Dr. L.J. Randolph, Jr.

 

Dr. L.J. Randolph, Jr. is the President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and an Assistant Professor of World Language Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his EdD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With a teaching career spanning over 20 years, Dr. Randolph has authored/co-authored numerous publications and delivered numerous scholarly presentations. He is a co-editor of the book How We Take Action: Social Justice in PK-16 Classrooms (Information Age Publishing, 2023). In 2021, he received a Fulbright-Hays award to Mexico to develop curricular materials for teaching about Afro-Mexican cultures.

 

A lifelong advocate for equitable, accessible, and transformative language education, Dr. Randolph’s research and teaching focus on critical issues in language education, including teaching Spanish to heritage and native speakers, incorporating justice-oriented/anti-racist/anti-colonial pedagogies, and centering Blackness and Indigenousness. He is deeply committed to exploring and informing the goals of language education, promoting inclusive and liberating language learning experiences, and understanding the roles of teacher identity and curriculum in enacting justice-oriented pedagogies.

 

Dr. Randolph has held leadership roles in various language organizations, including President of the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina (FLANC), President of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), Coordinator of the Cape Fear Foreign Language Collaborative (CFFLC), and Founding Vice-Chair of ACTFL’s special interest group for Critical and Social Justice approaches.