Dr. Carr will be honored at a ceremony held at the Jarvis Auditorium on Wednesday, April 22 from 5-7 pm.
Dr. Jhonni Carr is a 2025-2026 recipient of the prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award at UC Berkeley. This is not the first time Carr, a lecturer in the Spanish & Portuguese Department since 2018, is being honored for her excellence in instruction; she is also a recipient of the 2024-2025 Arts & Humanities Teaching Award as well as a 2021 Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award.
Carr’s research focus is on linguistic landscapes, or how public signage reflects and shapes social belonging. Whether in the context of Southeast LA or the higher education institutional landscape itself, she analyzes how linguistic policy and practice regarding minoritized languages impact Latinx communities. She and co-author Román Luján, both Fellows at the UC Berkeley Center for Teaching and Learning, produced a set of tools for educators to introduce principles of linguistic solidarity and language justice into the classroom. (Their chapter on the project is “Language Solidarity: How to Create a Forcefield with Words.”) Currently, her collaboration with Dr. Laura Álvarez López (University of Stockholm) and recent UCB alumna Sol Yuritzin Arroyo-Jacuinde pays particular attention to how Hispanic-Serving Institutions align their mission with practice, tracing where and how Spanish appears on campus and how this affects Latinx students.
As an educator, Carr’s philosophy of teaching closely mirrors her research. She emphasizes experiential learning and the connections between classroom and community. During the pandemic, Carr offered students the chance to harness their final projects to actively support their communities. Students produced Spanish translations of COVID-related resources; one student’s Mixtec translation was featured on radio stations broadcasting to indigenous farm-working communities. In other courses, students are encouraged to engage with public spaces—whether through fieldwork in the Mission or bringing their work to a broader audience through websites—in order to meaningfully connect linguistic theory, practice and social change.
Reflecting on how Carr shaped her and her peers’ experience at Berkeley, student Ana Cecilia Rodríguez shares: “Professor Carr's courses have permanently changed how we think about language, power, access to language, and identity. She wants us to not only learn from the experts but become the next experts. Her teaching has deeply influenced both our academic and personal lives.”
In addition to her impact in the classroom, Carr’s campus leadership is defined by both extensive undergraduate mentoring and event organization. She has guided numerous students through the Faculty Mentored Undergraduate Research Fellowship program, also working with students designing and leading their own DeCal courses. In recent years, she has led the Linguistic Landscape Lectures en Español series and “Speaking up: Pathways for linguistics students towards language access advocacy,” in addition to ongoing partnerships with numerous community organizations.
