Thursday, March 13, 2025, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard (2 Arrow St, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA)
This in-person event will be conducted in English. Click here to RSVP.
This talk will explore the role of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) in the teaching of Spanish, including its theoretical underpinnings, goals and development. CLA centers on the power dynamics of language and its relationship to identities, and its role in perpetuating and/or resisting systems of inequality. By critically examining the sociopolitics of language, rather than focusing exclusively on linguistic forms and prescribed usage, CLA-based pedagogies foster a more complete understanding of language. The talk will highlight how CLA aligns with and extends the work of antiracist and social justice-oriented pedagogies, offering students tools to engage with language variation and linguistic prejudice in ways that promote equity and justice in language teaching.
Jennifer Leeman is a professor of Spanish linguistics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her research and teaching focus on the sociopolitics of language, with particular attention to multilingualism, Spanish in the US, and the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language. Her work is interdisciplinary, engaging the fields of education, Latinx studies, language policy, and linguistic anthropology, as well as applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. She was the founding director of George Mason’s online graduate certificate in Spanish Heritage Language Education, launched in 2021.
Leeman’s publications explore the ideological intersections of language, race, and nation, particularly in the racialization of Spanish and Spanish speakers in the US. She is the author, with Janet Fuller, of Speaking Spanish in the US: The Sociopolitics of Language (also published in Spanish). She has also published numerous articles and chapters on topics such as census questions on language and ethnoracial identity, linguistic and semiotic landscapes, and heritage language education, as well as critical approaches to teaching Spanish. In addition to her academic role, Leeman spent nearly a decade as a research sociolinguist at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Survey Measurement.