Transforming World Language Teaching and Teacher Education for Equity and Justice

Pushing Boundaries in US Contexts

Beth Wassell, Cassandra Glynn, Beth Wassell, Cassandra Glynn

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781788926508
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788926539
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Desarrollo profesional

This edited book expands the current scholarship on teaching world languages for social justice and equity in K-12 and postsecondary contexts in the US. Over the past decade, demand has been growing for a more critical approach to teaching languages and cultures: in response, this volume brings together a group of scholars whose work bridges the fields of world language education and critical approaches to education. Within the current US context, the chapters address the following key questions: (1) How are pre-service or in-service world language teachers/professors embedding issues, understandings, or content related to social justice, human rights, access, critical pedagogy and equity into their teaching and curriculum? (2) How are teacher educators preparing language teachers to teach for social justice, human rights, access and equity?

1Rethinking Our Introduction: Calling out Ourselves and Calling in Our Field

Cassandra Glynn and Beth Wassell

We (Cassandra and Beth) sat down together to write the introductory chapter to this edited volume back in February 2020, at a very different time in our world. We had planned to make the argument that, after over 20 years of scholarship on critical and social justice approaches in world language education,1 this work still exists at the margins of our field – as an add-on, as a checking of a box, or as something that is only for more progressive, liberal or ‘woke’ educators. At that time, we couldn’t have imagined what would happen over the next few months – a global pandemic in which Black and Brown Americans were dying at disproportionate rates (Kaur, 2020), the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression (Long & Van Dam, 2020), the horrifying killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and all of the complex, ­justice-related issues that were both overtly and implicitly connected to these events.

Throughout the months that followed the onset of the pandemic, we watched as language teachers were forced to move to a ‘new normal’ and were met with an avalanche of webinars and virtual meetings with strategies, tools and activities to support remote learning from our national, regional and local organizations, and from other experts in language education. We were grateful for the voices of a few of our colleagues who reminded us about emerging issues of justice and equity: learners with no access to technology; learners whose families were sick or who had a loved one pass away; learners who were now essential workers and charged with being a central earner for their families; and learners who were undocumented or experiencing the pandemic in detention centers, to name just a few. However, early in the pandemic, these voices were the minority, and their ideas and strategies were often relegated to tweets, comments or short segments of webinars. Although there were some voices drawing attention to issues of anti-racism and equity, we observed only limited evidence of social justice issues as the central, explicit focus for world language educators’ professional learning. Within a year’s time, we would also witness the intense efforts in many states to restrict teaching about racism and other injustices through proposed legislation banning the teaching of so-called ‘divisive’ concepts, such as critical race theory, antiracist content, and even diversity and inclusion training (Stout & LeMee, 2021).

In late May 2020, after the world-wide response to the murder of George Floyd and undeniable calls for a reckoning around race in the US, we were able to reconnect and rethink this chapter. We wondered: how could we write an introductory chapter to a book on social justice and equity without centering these events and their implications for our field? Systemic racism, discrimination and other human rights and social justice issues have continually plagued the institution of education in the US and have trickled down to all aspects of schooling, teaching and learning. In this sense, these invisible, structural forces have shaped the way we think about, talk about, and do world language education, making it time for us to reconsider everything we do as stakeholders in our field.

This leads us to a moment when everything has to be on the table: curriculum, instruction, teacher education, professional development and our identities as world language teachers. To this end, in this chapter, we argue for dismantling how we think about and what we do in language teaching. We echo critical scholars in language education, but also emphasize the connectedness of key segments of our field, for example, the connections between professional outlets and current instructional approaches that have gained popularity, and theorize how, taken together, these segments contribute to oppression and injustice for our learners and do little to support their future outcomes as intercultural, justice-oriented citizens in society.

To engage in this dismantling, we start by calling out and calling in, distinguishing between the two forms of drawing attention to issues of justice and equity. The chapter begins with the work of ‘calling out’ our own complicity in upholding oppression and injustice for our learners. We recognize that there are times when ‘calling out’ is appropriate and even necessary, and we engage in ‘calling out’ by asking ourselves how our own actions, as teachers and as scholars, have contributed to oppression as a first step toward greater accountability (Jewell, 2020). By calling ourselves out, we are publicly drawing attention to circumstances that influenced decisions we made or actions we took and the lessons we learned from those experiences. We then critically interrogate, or ‘call in,’ key areas in the field of world language education in the US context: curriculum, standards and approaches, and teacher education and development. In this way, we raise issues inherent in the field as a call to action for scholars and practitioners seeking to reimagine world language education. Finally, we advocate for rebuilding our field on a foundation that centers our critical stance on justice and equity. We describe how the chapters in this volume contribute to this rebuilding process and how our colleagues have begun to engage in this paramount work.

Calling Ourselves Out

‘Calling someone out,’ in the context of antiracist work, serves the purpose of making oppressive and detrimental thinking or behavior visible and holding individuals or systems accountable for their thinking or actions (Jewell, 2020). In our (Beth and Cassandra’s) time as educators in K-12 and college classrooms, we acknowledge that we have contributed to systemic inequities in education, perpetuating notions about what world language education should be and what it means to be a language teacher. Although we have spent a significant amount of time as teacher educators and scholars seeking to disrupt current approaches to language education and to draw attention to issues of access for minoritized students in language study, our work has also created additional problems. In the section that follows, we draw on two separate, individual narratives as a starting point to contextualize and then problematize our own work in world language education. We do this to promote the importance of first looking critically inside ourselves prior to looking outward into the field.

Cassandra’s voice

More than two decades after starting my teaching career, I wonder what my students’ experiences would have been like in my classroom if I had been introduced to critical pedagogy and social justice education while in my teacher education program. I started teaching in an urban middle school with a student population composed of mainly African American students, Latinx students and a mix of low-income and middle-class white students. I can say with certainty that I failed my students. I spent the first few months expecting my students to respond to education in the way that I had, in a very middle-class, white way, and I proceeded to teach language in a Eurocentric manner, buying into the classic narrative of what a world language curriculum should look like. Guess which students benefited most from my lessons? Definitely not my Black and Brown students. Even after a 7th grade African American student adamantly told me, ‘It ain’t cool for no Black boy to be learning French,’ I still grappled unsuccessfully with the tools to examine my curriculum and my approach; I had no idea where to begin.

I recognized that there were issues and a significant opportunity gap (though at the time, we called it an achievement gap) and I launched into new ideas for reaching learners without first critically examining my own identity as a white teacher, my biases, and my relationships with students. I was sent to an urban middle school conference with three other teachers from the school where I learned about a ‘school skills’ curriculum for ‘at risk’ students. I brought this curriculum back to the middle school and found myself running an after school program for ‘at risk’ students in which this curriculum was implemented. The administration identified students who would benefit from the program, and they sent the students to me, most of whom were African American males. I failed to recognize that the majority of the ‘at risk’ students who administrators identified as problems and ‘at risk’ were African American, and I had not considered what it meant to be a white teacher working with minoritized students in this program. We didn’t recognize, at that point, the issue with the label ‘at risk,’ which positions students through a deficit lens, as problems. At one point, my administration placed an 8th grade African American student with a significant Emotional Behavior Disorder in my class every quarter, having her repeat the curriculum several times, simply because my class was the only class in which she did not have outbursts. I was told that they did not care if she learned or not, they just wanted her to be quiet and behave. I was complicit, allowing her to repeat my class with the mindset that I was protecting her, when I should have been advocating for her.

Just two years after I began teaching, I moved to a large first-ring suburban school district that was actively engaged in examining issues of equity, and I took my first critical pedagogy class in graduate school. Stepping away and having the opportunity to reflect on my time in the urban school, I could clearly see that I had been perpetuating racist practices. However, what felt even worse when I looked back was that I thought that I had built trust and strong, personal relationships with my middle school students, particularly with my minoritized students. My relationships with students always came before the content, but I came to realize that no amount of relationship building could erase my ignorance and the inequitable practices I had helped to uphold in that school. At the time, I felt that I had cared deeply about my students, but this growing understanding of my privilege and positionality and of critical pedagogy caused me to realize that I hadn’t demonstrated true solidarity and love; I hadn’t empowered my students in the way they should have been.

Beth’s voice

My narrative focuses on a much more recent point in my career: the fall of 2019. Because of administrative responsibilities I had taken on, fall 2019 was the first time in about five years that I had the opportunity to teach my department’s world language teaching methods course. Coincidentally, it was also the first time I would support my students through the completion of the edTPA assessment, which was newly required by our state for teacher certification.

I began by revisiting the syllabus that I had refined over several years and started to restructure the material to span two semesters, in connection with our state’s recent change to a year-long clinical practice experience. The key topics I focused on in the course were ambitious and included advocacy, standards, second language acquisition, curriculum, unit planning, lesson planning, instruction and assessment. I remembered how overwhelmed I always felt when teaching this course because of the extensive amount of content that we had ‘to fit’ into our content-specific teacher preparation classes. Despite this challenge, I wanted to add a stronger emphasis on teaching for and about social justice and equity into the course. However, in my beginning-of-the-semester haste, I did exactly what I regularly caution educators not to do. I added a component in the beginning of the semester on framing our stance and practice in culturally sustaining pedagogy, building relationships with students and affirming their identities, which I scheduled to take place over two weeks. But then, after that, I went back to several traditional readings, videos and resources to teach second language acquisition, unit and lesson planning. Although those resources provide guidance for ­standards-based planning and teaching, they do so with few references to the more critical issues and content that I want educators to draw on as the context for instruction.

Perhaps even worse, the two weeks at the end of the semester – when I had planned to shift back to key texts by my colleagues that emphasize critical approaches, and unit and lesson planning for social justice – was minimized when I felt pressure to focus more time on preparing for the high-stakes edTPA. Similar to the realities of many of our K-12, public school teacher colleagues, I felt I had to ‘teach to the test.’ By doing so, I lost the time and space to help our pre-service teachers explore ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ Note
• 1. Rethinking Our Introduction: Calling out Ourselves and Calling in Our Field
• Part 1: Disrupting Teaching Stance and Practice in the Classroom
• Part 2: Resisting and Reworking Traditional World Language Teacher Preparation
• Index