Affiliated Faculty and Consultants
Lillian Duran
Lillian Durán has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation at Utah State University. She helped to begin the first Spanish-English Head Start bilingual preschool program in Minnesota and conducted a three year experimental, longitudinal study comparing the language and literacy development of the children who attended the bilingual classroom to children in an English-only setting. She is currently collaborating with Centro de la Familia, the lead agency for Migrant Head Start in Utah. Lilly has delivered numerous presentations on the topic of evidence-based practices in assessment and instruction with young Dual Language Learners (DLLs) at regional, state and national conferences. Prior to her work in higher education she worked for 10 years as an ECSE teacher both in Prince George’s County, Maryland and Minnesota. She became interested in researching evidence-based practices for young DLLs when she and her family moved from the Washington D.C. area to rural south central Minnesota, where she worked as an ECSE teacher in many communities with high Latino, Somali, and Sudanese populations.