Dr. Angela Bland is a Facilitator for Tui Tuia | Learning Circle’s Languages Team. She was born in Ōtautahi, New Zealand.

Her teaching journey began with a range of experiences including learning to communicate using Australasian Signed English, being a read/writer for adults with physical disabilities and working as an ESOL tutor for the now called English Language Partners. Her language teaching and leadership experience has been in New Zealand and overseas in Japan and Ecuador with related experiences in Thailand and Guatemala. In New Zealand, she has taught in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. She also gained some teaching and training with Seabrook McKenzie Centre as a Specific Learning Disabilities teacher.

For the past ten years, she was an English as an Additional Language middle leader and teacher in a secondary school. Her primary foci in this role were equity of pathways for all bilingual and multilingual learners, targeted and planned student, parent and community engagement for culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and effective transitions and data gathering from primary to secondary school for all bilingual and multilingual students and their families. In particular, this involved working alongside teacher aides, bilingual and multilingual learning assistants, and community leaders. Additionally, a focus for her has been working with and supporting Pasifika languages; including completing a PhD which implemented, evolved, and explored supporting and developing Pasifika languages in a small and diverse Pasifika secondary school population.

She brings to the facilitator role a range of networks and advocacy work, strengths across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, an aspiration to empower teachers and middle leaders to explore their practice and find pathways for challenging implementations, aroha, and humour.  Her research interests are providing Pasifika language and community language pathways in secondary schools from Year 9 to 13 and developing accessible and inclusive assessments to monitor and develop these languages and literacies in addition to English language literacy in the secondary context.