Professor Maris Thompson joined the CSU, Chico faculty in 2008. She received her Ph.D. in the Language & Literacy, Society & Culture program in the Graduate School of Education at UC, Berkeley. Before her graduate work, Dr. Thompson taught English as a Second Language at the middle and high school levels in Portland Oregon, Oakland California, and Puerto Villamil in the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. In the School of Education, she teaches a variety of courses focused around educational equity, democracy, curriculum, and adolescent literacy. She chairs the Internationalization Faculty Staff Task Force, sits on the Academic Senate, and serves as a faculty mentor for the REACH program (Raising Educational Achievement in Collaborative Hubs) a first year experience program for first generation college students. She also serves as Co-Teaching Coordinator in the School of Education, assisting with the scale up of co-teaching as a model for effective clinical practice across all credential programs. Her research interests focus on language equity in current and historical contexts, the role of narrative in discourse practices at home and in school, the experiences of first generation and international students in higher education, and co-teaching as an apprenticeship model for reciprocal professional development. In 2015, Dr. Thompson was awarded a Maggie (Award) for her work on gender equity on campus from the AS Gender and Sexuality Equity Center.

Dr. Zartman, directs the CSU, Chico Center for Bilingual/Multicultural Studies, teaches and supervises pre-service teachers in the Multiple and Single Subject Bilingual Credential program, supervises pre-service teachers in the Single Subject Credential program, teaches the Research Seminar in Education course for graduate students in Education and Social Science MA Programs, and also teaches Access and Equity Issues in Education to undergraduates intending to pursue a teaching credential. He received a PhD in the Social, Multicultural and Bilingual Foundations of Education from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1984. Zartman taught high school and directed an adult education program in El Paso, Texas from 1975 through 1981. Since his arrival in Chico, Zartman has served as Team Leader or Cluster Leader on more than one dozen accreditation site visits for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC), and currently serves as both President of the California Association of Bilingual Teacher Educators (CABTE), and a member of the Board of Directors of the California Council on Teacher Education (CCTE).