Anita Pandey

Anita Pandey is a tenured professor in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University, and the Director of the institution's Writing Center.  She earned her doctorate--in applied linguistics--from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She holds two M.A. degrees (both from Illinois) and a B.A. (honors) in English, with a minor in African literature, from Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Her areas of expertise include linguistics, humanities, professional and technical writing, and P-12 teacher education.  She has provided professional development in early childhood education, bilingualized instruction and assessment, reading, and ESL. 

Anita was born and raised in Africa. She spent time primarily in Zambia (her birth place), Nigeria, and Cameroon.  She acquired Hindi from her parents and picked up Yoruba, Hausa, and Nigerian Pidgin in her childhood.  She learned French and Spanish as a teenager--primarily from children, as documented in her first book, The Child Language Teacher: Intergenerational Language and Literary Enhancement, which chronicles how she taught her mother English in her childhood, and how this empowering experience enhanced her academic and social skills.  Her latest book is titled Language Building Blocks (Language Building Blocks 9780807753552 | Teachers College Press).

Anita chairs the Early Childhood Education Special Interest group at the National Association for Bilingual Education.  She served as U.S. Liaison for Childhood Education International from 2017 to 2020, and on the Board of the National Association for Bilingual Education from 2014 to 2017.  She directed the Howard County African American History Project, part of the Historical Society, and was a featured speaker for the Howard County Office of Human Rights and Equity: Howard County's Unsung (S)heroes - YouTube.   She also ran for a nonpartisan School Board position in 2018, and won 38,109 votes in the county-wide race (Anita Pandey - Ballotpedia).  She is a proud parent, and an advocate for collaborative reading and writing or what she terms "performative literacies,” as well as for alternative testing (e.g., portfolio and multimodal assessments), and the humanities, specifically the non-Western roots of philosophy, mathematics, science, engineering, astrology, astrophysics, medicine, music, and folklore/literature.  She can be reached at anita.pandey@morgan.edu