Lauren is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics. As a researcher, she seeks to promote equity in education through the design and implementation of antiracist pedagogies in Spanish as a Heritage Language classrooms. Lauren’s work illuminates how Heritage Learners of Spanish negotiate race through language and deepens our understanding of how racialized identities are constructed on the basis of perceived linguistic features. Lauren is currently performing classroom ethnographic fieldwork for her dissertation in high school Heritage Spanish classrooms. Other projects she is working on explore translanguaging in the L2 Spanish classroom as well as learner motivation and investment in Haitian Creole classrooms containing Heritage and L2 learners.

To add to the body of tools available to educators promoting social justice-oriented pedagogies, Lauren has published various articles in The Language Educator and the Journal of Literacy Innovation outlining anti-racist teaching strategies for Spanish Classrooms. She also recently co-authored a book chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies, Multimodality and Interdisciplinarity in Spanish Language Teaching exploring multiliteracies as a social justice-oriented framework.