Two longtime faculty members bid farewell to the College of Education

The San Diego State University College of Education salutes two outstanding, long-serving members of the college faculty. Learn more about the careers and contributions of Margie Gallego, professor of teacher education, and Katina Lambros, associate professor of school psychology.

Margie Gallego

Throughout her career at top institutions, Margie Gallego built a reputation as an outstanding researcher. At SDSU, however, she particularly relished the chance to teach. Some of her fondest memories during her 26 years at San Diego State involve teaching research methods to in-service teachers studying in master’s programs.

“I think that it helped them walk taller,” she said. "These teachers love what they do, and most of their work is so often private, in their classrooms. This gave them a voice to present their material from a point of expertise. 

"Teachers often don't get recognition, or don't seek it for themselves. I loved having them realize, ‘Oh, I am a teacher-scholar.’!"

And so, too, is Gallego. Born into a family of educators in Tucson, Arizona, Gallego stayed in her hometown to attend the University of Arizona. She spent 10 years at U of A, earning her bachelors, two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. 

Her career in academia began in 1989 when she received a tenure-track position at Michigan State University. Gallego taught teacher preparation courses and became her department’s bilingual education expert. She also started building her stature as a researcher, examining after-school environments in Lansing, Michigan’s Latinx community and becoming active in American Educational Research Association (AERA) and literacy research conferences.

Gallego made her way back out west in 1994 when she accepted a position at the University of California, San Diego to work with renowned cultural psychologist Michael Cole. Gallego taught in the Department of Human Development and worked as part of the assessment team studying after school environments for the Laboratory of Cognitive Human Cognition (LCHC). She considered herself fortunate to have been part of LCHC and connect with scholars from around the world pursuing joint research projects.

Along the way, as an active part of San Diego’s literacy community, Gallego got to know faculty at SDSU.

“They would say, ‘If you want to come back into straight-line teacher ed,” you would fit in well,” she said.

She was interested. Gallego joined the SDSU School of Teacher Education in 1999 at a time when — flush with federal government funding to prepare literacy coaches and reading specialists — the school boasted as many as 20 literacy faculty members.

At SDSU, Gallego taught credential, master’s and doctoral students, even taking on a freshman success course for first-generation college students (she had been one herself). She also supervised student teachers — something of a rarity for tenured faculty members.

"I actually really enjoyed that,” she said. “I always thought it was kind of fun to see what's going on there, and then to translate that into my own teaching. If you're only on campus and you're the only teacher you ever witness teaching, your ideas get stale."

Gallego took a step back in 2017 as her father’s health began to deteriorate, moving to exclusively online courses and no longer working with graduate students. She currently teaches an asynchronous course in ESL SDAIE (Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English) to credential candidates in the Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education.

Now, as she enters the Faculty Early Retirement Program (FERP), she’s excited for the chance to have more time. With her two children now grown, she has some writing projects in mind, including a research memoir and even a work of fiction — an imagined conversation between Lev Vygotsky, Alexei Leontiev and Alexander Luria, early pioneers of cultural-historical psychology. 

"I'll find things to do,” she said. “And plus, I'll still be working half-time, so I'll still be around. It's exciting. It’s a little scary, but I think it's good."

Katina Lambros

At the final faculty meeting of her two-decade career in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology, Katina Lambros gradually caught on to something strange. 

Was one of her colleagues wearing … mismatched shoes? 

Wait, were all her colleagues wearing mismatched shoes?

The collective fashion faux-pas was actually a loving callback to something that happened 12 years earlier at a departmental retreat.

"I was walking my son to school, and it was raining,” Lambros recounts. “I came back and had to commute to San Diego State. I had to change, and I just stuck my face in my dark closet, and I put two shoes on that I thought were similar — they were not. I came to campus in two different shoes.”

Adding to the humor was that the absent-mindedness was certainly out of character. Lambros is known for her organization, always showing up to meetings with sharpened pencils at the ready to take copious handwritten notes. And the farewell prank was indicative of the close bond she has with her CSP colleagues who she sincerely calls “my dear faculty.”

Lambros has been part of the CSP family since 2006 when she started as a lecturer. She was hired as a tenured-track professor two years later while pregnant with her son Nicholas. There’s something poetic about her leaving as her son is graduating high school.

Herself an alumna of SDSU, Lambros (‘93, psychology) worked as a school psychologist and a research scientist at Rady Children’s Hospital early in her career. While she came to SDSU with a strong background in research, she found great enjoyment in teaching aspiring school psychologists — many of whom she now admires as leaders and advocates in the school system. To this day, she loves getting to see her students in action on site visits.

“I learned how to become, I think, an effective teacher,” Lambros said. “That was through a lot of trial and error and a lot of listening to students to shape my classes in ways that would better support them. I’d tell them ‘I can't always fix everything and I can't solve a lot of the big issues in education. But I’m going to show up, stand by your side and help you try to figure them out."

So what’s next for Lambros? Well, she doesn’t quite yet know — a prospect that is both scary and exciting.

“I get to step out of my professional identity and figure out what I want to do,” she said. “I have 20 novels that I cannot wait to get to.”

She expects to spend a large portion of the year in Canada, where her husband is from. Nicholas is also a talented hockey player, and she is eager to watch him pursue his dream.

She also knows the school psychology program she loves dearly is in good hands — even if their footwear doesn’t always match.

"In my program, I got to stand on the shoulders of giants — the people that built our school psych program,” Lambros said. “Now there’s my beautiful current faculty, who are just picking up and running with where the field is today.”