Pei-ni Causarano received her Ph.D. in educational linguistics from the University of New Mexico. While she is currently developing online Chinese courses for Fairfax (VA) County Public Schools, she continues teaching advanced Chinese courses at the University of Mary Washington. Her research is informed by more than 15 years of experience serving as a face-to-face and online Chinese and ESL instructor and clinical supervisor at various institutions. Her interdisciplinary areas of study include cross-linguistic influences in second language acquisition (SLA), thinking from a first language perspective when speaking a second language, online language teaching and learning, and development of second language (L2) literacy. Raising trilingual (Chinese, Italian, and English) children, Dr. Causarano is also an educator and parent in heritage language schools.

An Chung Cheng, Ph.D., is a professor of Spanish at the University of Toledo, Ohio, where she has also served as the Director of the Asian Studies Program and adviser of the Multi-Age Foreign Language Education Program at undergraduate and graduate levels. She specializes in second language acquisition and teacher education. Her research areas are in instructed second language acquisition, multilingualism, heritage language education, language input processing, and corpus-based approaches in third language acquisition. She has taught foreign language teacher education courses in the United States and abroad. Dr. Cheng has been actively involved in community-based Chinese heritage schools as a parent, teacher, member of the board of directors, and head of a weekend school. She was the principal investigator of a research project on Chinese heritage programs in the United States, funded by an International Research and Studies Grant of the U.S. Department of Education (2009-2013). She has been the program director and instructor of the STARTALK-CHELER Chinese Leadership Program at the University of Toledo for teachers of Chinese heritage schools each year since 2013. She is the past chair of the ACTFL Less Commonly Taught Languages Special Interest Group and the president of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL).

Ms. Hui Liang is a certified Chinese language teacher with 20 years of language teaching experience at the high school and college level. She is a highly motivated, enthusiastic, and dedicated educator and curriculum writer who has demonstrated great passion for her teaching. She has served several Chinese schools in the United States for 12 years. Ms. Liang is also a former Vice-Principal and Academic Director of the Howard County Chinese School, Maryland, where she was responsible for designing and implementing the Chinese curriculum, hiring teachers and providing professional development, working with parents, and running the school’s daily operation. All Chinese programs and subsidiary courses have been launched and well developed, and they have been enjoyed by many students and parents. The school size has been increased from 436 to 1,200 students in the past 8 years. Currently, she is a member of the Board Directors of the Chinese School Association in the United States (CSAUS) and the former President and current Director of the Chinese Language Teacher Association, North Capital Region (CLTA-NCR). Ms. Liang is an active promoter of Chinese language and culture and an event organizer. Together with her team members, she has organized and participated in several conferences and workshops, bringing in outside speakers and authors to share their work with the Chinese language teaching community, while also regularly organizing extracurricular and community events.

Tommy Lu, EdD, has been actively gathering and developing programs for Chinese community-based schools for over 20 years. He has served in several positions, such as the principal, vice principal, curriculum director, and teacher of the Chinese School of Delaware; co-chair of the ACTFL Heritage Language SIG; president of ACS (Association of Chinese Schools) and NCACLS (National Council of Association of Chinese Language Schools); Chinese language representative for the Coalition of Community-Based Language Schools; and senior advisor to CELIN (Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network) @ Asia Society. He is interested in building a platform for all community-based schools using the community of practice (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder) approach so that every community member can share and collaborate what they have learned and improve teaching and learning.

Grace Wu is a Senior Lecturer in Foreign Language in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Chinese literacy and Chinese character teaching. Currently, Grace is the Chinese Heritage Language Course coordinator at the Penn Chinese Language Program. Combining Grace's creativity and her 25-year experience in the field of Chinese language education, the Chinese Biographies series was selected as the best grant project of 2012 for the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Grace has been academic director of the Chinese School of South Jersey (CSSJ) since 2007, when her children entered kindergarten in CSSJ. The dedicated teachers and volunteers, as well as the camaraderie and friendship her family has developed in the community-based school, are what have kept her serving the community. Grace has served on the CSSJ Board of Trustees for the past ten years and was President for the past 6 years. She is also the current Chair and Vice Chair (2018-2021) of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Heritage SIG. During COVID-19, Grace organized an ACTFL webinar about “Teaching and Learning in a Community-Based Heritage Language School”, addressing these questions: How does remote teaching affect our community school? How do community schools continue their agenda in the midst of challenges? Her new book, Heritage Chinese: Modern Chinese for Advanced Beginners (Wu et al.) will be published by Routledge in 2023.