Abstract
Although social justice and related critical pedagogies are rapidly growing areas of interest in language education, instructional materials for use across languages and levels and published as free and adaptable Open Educational Resources (OERs) are lacking. The purpose of this article is to describe the frameworks, process, and lessons learned related to the creation of three instructional planning templates that support social justice in language education and scaffold implementation of multiliteracies and social justice pedagogies. After defining social justice, the article summarizes the frameworks that inform the instructional templates, describes the process of creating, piloting, and revising the templates, and identifies the affordances and constraints discovered through this process.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-19 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | L2 Journal |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Complicating the need for more social justice resources are the challenges educators face in enacting critical pedagogies, partly because these “approaches to the teaching of foreign languages remain uncommon, and are very much ‘foreign territory’ for most foreign language educators” (Reagan, 2016, p. 173). For example, due to various constraints, instructors may feel beholden to their textbook, making it difficult to question, adapt, or supplement often biased course materials, to incorporate social justice content, and to implement activities reflective of critical approaches (Reagan, 2016; Reagan & Osborn, 2021). Moreover, enacting critical approaches entails attending to students’ linguistic development and cultural understanding, as well as their ability to reflect critically about language and culture and their role in society. Language educators must thus be adept at targeting multiple learning objectives–linguistic, cultural, critical–simultaneously and planning strategically, yet “targeting these multiple objectives at once simply cannot be done in traditional planning; it requires the use of planning protocols that make room for such vision nadrac ticpe” R(agane, 0216, .p 719). In response to these challenges, the authoring team (henceforth “the team”) developed the Social Justice in Language Education (SJLE) initiative, funded by a three-year International Research and Studies Program grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Projects funded through this grant program must strengthen instruction and curriculum development in U.S. language programs, respond to the national need for individuals with expertise and competence in world languages, contribute to a globally competent workforce, expand access to language learning through OERs, and support teaching of critical world languages and issues (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). To meet these aims, the goals of the SJLE initiative are to: (1) develop students’ oral and written language proficiency and prepare them to communicate in personal, academic, and professional contexts; (2) encourage complex intercultural understanding of social justice topics and how they are addressed through languages and across cultures; and (3) foster the career competencies of critical thinking, creative problem-solving, ethical reasoning and decision making, and engagement with diversity (CARLA, 2022). These goals are realized through creation of a suite of professional development materials including instructional planning templates, intermediate-level curricular units in nine languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish), a searchable database of target language texts addressing social justice topics, and a social justice bibliography. All materials are being published as OERs on the website of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota, thereby creating aone-stoperositopry of social justice resources. The purpose of this article is to describe the frameworks, process, and lessons learned related to the creation of one component of the SJLE initiative: instructional planning templates. In so doing, we hope to empower language teachers, program directors, and curriculum developers to teach for social justice, author and share social justice-oriented materials, and ground their work in critical pedagogies. To provide context, we first define social justice and then acknowledge our positionality in relation to the project. Next, we explain the frameworks that inform the instructional templates, describe the process of creating, piloting, and revising the templates, and identify the affordances and constraints discovered throughthis process. We conclude by outlining future directions for the SJLEinitiative.
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