Dr. L. J. Randolph Jr.

Headshot of LJ Randolph

Announcements

  • Click here to learn about my recently published edited volume How We Take Action: Social Justice in PK-16 Language Classrooms.
  • Click here to view my blog (Decolonize Langauge), which contains materials and resources for teaching languages through an anticolonial and antiracist lens.

Welcome to my website! Among other things, I am an educator, linguist, abolitionist, and liberationist. Over the past two decades, I have taught a variety of courses in Spanish, English language, and education at the secondary and post-secondary levels. Currently, I am an assistant professor of World Language Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research and teaching focus on various critical issues in language education, including teaching Spanish to heritage and native speakers, incorporating justice-oriented/anti-racist/anti-colonial pedagogies, and centering Blackness and Indigenousness. Ultimately, I seek to explore and inform the following big questions:

  • What are the goals of language education?
  • How can language learning be an inclusive and liberating experience for students from minoritized and marginalized linguistic and racial identities?
  • What are the roles of such variables as teacher identity and curriculum in enacting justice-oriented pedagogies?
As an advocate for equitable, accessible, and transformative language education, I have served in leadership roles in various language organizations, including president of ACTFL (originally founded as the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages), president of the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina (FLANC), president of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), coordinator of the Cape Fear Foreign Language Collaborative (CFFLC), and founding vice-chair of ACTFL’s special interest group for Critical and Social Justice approaches.