Chasing Encounters

Language and how we communicate with each other is at the centre of this conversation with multilingual and multinational, Dr. Uju Anya. With intelligence and good humour, she provides a healthy reality check: contemporary society is multilingual and we need to face it, accept it and educate with that framework in mind. For her, this necessitates changing up how language plays a role in the classroom to reflect interactions in everyday society. How do we do this? We need to reexamine the biases and purist notions we have internalized about language. Teachers, in particular, must move from being arbiters (police) of language and become the enablers of cultural and linguistic diversity. *Biography: Dr. Uju Anya is an assistant professor of second language learning in the Curriculum and Instruction Department and a research affiliate with the Center for the Study of Higher Education at The Pennsylvania State University. She specializes in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and second language learning with