Issues with Textbooks

Learning a foreign language is a critical part of the liberal arts’ mission, as doing so helps students to recognize the validity of different perspectives, learn to see the world with fresh eyes, and become more culturally aware. But often the textbooks we use undermine these lofty goals, either by presenting language and cultures in a stereotypical fashion, or by tacking on diversity to a curriculum otherwise firmly centered on the dominant culture, e.g., limiting it to the “culture box” popout on a textbook page. Let’s look into why these practices are harmful to the project of the humanities.

We know that students often are fond of conventional representations of culture, be it cheese in Switzerland or Lederhosen in Germany, a fact that may account for their tenacious presence in our textbooks. So why should we root them out of our curricula? The answer, as Sederberg and Tarnawska Senel argued in 2023,^[1] is simple: because they offer a homogenized, non-controversial portrayal of the target country, in which there exists a single, monolithic culture. Breaking that summary down reveals a number of pedagogical errors, all of which fly in the face of our goals as educators. To homogenize is to make uniform, to ignore social tension is essentially to make it disappear, to portray culture as monolithic is to deny its diversity. No culture exists in such a uniform, harmonious form, meaning that presenting one in this way not only misrepresents the very concept of culture to the students, but also fails to encourage them to re-examine their own cultural assumptions.

Likewise, an “ideologically neutral” approach to language fails to take into account the role language plays in culture, including how it “can produce discrimination and inequality.”^[2] Presenting the language itself uncritically thus helps to maintain unjust power structures rather than making students aware of language’s power to challenge them, a missed opportunity for language educators to make their courses more relevant. Students should learn that language, in addition to being a grammatical system with a unique vocabulary, also is a product and producer of values.

It would seem then that diversifying the people portrayed in language textbooks and the language they use would be a good start on the road to a more accurate representation of the target culture, and indeed it can be, but only if done in a way that avoids reproducing the undesirable dynamics of marginalization. And this is where textbooks often fail, as the “culture box” treatment of a minoritized culture or identity serves only to underscore its “otherness”, its failure to conform to the dominant cultural norms. What such portrayals need instead to do is to work against the idea of monolithic culture by framing and contextualizing the minoritized culture and, just as importantly, examining why it is seen as apart from (and by) the dominant group. In other words, the inclusion of minoritized cultures and identities must itself include an acknowledgement of their exclusion, thus providing students the opportunity to reflect on the nature of social power dynamics.