Partha Debnath is an Information Architect by profession and an avid enthusiast of diversity and social justice. With a conviction to support diversity and justice in society and nature, Partha works to understand the internal dialectics of multi-cultural social fabrics. He regularly engages in social endeavors to study multi-ethnic practices, race relations, and role of heritage languages to promote peaceful coexistence and diversity. He is motivated to work towards a better tomorrow. While pursuing his interests in information technology as a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) and Bengal Engineering University, West Bengal, India, he also engaged in carrying forward diverse educational programs among school kids via interactive and participatory learning methods. Using heritage language as the mode of communication, he adopted a collaborative approach and brought in science, society, nature, and culture to create holistic learning experiences for young students.

Partha founded two Bangla/Bengali schools in the Greater Philadelphia area in Pennsylvania (2010) and an umbrella organization, The Friends of Bangla School Foundation (FoBS), a 501c3 non-profit organization (2011) to coordinate and offer a networking platform, primarily for the Bangla schools in North America. He has engaged in dialogues with parents, teachers, and school district administrators to bring the State Seal of Biliteracy to students in Bangla Schools, celebrate International Mother Language Day, and organize annual events (e.g., Unity Fair Basanta Utsab and summer camps) as a vehicle for intermingling and sharing.

Partha has developed and introduced via Friends of Bangla Schools, a comprehensive curriculum to teach Bangla as a heritage language among young children and non-native speaking adults. He consolidated and incorporated the canonical forms and frameworks of ACTFL (in North America), CEFR (in Europe), and Biswa Bharati (in Indian sub-continent), as main ingredients to develop the curriculum. This was done as one of the primary tasks of establishing a robust framework for teaching Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali) as a heritage language, among the young children residing outside of native Bengal and Bangladesh. He was the key architect in developing a customized “Learning Management System” (LMS) to teach Bangla (and also any other heritage language), among young and adult learners, with self-paced, unsupervised, and supervised learning styles. He regularly engages himself and encourages others to create diverse, contextual content in both Bangla and English, to aid the learning of Bangla as a heritage language.

Partha is actively engaged in motivating the coordinators of Bangla schools in various states to join the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools.

Sayema Khatun is the principal of Akkhor Bangla School, a heritage language community school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, established in 2015. She is one of the coordinators of the Friends of Bangla Schools (FOBS), an alliance of 16 Bangla schools that organizes an annual milan mela, an assembly of Bangla schools across the country. Sayema has just completed the 2024 Heritage Language Teacher Workshop from the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) at UCLA, and she is developing a Bangla heritage language curriculum for the community school program, in collaboration with the NHLRC. She is also a member of the South Asian Language Teachers Association (SALTA) and recently presented a paper on "Potential of Literature to Teach Bengali as a Heritage Language" at the SALTA Conference 2024, UW-Madison. A first-generation immigrant and Bangladeshi-American socio-cultural anthropologist, Sayema earned an MS in anthropology (focusing on Rohingya refugees) at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is a former associate professor at the Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, and she has worked on South Asian history, society, and culture for the last 20 years. Currently, she is an independent consultant for ACTFL as a Bengali language expert. Her research interests and ethnographic writings revolve around a wide range of topics in Bengal and Bangladesh studies, such as Bangla language, literature and culture, indigeneity, collective identity, citizenship, and making of refugees, policy and humanitarian intervention, partition of British-India, and recurring conflicts/crisis in Bangladesh-India-Myanmar borders. Besides publishing bilingual academic papers, she also writes short stories, poems, and op-eds in print and online publishing outlets and has published two books. Currently, she is preparing to pursue a PhD in the 2025-2026 year. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband and teenage daughter. Her areas of expertise are the following: Bengali language, literature, and culture; Bangladesh studies; ethnography; South Asian society and culture; gender-based violence; Rohingya refugees; ethnic conflict; indigeneity; and transborder issues. Email: sayema.khatun@akkhor.org