Dr. Jenna Cushing-Leubner is an Associate Professor of Heritage/World Language Education, Bilingual/Bicultural Education, and TESOL at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
I have been doing heritage language reclamation education research by invitation with communities for almost ten years. Before that, I taught in K-12 schools and adult education centers in Austria and Minnesota. I have a K-12 teaching license in teaching English as an Additional Language and my PhD from the University of Minnesota is in Heritage Language Teaching & Learning. My passion is supporting community members in being the designers of the curriculum and instruction practices that teachers use with multilingual/heritage language learners, and supporting teachers in teacher preparation and professional development that reflects the desires, knowledge systems, and languages of multilingual families and communities.
My passion is getting to work together with heritage language educators and families to design curriculum, texts, and instructional practices to make schools into places that multilingual youth deserve.
I am committed to public scholarship and professional development for heritage language teachers that is accessible, meaningful, and responds to both the desires of families and the teachers who care about transforming education.
In addition to working directly with schools and teachers through in-person professional development, I designed and coordinate the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s fully online heritage language education professional development programming. Since 2018, I have also been working with Hmong heritage language and culture educators around the United States as part of MN Zej Zog’s participatory design of free, open-access units, materials, teaching and learning standards, and professional development to support less commonly taught heritage language reclamation education and multilingual ethnic studies. You can find most of these resources on the Lub Zej Zog Hmong Language Resource Hub.
My approach to heritage language teaching & learning
Heritage language education is an act of educational reparations. English dominance and the ways policies and curriculum in U.S. schools restrict people’s ways of knowing, thinking, and doing things does a lot of harm to young people’s confidence in their languages, confidence in their capabilities, sense of dignity, and sense of where knowledge itself comes from.
Heritage language reclamation is committed to interrupting those acts of harm and facilitating healing, joy, fascination, creativity, dignity, confidence, and a sense of agency for the future.
My approach to heritage language teaching & learning is to support teachers in drawing from the many dimensions of community cultural wealth young people have access to outside of schools, supporting confidence in reclaiming and making their voices and ideas known and heard, promoting ethnic studies curriculum and pedagogies in multilingual spaces, and practicing critical language and dialect awareness both in relationship to English and within community languages.
Heritage language reclamation teachers also have to recognize how intergenerational knowledge of danger and intergenerational trauma are carried into their classrooms. I work carefully and intentionally with teachers to develop trauma-responsive and healing-centered language teaching and learning environments.
If you are a white teacher who teaches multilingual children of color and children whose families have experienced forced displacement, there are additional things you need to know and be able to do in order to create an environment that is healthy, safe, and rejuvenating for your multilingual/heritage language learners. Even though I work in close relationships with teachers of color teaching their own community languages when I am invited to do this, I have a special commitment to do professional development and coaching with white teachers on critical language awareness, understanding dynamics of race and language, and understanding power dynamics of language within settler schooling. If you are a BIPOC teacher and need to know more about me before deciding if you want to work with me, I’m happy to answer questions so you can decide.
