Research

Reading the walls · Language and migration · Rethinking the Spanish classroom · Sustaining Spanish

Current projects

SSHRC Explore
2025–2026
Principal Investigator

Mapping Halqʼeméylem in the Linguistic Landscape of a Canadian University

The University of the Fraser Valley sits on Stó:lō territory, and its two main campuses carry a mixture of English, Halqʼeméylem, and other languages on their walls, doors, and signposts. Between January and July 2026 I photographed and coded that signage across Abbotsford and Chilliwack to ask a concrete question: where is Halqʼeméylem visible, where is it not, and what kind of visibility is it (institutional, decorative, or genuinely communicative)?

The result is an interactive map of the corpus. Data collection closed on 15 July 2026, and a manuscript and a conference paper are in preparation from the findings.

Project page and map →

Changemaker TIPP
2025–2026

Reading the Walls, Rethinking the World

A teaching-inquiry project that turns the method above into classroom practice. Students learn to read their own linguistic environment, on campus, at work, and in the neighbourhood, as evidence about power, and then act on what they find. Presented at ConnectED 2026.

Manuscript
2026

The sustainability of Spanish in the Canadian university

Spanish programs across Canada are being trimmed, merged, and quietly dismantled. I argue this is curricular minoritization: a structural process, not a series of local budget decisions, and one that critical pedagogy is equipped to name and resist. Under review at Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos; presented at the LXII ACH Congress, Universidad de Salamanca.

Manuscript
2026

From measurement to accompaniment

What happens to assessment in the Spanish classroom when it is rethought through Indigenous frameworks? A move away from measuring students and toward accompanying them. Under review at Hispania; developed further at ASELE 2025, Universitat Jaume I.

IHUB CEWIL
2025–2026

Work-integrated learning in advanced Spanish

A community service-learning project embedding work-integrated learning into SPAN 302, so that advanced composition students write for real community partners rather than for a grade.

Ongoing lines of work

Since 2011

Rethinking the Spanish classroom

My longest-running thread, and where most of my current scholarship of teaching and learning lives: creative and decolonial assessment, digital tools, community service-learning, and collaborative writing in the Spanish classroom, from Cuéntame un cuento through Pecha-Kucha formats to social-media kits as evaluation.

TIPP
2024–2025

Decolonizing linguistic education

Rebuilding LING 101, an introductory linguistics course taken by students from across the university, around equity and advocacy rather than a canon of structural description.