DR. JUAN JOSÉ BUENO HOLLE

Juan José Bueno Holle (he/him/él) is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at Sacramento State, where he works mostly with pre-service teachers and bilingual teacher candidates. He holds an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the UNAM in Mexico City and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago. He is especially interested in multilingualism, language reclamation, and language justice, and has teaching experience at elementary, middle school, and high school levels.

WHAT'S THE TOPIC OF YOUR PRESENTATION?

While evaluations of language proficiency are often assumed to center around individuals' language production, extensive research has shown that evaluations of language production are instead closely tied to how we listen to/perceive language use in context. This is because our forms of perception are mediated through ideologies of language, race, class, gender, and nationality, which contribute to processes of racialization and minoritization (Flores & Rosa, 2015). This presentation highlights the role that educators play as listeners/perceivers in positioning their students as, for example, proficient/not proficient or intelligible/unintelligible.

WHY IS THIS TOPIC IMPORTANT?

By interrogating the language ideologies that underlie our listening/perceiving practices in education, research in this area calls for 1) building focused coursework that helps educators more intentionally and critically reflect on the listening/perceiving practices at work inside and outside of schools, and 2) supporting the work that educators are doing to validate students' language knowledge and practices and help expand their academic skills.

HOW DOES THIS WORK FIT WITHIN YOUR BROADER RESEARCH PROGRAM AND/OR WORK AS FACULTY MEMBER?

My broader research focuses broadly on connecting linguistic knowledge with practice to support multilingual communities around issues of language diversity, language ideologies, language loss, and language justice. These interests grow out of a combination of my experiences as a teacher in various K-12 contexts in the US and abroad together with my academic interests in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Linguistics.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE THE AUDIENCE WILL TAKE AWAY FROM YOUR PRESENTATION?

That our everyday interactions and ways of using language are complex and tied directly to negotiations of meaning and power. Developing critical awareness of these processes can help us better understand our responsibilities as listeners/perceivers as well as our roles as speakers/signers.

LINK TO A RECENT ARTICLE, PROJECT, OR OTHER SCHOLARLY-RELATED WORK:

The work I am presenting is in progress, please visit my Sac State Scholars profile for general information about my research.

For a recent project on multilingual writing, see: Writing With Joy: Building Multilingual Relationships Through Community-Engaged Language and Literacy Work