About

Growing up in a small New England seaside town, I received my K-12 education through the U.S. public schooling system. The oldest of three siblings, I confronted identity conflicts in my youth, as I observed affluence among the majority of my school peers while experiencing socioeconomic struggles within my own single-parent home. Seen as an economic mobilizer, language correction and prescription were pervasive across my home and school domains. While at school, world languages were a marginal element of the core academic curriculum and prescriptive orientations to language predominated, whereby any deviances from perceived standards were seen as problematic for communication (or simply as poor etiquette at home). As an adolescent, I became incredibly self-conscious about making "mistakes" in my speech and writing; I had not yet gained a full appreciation for natural language variation and the innovations that emerge through language invention and creativity. When I first began teaching English as a Second Language, I actively sought to correct my students' "mistakes", the prescriptive mindset long internalized within me.

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Over many years of teaching and academic study, I developed a new set of critical vocabulary and conceptual tools to re-see not only my language pedagogy, but also my own language socialization. Doctoral studies in critical applied linguistics helped me to reflect more critically on my teaching experiences, embrace my vulnerabilities (both in and out of the classroom), and accept that my ideological formations as a educator are complex and ever evolving as I search for ways to realize sociolinguistic justice both in and beyond language classrooms.

 

Married to an Iranian Azerbaijani polyglot, I live in a multilingual household, where we language between English, Azerbaijani, Spanish, Farsi, and even some Turkish. Self-directed language learning has been ongoing in my adult life. It has opened many wonderful opportunities for cross-cultural exchanges, travels, friendships, and professional opportunities. It has also sparked my intellectual interests in informal learning and virtual language exchange, as fields of inquiry.

 

Currently, I am focused on learning Azerbaijani, which is an agglutinative Turkic language and proudly my daughter's first language. The greatest number of Azerbaijani speakers reside in the Azerbaijan province of Iran. However in this context, Azerbaijani is a marginalized language that is learned by millions through oral home traditions but not taught schools. It is also the official language of Azerbaijan, a country which neighbors northern Iran. In Azerbaijan, there are ongoing nation-building efforts to codify, revitalize, and teach this language.

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I hope you will join me in these and other language advocacy efforts.