Belén Hernando-Lloréns, PhD

My scholarship examines historically and ethnographically the production of linguistic and racial diversity, in the US and internationally, as an educational “problem” that elicits different social and pedagogical “solutions” in different historical moments.

My research brings postcolonial, postfoundational, and historical perspectives to questions of multilingual education situated not only in the classroom, but in policy, educational sciences, popular culture, and historically. I am particularly interested in how multilingual research and teaching differentiates and racializes kinds of children making them seem more or less “capable” of knowing Spanish.

My new research examines historically the construction of the Bilingual Child of Color as a pedagogical and scientific problem in the US in the first decades of the 20th century. I am also co-editing a special issue titled “Conviviality in Education and the Making of Difference”. This special issue aims to complicate discourses of conviviality in education beyond harmonious coexistence and conflict resolution in diverse societies to probe the interrelationship of conviviality with the production of difference and (in)equality.

I received my PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a dissertation study that has been awarded the AERA Outstanding Dissertation Award (Division B) and the Exemplary Work from Promising Scholars Award (Division D). My investigation has been funded by the Social Science Research Council and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School, among other institutions.

As a certified K-12 public school Spanish teacher, I taught Spanish and Heritage Spanish at the Middle and High School level in Kansas. I have also been a teacher educator for more than 10 years.