Maria Estela Brisk

Student Success and Access and Faculty Excellence

Maria Estela Brisk learned early that language could be both a bridge and a border. Her mother taught her that a complete education includes speaking more than one language. Later, while raising her daughter, Angélica, in a multilingual home, Maria saw the prejudice often directed toward Spanish speakers. She chose to spend her career changing what bilingual students and their teachers could expect from education.

Across more than 50 years as an educator and scholar, Maria has taught, researched, and mentored generations of teachers. Now in her 80s, the UNM alumna continues to teach at Boston College. Former students call themselves “Brisk babies,” an affectionate name that reveals something a curriculum vitae cannot: her influence lives in the people she prepared, and then in the students they teach.

Maria established the Professor Maria Estela Brisk Scholarship for Bilingual Education Teachers to support master’s students preparing to serve multilingual learners. The scholarship can give a working educator room to pursue advanced training, strengthen a classroom, and help children experience their home language as an asset rather than an obstacle.

Angélica is now gathering family members and Maria’s former students around an effort to double the scholarship. The circle keeps widening: a mother teaches her daughter the value of language; that daughter becomes a scholar and mentor; her students become teachers; their classrooms make belonging possible for countless young people.

Maria made language a doorway and spent a lifetime holding it open. Be the reason the next bilingual educator walks through it and helps an entire classroom find its voice.