9 Questions with Ariel Koren
Social Entrepreneur, Speaker of 8 Languages & Marketing Lead for Latin America at Google for Education
“Language is power, and to fully realize that power, we have to even linguistic playing fields, let the most silenced voices reverberate, rewire our brains that have been conditioned to disproportionately reward the vocal patterns and lexicons and grammar habits that match that which is deemed white, male, heteronormative, and Anglophone.”
Ariel Koren is a social entrepreneur and speaker of 8 languages working at the intersection of Ed Tech, access and globalism as the Marketing Lead for Latin America at Google for Education. She is responsible for Google’s education marketing strategy for the region; finding and amplifying the most inspiring education technology stories; championing school innovation; and working closely with students, teachers, and education leaders to make the power of technology accessible to every student and school.
Ariel is passionate about leveraging her multilingualism to bridge barriers, and especially about using education as a tool to overcome barriers. Prior to working at Google for Education, she was on the Google Translate team, focused on improving product and feature awareness to empower linguistically diverse communities. To this end she built education materials (#WeSpeakTranslate) and scale their impact through community partnerships.
Ariel is passionate about diversity and inclusion; she has served as a delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, an ambassador to the Department of State in China, a Board Member of the SF LGBT Center and a Global LGBT Pride delegate at Google China.
A constantly-traveling nomad, her favorite hobbies are translating Spanish and English pop songs into Chinese and connecting with women around the world through multilingual storytelling.
1. When did you decide you wanted to be in tech?
In high school I founded a non-profit organization called ACTION (Active Cross-cultural Training in Our Neighborhoods) whose mission is to combat the US foreign language education deficit by bringing language and culture classes to schools where they are not otherwise offered.
In college, I grew and expanded the organization which now brings daily Spanish language classes to 300 students across several schools. When the team set out to measure our impact, we could see that access to language education was enriching students’ lives. But student outcomes differed based on access to technology; the subset of kids who were digitally literate and had daily computer and internet access were acquiring new languages more effectively.
This insight inspired my goal to work at the intersection of technology and education with a particular focus on language, equity, and access.
“But student outcomes differed based on access to technology; the subset of kids who were digitally literate and had daily computer and internet access were acquiring new languages more effectively.”
2. Who’s one person in your life you looked up to when you were younger?
Tamara, my younger sister. She has dealt with significant discrimination and adversity in her life, and approaches life with such resilience and grit.
She has been a proud and outspoken disability advocate for as long as I can remember. Recently, she even created her own blog, Disability Connect Jacksonville, where she shares her experiences having intellectual disabilities and invites members of the disability community and allies to share in important conversations about diversity.
3. Where’s your hometown?
Jacksonville, FL.
4. What’s something you’ve done that you’re immensely proud of?
I feel proud and fulfilled anytime I succeed at using my platform as a person in technology to amplify the kinds of stories that most deserve to be heard. A recent example is launching #innovarparami, an integrated Google for Education campaign to celebrate student and teacher changemakers in Latin America and to spark a conversation about how to foster innovation in schools.
The campaign included a series of mini-documentaries about exemplary (mind-blowing!) projects, like that of a 5th grader who invented and scaled out a prototype that turns bottles into lightbulbs. Tens of thousands of educators and students have watched the documentaries and used the campaign’s hashtag to share their vision about innovation, and hundreds of students have participated in the campaign’s prototype-a-thon challenges, building solutions to real problems facing their communities.
I definitely feel excited and proud to see, through this campaign, so many new ideas coming to life, un-sung heroes being celebrated, and the entire educational ecosystem coming together from student to teacher to parent to Secretary of Education. It was especially exciting when the campaign was featured on Google’s homepage!
5. What’s something that’s been on your mind a lot lately?
I’ve been thinking about voices. Our business world is starting to look more diverse, but we don’t yet sound diverse.
At a recent Women’s Leadership workshop, the facilitator advised me to deepen my voice, in order to be taken more seriously and be less prone to “man-terruptions.”
Women are constantly told to avoid “up-speak” and talk in a lower tone. I am five feet tall and was born with thinner vocal cords than most men and many women. I would like to see a leadership session that unpacks why thin vocal cords get less airtime, instead of asking women to juggle our jobs and dreams with daily vocal exercises.
Extrapolating from this isolated example, we are still teaching people to succeed within the context of unfair rules, instead of galvanizing the masses to change the rules. The rules of language are written by the most elite members of society even while language itself is written by everyone else.
“The rules of language are written by the most elite members of society even while language itself is written by everyone else.”
Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing campaigns targeting women and “minorities” but are more likely to use the campaign ideas spoken by cis heterosexual male vocal cords.
Black people invent mainstream vernacular, and yet are subject to bias and often called “uneducated” when the words that they created come from their own mouths.
Comedians and actors make livings out of impersonating non-Anglo accents but folks who really have diverse accents are less employable.
The challenge of democratizing language is especially incumbent upon those of us working in technology. 80% of the world’s internet content is in English even though only 20% of the world’s population speaks English.
Language is power, and to fully realize that power, we have to even linguistic playing fields, let the most silenced voices reverberate, rewire our brains that have been conditioned to disproportionately reward the vocal patterns and lexicons and grammar habits that match that which is deemed white, male, heteronormative, and Anglophone.
By prizing and privileging antiquated speech patterns characteristic of only the most privileged or the most male or the most straight among us, we negate the power of language and send the message that we profit when our groups look diverse, but not when they sound it. There are too many people we aren’t reaching and too many stories that we’ve erased.
So that’s what’s been on my mind lately! Voices.
“By prizing and privileging antiquated speech patterns characteristic of only the most privileged or the most male or the most straight among us, we negate the power of language and send the message that we profit when our groups look diverse, but not when they sound it.”
6. Favorite food?
Hummus and chocolate (separately).
7. Mac or PC?
Chromebooks! ;)
8. If you could try another job for a day, what would it be?
A teacher!
So much respect and gratitude for teachers. The fabric of our society. Some of the most important and inspiring, and too often under-appreciated, people in the world.
9. If you could give your 18-year-old self a piece of advice, what would it be?
You will tell people how transient you are, and you will be told to be careful. Because you are woman, and women shouldn’t travel away from home alone.
And you will laugh inside because home has already been the most dangerous place to be a woman. And you will surround yourself with the most multinational womanhood and find safety in the hug of a matriarch from a new village and find solace in how lesbian bars feel the same in Sao Paulo and Jacksonville and Toluca and San Francisco. And you will learn that the more changing and inconsistent the landscapes around you, the more unshakable the things inside of you.
Because sometimes you will believe that you are traveling so much that you are drifting away into nothingness and that the more places you see and go to, the smaller you get, but you will learn to amass pieces of places, make them part of you such that you grow bigger, and you will learn to build anchors out of thin air.
And you will learn that you spent your whole life searching for home within other people. You searched so hard in others that you didn’t look in yourself. and you will build the sturdiest house when you lift the grounds within you.
And you will understand why humans “were made with feet not roots” and you will learn that home is and always was and always will be You.
