He is originally from Canada, and started as an ESL instructor in Oregon in the 1990s while working as a community organizer and activist. He then moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, where he taught English for eight years at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca and earned an MA in applied linguistics and went on to do his dissertation research in Oaxaca, an ethnography of language teachers. After finishing his PhD in 2007, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio, working with Bilingual Education and ESL teachers.