Desired Outcomes

First and foremost: we are not trying to write the seminal guide to critical pedagogies, a task we are not qualified for and one that others, who are, have taken on with much success. Rather, we want to provide an introduction to and partial overview of the topic of critical pedagogies to a very particular audience: language instructors who are interested but unsure of where and how to start incorporating such approaches into their own teaching. We hope that what you find here in the guidebook convinces you of the importance of adopting a more critical mindset in the foreign language classroom while giving you more confidence in your ability to challenge yourself and your students to see culture and language in a new light. In the end, you won’t be an expert, either, but you should feel more comfortable taking up the challenge(s) of diversifying your teaching.

As part of this process, we will spend some time familiarizing you with key terms and helping you to understand the goals of various critical pedagogies, focusing on unifying principles as much as differences. Armed with this knowledge, we will move on to the next step: spotting shortcomings in the presentation of culture and offering tools to address them. Thus, in the end, you should have a working knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings of criticality and an understanding of how to apply them to your curriculum and lesson planning. We hope this empowers you to take a chance on new teaching approaches. You may find it requires some trial and error to calibrate your approach. That is fine! Extend yourself and your students grace throughout the process.

Lastly, we want to make very clear throughout this guidebook that each of you will find here what works best for each of you, and that very few of you will completely overhaul the best practices you have built up over the years or decades. And that is fine, for as Linwood and Johnson note, “[n]o one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”^[1]