Jiadi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Language and Literacy Education program and Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign. She is multilingual and speaks Mandarin, Hezeness (a langauge native to her hometown), English, Korean, and Japanese. Her work is guided by a sociocultural perspective that acknowledges minoritized communities’ daily literacy and cultural practices conducted with different modes and across named languages as legitimate knowledge. She believes the cultural, linguistic, and historical knowledge students bring into the classroom could leverage their learning, including academic performance.