JOSH PRADA
mission |
I am Josh Prada, an applied linguist working at the intersection of multilingualism, critical education and social justice across geopolitical spaces. My current agenda spans the United States, Germany, Brazil, North Africa, Japan and Australia with a sharp focus on the curricular architectures and pedagogical approaches at work in mother tongue/heritage language education, and bilingual and plurilingual education contexts. With attention to students, teachers, school and insittutional adminsitrators, and community members, the focus of my work is on improving the conditions with which multilingual youths and their families are received in mainstream education. The emphasis of my research-practice is on advancing approaches that center people from minoritized communities, such as the Hispanic communities in the United States and Brazil, or the Imazighen community in Europe. As a member of these communities, my work weaves together empirical, philosophical, theoretical and activist perspectives, gearing my program of inquiry towards equity, plurality and just change in schools and beyond.
As a queer academic of migrant background, I spent my childhood and adolescence between Melilla (a small multilingual and diverse city in North Africa) and London (a superdiverse world capital in the UK), and my adulthood in West Texas and Southern Indiana. I have also lived in Portugal, and spent long stays in Morocco, the Netherlands and France. I use most of the languages of the places where I have lived on my daily interactions. In these places, I have been involved in language education through a variety of roles: I have taught English and Spanish in schools and universities in Europe and the United States, I have designed and facilitated Performing Arts and Spoken Word Workshops for multilingual youths in London, I have created and coordinated service learning programs in Texas, developed and directed international teacher programs and courses for MA students, and I have facilitated workshops, given invited academic talks and plenaries around the world, including Bangladesh, Canada, Brazil, Norway, South Africa, Portugal, Morocco, and Poland, among many others. These experiences, coupled with my collaborative work with local community partners around the globe, inform my pursuit of social action through antiracist, decolonial educational proposals. Onto-epistemologically, I draw from concepts and ideas born in southern, queer and borderlands ways of knowing as means to question the nature of ideas produced in imperialistic traditions.
In the field of applied linguistics, my research program is known for originally bridging mother tongue/heritage language education and translanguaging.
As a queer academic of migrant background, I spent my childhood and adolescence between Melilla (a small multilingual and diverse city in North Africa) and London (a superdiverse world capital in the UK), and my adulthood in West Texas and Southern Indiana. I have also lived in Portugal, and spent long stays in Morocco, the Netherlands and France. I use most of the languages of the places where I have lived on my daily interactions. In these places, I have been involved in language education through a variety of roles: I have taught English and Spanish in schools and universities in Europe and the United States, I have designed and facilitated Performing Arts and Spoken Word Workshops for multilingual youths in London, I have created and coordinated service learning programs in Texas, developed and directed international teacher programs and courses for MA students, and I have facilitated workshops, given invited academic talks and plenaries around the world, including Bangladesh, Canada, Brazil, Norway, South Africa, Portugal, Morocco, and Poland, among many others. These experiences, coupled with my collaborative work with local community partners around the globe, inform my pursuit of social action through antiracist, decolonial educational proposals. Onto-epistemologically, I draw from concepts and ideas born in southern, queer and borderlands ways of knowing as means to question the nature of ideas produced in imperialistic traditions.
In the field of applied linguistics, my research program is known for originally bridging mother tongue/heritage language education and translanguaging.
