A World of Indigenous Languages Politics, Pedagogies and Prospects for Language Reclamation

Teresa L. McCarty is an educational anthropologist and applied linguist who lives and works in the homelands of the Gabrielino-Tongva, Tovaangar. At the University of California, Los Angeles, she is Distinguished Professor and G.F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology, and Faculty in American Indian Studies. A member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the International Centre for Language Revitalisation, she is the former editor of the American Educational Research Journal and the current coeditor of the Journal of American Indian Education.  Her books include A Place To Be Navajo—Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling, “To Remain an Indian”—Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (with K.T. Lomawaima), Language Planning and Policy in Native America, Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism (with L.T. Wyman and S.E. Nicholas), Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas (with S.M. Coronel-Molina), A World of Indigenous Languages: Politics, Pedagogies, and Prospects for Language Reclamation (with S.E. Nicholas and G. Wigglesworth), and Critical Youth Research in Education—Methodologies of Praxis and Care (with A.I. Ali). She is currently engaged in a multi-university, US-wide study of Indigenous-language immersion schooling funded by the Spencer Foundation.

Sheilah E. Nicholas, Hopisino, is a member of the Hopiit, the Hopi People, who continue to reside on aboriginal lands in the Black Mesa region of now known Arizona.  She is a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies and the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) at the University of Arizona (UAZ), Tucson.  Along with colleagues Dr. Teresa McCarty and Dr. Michael Seltzer at UCLA and Dr. Tiffany Lee at UNM, she is the UAZ Co-PI of the Spencer funded national study, “Indigenous-Language Immersion and Native American Student Achievement” which will establish a national database of Indigenous-language immersion (ILI) programs and identify the conditions under which ILI is beneficial as an innovative education practice. This and her research focus on Indigenous/Hopi language maintenance and reclamation, the intersection of language, culture and identity, and Indigenous language teacher education have been published in Journal of Language, Identity & Education, Native Studies Review Journal, and co-edited volume (2019), A World of Indigenous Languages: Politics, Pedagogies, and Prospects for Language Reclamation, Multilingual Matters.  She is an instructor consultant for the Indigenous Language Institute (ILI), Santa Fe, NM, an organization that assists tribal communities in their language revitalization/reclamation efforts.

Gillian Wigglesworth is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia and chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Her research interests include the languages of Indigenous children growing up in remote communities in Australia, the complexity of their language ecology, and how these interact with English once they enter the formal school system.