Richard de Meij

Richard de Meij has been a teacher of multiple languages for the past 32 years and has taught 7 different languages, in 5 different countries, throughout those years. He is the consummate language educator, polyglot of 8 languages, linguist, speech pathologist, dancer, educational-technologist, and was named Connecticut’s Language Teacher of the Year in 2019! He is also an antiracist and a social justice & equity advocate, and passionately advocates for both students’ and teachers’ voices in education. He believes that “teachers perform works of wonder and of the heart everyday!” Richard uses the unique combination of his multicultural/multilingual background, ingenuity, insight, humor, his skills in multiple educational technologies, and his expertise in language acquisition, linguistics, and speech-language sciences, to bring 21^st Century Skills, International-Mindedness, and World-Readiness Skills to his classroom and his community in order to connect the world of languages & cultures to his students’ and neighbors’ personal worlds and experiences. In his community, he endlessly advocates for equitable access to high quality language education for all learners, fueled by his belief that “learning languages is everyone’s birthright!” He continuously challenges insidiously persistent false racial & ethnic narratives around who can learn languages well and presents counter-narratives grounded in science and lived experiences and realities. Richard is the founder and webmaster of www.celebratelanguages.com and co-founder of the Northeast Festival of Languages. He was born and raised in Aruba, and is a native speaker of Dutch and Papiamento, a near-native speaker of English, Spanish and Portuguese, and a proficient speaker of French and German, and is currently working on improving his proficiency in Italian, Jamaican Patois and Swahili.