(Un)learning through a research internship about Indigenous language revitalization: A story of an encounter between a PhD student and two professors (by Ingrid Jasor, Dr Belinda (kakiyosēw) Daniels and Dr Andrea Sterzuk)

Ingrid Jasor, the first of our team of three guest bloggers this week, is a PhD student in Education from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Language Science/Linguistics from Université des Antilles in Guadeloupe, a Caribbean Island she calls home. Her research topics are centered around bilingualism in diglossia context, minoritized language valorization and revitalization as well as additional language acquisition processes. She is also an English as a Second/Foreign Language teacher and an avid language learner. Apart from her native French and Kréyòl-Gwadloup languages and bilingual English, she is currently practicing her Spanish, working on getting back to her Arabic (Fusha) and is now honored to be learning Innu-Aimun and nēhiyawēwin (Cree) Indigenous languages.

Belinda kakiyosēw Daniels, our guest blogger last week, and Andrea Sterzuk are old friends of BILD; for their biographical information, please scroll to the end of the post.

This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Ingrid speaks:

On a Friday morning in March 2022, I found myself writing an email to Drs. Belinda (kakiyosēw) Daniels and Andrea Sterzuk. Reaching out to two recognized researchers after reading one of their co-authored articles is one of the wildest things I have ever done as a PhD student/junior researcher! You see, I am a French and Kréyòl Gwadloup-speaking “Black Antillean” (Celestine, 2011), from Guadeloupe (originally named “Karukera” or the “island of beautiful waters” by the Kalinago people), an island in the Caribbean colonized by the French.

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