CARLA X019 - c7.22: Critical Approaches to Heritage Language Education (1-week in-person institute)
Description
- Institute Type: 1-week in-person
- Location: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Campus
- Target Audience: Teachers of heritage language, world language, Indigenous language, and English as a Second Language learners at the middle school through postsecondary level. It is not designed for the elementary school level.
Heritage language learners bring a range of vital language and literacy histories, connections with communities, and complex intercultural knowledge. Unfortunately, typical world language curriculum and teacher preparation aren’t designed for heritage learners to expand their confidence and truly thrive. Heritage language teachers can disrupt language loss, help heal wounds from subtractive schooling, and nourish a sustainable multilingual future.
This institute advocates for critical approaches and a healing-centered paradigm to language teaching. This starts with identifying ways that heritage learners have been denied access to the natural development of bilingualism and biliteracy (e.g., institutional racism, impacts of colonialism, linguistic xenophobia). Then the institute dives into transformational teaching practices that create fertile spaces to regenerate language confidence and learners’ connections to generational knowledge and strengths. By redesigning language learning environments and curriculum in ways that focus on personal, complex, and collective identities, as well as real-world issues that matter to youth, teachers can create spaces that reclaim heritage languages for future generations.
Instructors
Jenna Cushing-Leubner is an Associate Professor of Heritage/World Language, Bilingual/Bicultural Education, and TESOL at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She has been collaborating with heritage language educators and families to design curriculum, texts, and instructional practices for over a decade. She is the creator and coordinator of UW-Whitewater’s online heritage language education professional development programming, and the co-convener of Lub Zej Zog’s Hmong Language Reclamation Project.
J. Eik Diggs is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona and a licensed Spanish language and ESL teacher with over a decade of experience with heritage language curriculum design and teaching. She developed and taught a multi-year high school Spanish as a Heritage Language program in Minneapolis, Minnesota, infusing ethnic studies, the arts, identity work, and youth participatory action research.
Aracely Thomas (guest instructor)is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota and a licensed Spanish language teacher with over a decade of experience as a heritage language teacher and program advocate. She developed and taught a high school Spanish heritage language program in Farmington, MN, integrating Freirian pedagogies with current events, arts-based language arts, and gender-conscious curriculum.
See the full course description here.
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