Speaker Bio
Dr. L. J. Randolph Jr. is an assistant professor of World Language Education and affiliate faculty in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before working in higher education, he spent a decade as a Spanish and ESL teacher at the high school level. His research and teaching focus on various critical issues in language education, including teaching Spanish as a heritage/home/community language, incorporating justice-centered/anti-racist/anti-colonial pedagogies, and centering Blackness and Indigenousness. He is a co-editor of the volume How We Take Action: Social Justice in PreK-16 Classrooms (Information Age Publishing, 2023). An advocate for abolitionist, liberationist, and transformative language education, he has held leadership roles in many professional language associations at the state and national level, including 2024 president of ACTFL (originally founded as the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages).
About the LCTL Career Fair
WISLI helps connect speakers of less commonly taught languages with professional development and career opportunities.
Less commonly taught but widely spoken. Many less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) are critically important to international relations and local communities. Each summer, WISLI welcomes leaders and experts – from government to the private sector and human services – to share stories, advice, and opportunities for building multilingual-professional lives.
Keynote Sponsors
This lecture is sponsored by the Wisconsin Intensive Summer Language Institutes (WISLI), the Center for South Asia (CSA), and the Institute for Regional and International Studies National Resource Center (IRIS NRC).