Our Starting Point

While we, like most instructors of foreign languages, welcomed the trend to diversify the representation of the target culture(s), the resulting changes to textbooks were not always satisfying, and in fact were often largely cosmetic. Of course it is better to portray and discuss non-dominant cultures than to ignore them but presenting them as exceptions to the rule of the dominant culture only serves to uphold the false paradigm of the single, essentially homogeneous culture. How could we instead portray culture in such a way that the students would recognize its dynamism, its existence in the tensions between the dominant and the subcultures? That, along with a desire to accommodate an increasingly diverse student body, was our starting point and became the mission of this project.