Classroom Interactions
Finally, we would like to offer some suggestions of how to address exclusionary culture in specific interactions in the classroom, either in conjunction with revisions to your teaching materials or as a way to begin the work of bringing a critical and inclusive approach into your classroom if you do not currently have the time or bandwidth to enact larger structural changes.
For all of your course materials, whether they are self-created or not, you should consider authorship, audience, and context. Ask yourself, “Who wrote this, for whom, and from which time, place, and perspective?”[1] If you are working with multiple texts in your course, working through these questions can help you answer the larger question of “why this text now?” This will help you treat your textbook, if you’re using one, as one text among many. You can also make the question of “why this text now?” explicit to your students and discuss with them the merits of different texts, inviting them to take a critical perspective. By engaging openly with the context and merits of each text, you can also avoid the situation where additional texts and materials by and about minoritized identities are presented as “supplemental materials” to the “core material” of the textbook (often by and about majority identities). Reflection on the reasons behind each text can prevent unintentional tokenization.
At the intersection of classroom interactions and curricular design is the question of how to handle literary and historical texts that contain language, imagery, or tropes that are nowadays considered offensive. This comes up not infrequently in the German literary canon with regards to racism and anti-Semitism. One approach is to remove the text in question from the syllabus in response to student complaints, real or imagined (one of us has pre-emptively removed texts from a course due to fear of offending students and uncertainty about how to handle the material). This may in many cases be the correct solution—we are not suggesting that you subject your students to gratuitous offensive content. However, if the instructor removes the text and then complains about how their course is now lacking due to not being able to engage with other, literarily meaningful aspects of that text then we would consider this move reactionary rather than critical. A pedagogy grounded in criticality allows you to include these materials—if you are willing to walk the students through why you chose to include this text and what you intend for them to learn from it.
If you are restricted to using only a textbook, you can still engage in these critical discussions with your students. You can problematize the textbook (without implying that its faults make it worthless) by explaining that it is not possible for a single text to represent all identities and activities connected to the target language or to be perfectly adapted to all situations. Just like the students do not have detailed knowledge of all the identities, activities, and sub-cultures connected to their language, neither do you nor the textbook authors know all of the identities and activities in all the cultures that the target language encompasses. You can talk about what the book does well and what the students think is missing and why those identities/activities might be missing. You can also ask the students to contemplate whether there are constraints on who can teach which identities and, going a step further, what changes they would suggest in order to make the textbook or course more inclusive.[2]
Our final piece of advice is to extend grace to your students and to yourself. Students may push back on or appear to be disengaged with critical discussions at first because they find them difficult. You may flub an attempt at problematizing an aspect of a text. We, the authors, have both had the experience of launching into an explanation of cultural nuance only to stumble over our suddenly stilted words, leaving ourselves and the students more confused. Just breathe, move on with the lesson as needed, reflect on your approach afterwards, and try again the next day.
- Thank you to Wells Castonguay for introducing us to this framework, and for the other suggestions in this section about how to hold conversations with students. ↵
- Unless your students are quite advanced, these conversations will likely need to be conducted in English (or another common first language). However, we believe this is a valuable area to exercise the judicious use of English in service of larger learning goals. See the ACTFL guidelines on target language use for further explanation of this approach. ↵
