Hometown: Dar es Salaam,Tanzania
Faculty mentor: David Cassels Johnson, professor of multilingual education, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education
Degree program and anticipated graduation date: PhD in teaching and learning: literacy, culture, and language education, May 2027

Jasmin Msuya is exploring the 2014 implementation of Tanzania’s Educational Language Policy in public secondary schools, with a particular focus on students’ transition from Swahili to English instruction. Although many Indigenous languages exist throughout Tanzania, this policy encodes Swahili as the language of instruction in primary education and English as the language of instruction in post-primary education. Msuya’s research contributes to an ongoing scholarly dialogue around the language of instruction in multilingual settings and explores how the use of English, a less familiar language, affects students’ and educators’ perspectives and potentially contributes to the death of Indigenous languages.

After graduation, Msuya plans to continue collaborating with educators, policymakers, and language scholars to bring different perspectives to educational language policies in multilingual classrooms and to document the effect of these policies on student and teacher experiences.

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