Mark Pacheco
Associate Professor
About
Mark B. Pacheco is an Associate Professor in the School of Teaching & Learning at the University of Florida’s College of Education. He received his Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching & Diversity from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, and his master’s degree in education from the City College of New York. He received a bachelor’s degree in English and Italian from Georgetown University. Dr. Pacheco’s most recent research focuses on ways that teachers can foster students’ character development within literacy and language instruction. In particular, he examines how students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds can cultivate virtue through meaningful engagements with grade-level texts.
Along with this work, Dr. Pacheco has an active body of research that explores (1) practical wisdom across school leadership teams, and (2) responsive instruction for diverse learners in literacy classrooms. His work has been supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. He has published his research in Journal of Character Education, Journal of Moral Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy and Science Education.
Along with this work, Dr. Pacheco has an active body of research that explores (1) practical wisdom across school leadership teams, and (2) responsive instruction for diverse learners in literacy classrooms. His work has been supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. He has published his research in Journal of Character Education, Journal of Moral Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy and Science Education.
Affiliations
- School of Teaching and Learning
Research Interests
Bilingual / Bicultural Education, Character Education, Literacy Education, Classical Education, Design-based Research
Education
- Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching, and Diversity, 2016 Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education
- M.S. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, 2009 The City College of New York
- B.A. in Italian and English, 2006 Georgetown University and Université di Firenze
Professional Appointments
- Associate Professor of ESOL/Bilingual Education, School of Teaching and Learning, University of Florida, 2025 - present
- Assistant Professor of ESOL/Bilingual Education, School of Teaching and Learning, University of Florida, 2018 - 2025
- Assistant Professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education, School of Teaching and Learning, Illinois State University, 2016 - 2018
- English and ESL Teacher, High School of Fashion Industries, New York, NY, 2007 - 2011
- Adolescent & Adult ESL Teacher, The Lado Institute, Washington, D.C; TASIS, England; EF Dil Okulu, Istanbul, 2006 – 2008
Activities and Honors
- Bilingual Research Journal’s Outstanding Early Career Reviewer (2021)
- Vanderbilt's Otto C. Bassler Dissertation Award for Outstanding Research (2016)
- National Council of Teachers of English Alan C. Purves Award for Using Translation to Drive Conceptual Development for Students Becoming Literate in English as an Additional Language, with Robert Jiménez (2015)
Selected Grants
Wisdom at Work
Role
- Co-PI
Funding Agency
- John Templeton Foundation
Project Period
- 2025 - 2028
Award Amount
- $1,500,000
Project VITE: Virtue in Teacher Education
Role
- PI
Funding Agency
- Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest
Project Period
- 2024 - 2025
Award Amount
- $40,571
Responsive Instruction for Emergent Bilingual Learners in Biology Classrooms
Role
- Co-PI
Funding Agency
- National Science Foundation - DRK12 program
Project Period
- 2020 - 2023
Award Amount
- $1,120,163
Selected Publications
Recent Publications
- Pacheco, M. B., & Febriarti, B. (2026). Wisdom in their words: A phenomenological study of practical wisdom in school leadership. Journal of School Leadership.
- Pacheco, M. B., McKee, J., & Lai, Y. (2026). Dignity and Discourses: Student perspectives on human dignity. Journal of Character Education.
- Pacheco, M. B., *McKee, J., & *Lai, Y. (2025). Little things can be big: Character education in the literacy classroom for multilingual learners. In V. Risko & D. Walker-Dalhouse (Eds.) Equitable literacy instruction for students in poverty. New York: Teachers College Press.
- Daniel, S., Pacheco, M. B., Burriss, S., Smith, B. E., & Hundley, M. (2023). Cultivating writerly virtues: critical human elements of multimodal writing in the age of artificial intelligence. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
Other Research
- Koukoulidis, N, Pacheco, M. B., Shin, J., & Brown, J. (2025). Development of an observation protocol for teachers’ culturally and linguistically responsive science instruction. Science Education, 109(6), 1779-1807.
- Ngozi M Nnamani, M., Hershey, M. S., Anthony, C., Pacheco, M. B., & Bohlin, K. E. (2025). From concept to capacity: Evidence of school leaders activating the four functions of Phronesis. Journal of Moral Education, 1-18.
- Pacheco, M. B., & Brown, J. C. (2022). Newcomer emergent bilingual students’ meaning-making in biology classrooms: A communities of practice perspective. Urban Education.
- Pacheco, M. B., Daniel, S., Pray, L., & Jimenez, R. T. (2019). Translingual practice, strategic participation, and meaning-making. Journal of Literacy Research, 51(1), 75-99.
- Pacheco, M. B. (2018). Spanish, Arabic and “English-only”: Making meaning across languages in two classroom communities. TESOL Quarterly, 52(4), 995-1021.
- Pacheco, M. B., Smith, B. E., & Carr, S. (2017). Connecting classrooms and communities with language and technology: A multimodal codemeshing project. Voices from the Middle, 24(3), 65-69.
- Pacheco, M. B., & Miller, M. E. (2015). Making meaning through translanguaging in the literacy classroom. The Reading Teacher, 69(5), 533-537.