In December, Russ Hugo, director of the Language Learning Center, was invited to serve on the Indigenous Pedagogy Expert Committee for the Canada Foundation for Innovation 2025 Innovation Fund.
Russ joined the Language Learning Center (LLC) in 2008 and continued in that position until just before he completed his doctorate in Linguistics from UW in 2016, at which point he joined the LLC in a full-time professional staff capacity. Russ was promoted to director in 2024.
Russ’s academic interests are focused on Indigenous language vitalization, Computer Assisted Language Learning, and language attitudes in relation to language policy. Russ has played a key role in the development of resources at the Canadian Studies Center including the 2023 documentary A Kabluna: Inuit Language Study at the UW.
The Language Learning Center creates and provides multimedia resources for people to learn, teach, and research world languages and cultures. The center leads, consults and collaborates with faculty, researchers, and professional organizations in the evaluation, research, and instructional design of language learning pedagogy and technologies. The center teaches and trains instructors, graduate students, and staff to create and evaluate audio, video, and multimedia computing language learning products, and provides hardware, software, and facilities for their development.