Sustaining Education Justice in Action
Bay Area, CA
Language revitalization refers to the work people and communities undertake to maintain the use of their languages–signed and spoken–in spite of governments, educational systems, and societal attitudes that sideline or actively oppose people’s linguistic rights. This marginalization has contributed to an unprecedented scale of language endangerment across the world. With our trip, we aim to provide an opportunity for students to not just learn about the topic of language revitalization but to also contribute to the important language revitalization work being done by communities in the Bay Area. We welcome participants regardless of background knowledge, whether you’ve never heard of language revitalization before or you’re a language revitalization practitioner yourself.
The maintained knowledge and use of ancestral languages has a variety of empirical benefits, being associated with positive mental health, physical health, and educational outcomes (Whalen et al. 2022). Thus, language revitalization is relevant to a wide variety of disciplines and topics, such as public health and education policy; we hope to explore language revitalization’s relevance to fields that at first glance may seem unrelated.
We take a broad view of language revitalization, encompassing Indigenous language movements, heritage language education (even in languages that aren’t necessarily endangered), etc. and including endangered languages that are considered by some to be varieties of other languages.
Citations:
Whalen, D.H.; Melissa E. Lewis; Stefanie Gillson; Brittany McBeath; Bri Alexander; and Kate Nyhan. 2022. Health effects of Indigenous language use and revitalization: a realist review. International Journal for Equity in Health 21.169. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-022-01782-6
Meet the co-leads:
Lindsay Flores
Howdy! I’m Lindsay, a rising senior from Oklahoma studying human biology and education. This is my fourth year involved with ASB through the lens of education. I am excited to explore this year’s education-themed program on education justice in the Bay and Sacramento. As Stanford students, it is hard to leave the bubble, which is why we would like to take the time to invest in deep research and service-minded learning that we would not otherwise get to outside of Spring break. Through my own experience in the Oklahoma education system, it has fueled a passion for understanding education and health inequities and for developing methods to tackle them through community-based and research-focused approaches. I love to teach, working with students from underrepresented backgrounds and making the inaccessible accessible, all while wearing a lot of floral patterns.
Zhangyang Wu
Greeting from my hometown dialect—Ni ho! My name is Zhangyang and I am a senior at Stanford studying Physics and Education. I am interested in understanding how education and civic/social issues intertwined and how we situate Artificial Intelligence in the education space. I started the Stanford Education Society and brought students across departments to connect with the Graduate School of Education and with undergraduate populations. Coming out of high school, I found a disconnect between the college prep resources and those who really needed it so I started Panda Bound, a college access organization that also focuses on civic empowerment. I am a 3rd time ASB co-lead and also 2nd time Curriculum Chair and hope to learn more about education with everyone!