Examples of Exclusionary Culture

The push for inclusivity exposes a sad fact about many of the mass-market textbooks available to instructors in foreign languages: they tend to focus on appealing, non-controversial aspects of the dominant culture while separating grammar from culture. Since critical pedagogies aim to help students better understand the relationship between cultural and linguistic norms and social power and privilege, both these tendencies need to be countered. But first they must be identified. So what does exclusionary culture look like?

Today, of course, textbooks are not as blind to cultural diversity as they were fifty or one hundred years ago. That said, in their efforts to portray the target culture as diverse, many fall victim to the practice that launched this project in the first place: tokenism. By this we mean that individuals from the non-dominant culture are represented throughout the book, but in such a way as to simultaneously underscore the dominance of the majority culture and to let it off the hook by being “diverse.” In other words, the representatives of minority groups are portrayed as fully integrated into the dominant culture and, effectively, fully part of it, with no consideration of how their experiences of it may be different, of how their voices and language might be different. Thus a textbook which includes a variety of identities without giving them a voice can still be exclusionary, much as the addition of a single female author to a group of canonical male authors does little to change students’ concept of authorship.

Likewise, exclusionary tendencies can be found at the micro level, or at the level of vocabulary, culture boxes, and lessons. In terms of vocabulary, it is valuable to think about what is not included to better understand how such choices can contribute to a closed portrayal of culture. An example frequently cited is careers. Clearly most mass-market textbooks are written for students who will go into the professions, and thus an emphasis on such fields is not surprising. This does not change, however, the effect of the choice, namely to insinuate that the target culture consists mainly of upper middle-class professionals. Similarly, when discussing holidays, festivals, and even food, the desire to emphasize the mainstream and/or traditional contributes to the homogenizing of culture, which does little to encourage students to question their assumptions about the target culture and their own.

Holidays, festivals, and food are also often featured in “culture boxes,” which effectively separate the presentation of culture from that of the language, thus undermining a central goal of all the critical pedagogies: to demonstrate to students that language and culture are inextricably mixed. In addition, relegating culture to boxes makes it seem less important than the primary grammatical content, an afterthought to or fun break from the actual study of language. But perhaps most importantly, as Sederberg and Tarnawska Senel note,

Topics reflecting current political and social realities such as forced global migration of refugees, the long-term impact of imperialism and colonialism, climate change, #BlackLivesMatter, anti-racism protests, and other social justice issues are absent from language textbooks, as if students and the communities whose languages they are learning were living in an apolitical, one-dimensional, and static world.^[1]

In other words, as they continue, putting culture into boxes and homogenizing it into a monolithic entity “create[s] a shallow and simplistic image of the target culture,”^[2] and “reinforces”^[3] the cultural assumptions students should be interrogating. Clearly, two of the last things we want to do as educators is to falsely portray the culture we teach and to discourage our students from thinking, meaning that the time has come to free culture from its box.

At this point it is probably clear how lessons, too, can work against the principle of inclusion, namely by separating grammar and culture, by presenting an undifferentiated image of the target culture, and by avoiding controversial topics. In the following section, we’ll offer some tips on how to avoid these pitfalls.