Alison Noyes is the manager of the Emerging America program at the Collaborative for Educational Services, where she leads the English Learner Collaborations project funded by a Library of Congress grant to the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies. She began her career as a teacher of English Language learners and high school history, and worked for many years with international students and college study abroad as a program director and assistant dean before returning to focus on engaging K-12 students. Alison is a graduate of Haverford College and received graduate training in methods of teaching English as a Second Language at Harvard University while teaching in their intensive English summer program. She received a Master of Arts in Intercultural Relations from Lesley University and did further graduate work in cultural psychology that included a summer of field work in east and central Africa. She has worked on curriculum to engage students using theater arts techniques, and developed projects incorporating local and site-based history resources into teachers’ classrooms. She has been a novice speaker of other languages in Spanish, Italian, and Swahili.