L&D Loves Languages

Letícia Usanovich is an intersectional facilitator of social transformation who has been living nomadically for the past nine years. With nearly a decade of experience designing and facilitating learning for international youth-focused initiatives, her work centers on collective and decentralized knowledge, honoring diversity of backgrounds and experiences, and bridging individual and group learning needs. She joined Katherine and ...

Dr. Jessica Zeitler is an instructional designer who works in 8+ languages and is passionate about creating inclusive multilingual educational spaces. In this episode, she speaks with Sarah and Katherine about how she uses her multilingual capabilities to create a sense of home for herself and others, even in officially monolingual contexts. Jess shares how her search for belonging led her to new communities and cultures and enrich...

Vijay Ramjattan, PhD, joins Sarah and Katherine in this episode to explore the intersections of language, race, and work. He shares insights from his research on accents and race in the workplace, discusses the labor of communicating in another language, and unpacks why there is no single narrative around accents. 

This episode is sponsored by The Pearl Remote Democratic High School. Enrollment is open now for Fall 2025! Learn mo...

Pragati Kamath is a bilingual instructional designer whose experience living and working across multiple countries and languages has given her unique insights into how context and culture influence multilingual L&D work. In this episode, she shares her experiences training professionals on cross-cultural communication and talks about how her multilingualism has given her the opportunity to connect global teams. Pragati also dis...

In this episode, Rafael Leonardo da Silva joins Sarah and Katherine to talk about his journey from learning English as an avid videogamer, to teaching Portuguese in the U.S. as a Fulbright scholar, to designing learning experiences as an instructional designer and professor in Boise State’s Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning program. He shares his experience at the intersection of language, technology and learning. 

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Loretta Mulberry is a passionate advocate for language accessibility on a mission to improve safety measures and expand information equity for everyone in the trades. In this podcast episode, she joins Katherine and Sarah to discuss the importance of having learning content translated to ensure all learners have equitable opportunities at every level within an organization. She also shares insights into the safety implications of l...

Gabriela Gutierrez is an experienced professional in project management and change management who speaks Spanish, English, and French. She joins Katherine and Sarah to talk about the opportunities and connections that being multilingual have opened up to her throughout her career, focusing on how she has taken a goal-oriented approach to language learning as part of career development. Gabriela also discusses what it is like to wor...

Scarlett Lopez is from Caracas, Venezuela. She moved to the US in 2014 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in International Business and Marketing, and later a master’s degree in Instructional Design & Technology. She has a customer success background in the tech industry, and is currently a bilingual Instructional Designer, creating learning experiences for different clients. She volunteers as a career coach at Upwardly Global, ment...

In this episode, Sarah and Katherine speak with Andrew Tobey. Andrew is a linguist with a knack for technology who works as a multilingual instructional designer in the corporate space. 

Andrew begins the conversation with a personal story about how multilingualism shaped his childhood, and talks more generally about the importance of immersing yourself in a language and speaking it from day one. He explains how learning a langua...

In this episode, Katherine and Sarah speak with Carly Overfelt. Carly has been teaching in higher education for over 15 years, especially courses in Writing, Literature, ESL and Linguistics. She has experience with faculty-facing programming and has been part of linguistic diversity curriculum and programming initiatives at three different higher ed institutions so far. What she learned in this work, especially from working with st...

In our fourth episode, Sarah and Katherine speak with Wedad Maatouk about her work as a district student services liaison. Wedad collaborates with a team of multilingual liaisons to ensure that students and parents in her school district have full language access by coordinating and providing translation and interpretation as needed.

Wedad is fluent in Arabic and knowledgeable in French and Spanish. She was born in Dearborn, Michig...

In our third episode, Katherine and Sarah speak with Alinnette Casiano, a bilingual learning and development leader with over 15 years of experience in education and leadership. She builds learning experiences through user experience research for cloud services sales enablement at Amazon Web Services. She recently started a doctoral program in public and nonprofit leadership. She is a Puerto Rican living in Texas and has a passion ...

In our second episode, Katherine talks with Mariana Horrisberger, a trilingual translator with over ten years of experience in the learning and development localization field. Maru and Katherine chat about the importance of access to learning assets in multiple languages; the nuances of translating not just the words in training materials, but also the culture behind the words; and the joys of learning a language before the Interne...

In this first episode, Sarah and Katherine tell their language stories and geek out about language issues in their respective workplaces. They begin a conversation about language, learning design, accessibility, equity and the people who make all of that happen. To be continued in future episodes!

Mentioned in the podcast: 

NPR’s Rough Translation podcast - How to Speak Bad English

Ethnologue: The world’s most spoken language