in the U.S. population.”
McHolme hopes to become a faculty member at a university where she can teach and study multilingual education. But for now, she’s focused on further developing her research and learning from her colleagues at Georgia State.
“The faculty at the ALRC have been very supportive throughout my postdoc, especially my mentor, Dr. Sarah Carlson,” she said. “She has taught me how to advocate for myself respectfully and thoughtfully in academic spaces.”