Robert Train, Professor, Spanish, Sonoma State University
Experiencing Language, Language Education and Social Justice in Times of Violence and Resistance
Attacking education has long been a staple food in the conservative political regimen of the “culture wars” in the US. However, the assault on higher education takes an increasingly troubling and openly violent texture in the Trump era, particularly for immigrants and Latinos. In this talk, I will examine impacts of Trumpian discourse on how we language educators may address structural and conceptual shifts around speaking, teaching, and learning languages in the United States as “world”, “native”, “second”, “foreign”, and “heritage” languages beyond and between English. I ask how the multiple war fronts against higher education, immigrants and Latinos impacts us as linguistic individuals (Johnstone, 1996, 2009), learners and teachers who bring to the classroom our diverse “lived experience of language”, or Spracherleben (Busch, 2017) as we co-participate in the ongoing shaping of experience both inside and outside the classroom. Drawing on recent work for a monograph on language education for Latinx learners (Martínez & Train, forthcoming), I will outline an ecologically complex and dynamic view of language experience at the intersections with discourse, identity, locality and mobility within and across multiple scales (global, national, institutional, community, familial, individual, affective and temporal). Language experience—woven into our human experience through languaging and translanguaging as we live in the world—offers educators working beyond English an ethical space in which to critically engage with the violence increasingly targeting our institutions, key constituencies of our students, and—in many cases—ourselves and our families.
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Tuesday, February 5, 2019
3 – 5 pm
B-4 Dwinelle Hall