Marwa Elmasry is a 2023-2024 Teach Plus Illinois Affinity Group Facilitator, Teach Plus Illinois Policy Fellowship alumna, and a K-12 World Language-Arabic teacher at Oak Lawn Community High School in Oak Lawn, Illinois. In 2019, she established the Arabic program at Oak Lawn Community High School, making her school district one of the handful districts that offer Arabic as a foreign language in Illinois. She advocates for non-violence/peace education, linguistic justice, positive representation of minority cultures in the curriculum, and racism-free schools. Marwa was named the Illinois Bilingual Teacher of the Year by the Illinois State Board of Education in 2022. Marwa began her teaching career in Illinois as an Arabic lecturer at DePaul University where she also earned her MEd in curriculum studies, her world language teaching license, and her bilingual education endorsement.
