Introduction

The working group’s goal is to research how the language curriculum reinforces, exacerbates, or disrupts cultural assumptions and stereotypes about gender and to develop resources – both actual materials and community connections – that will enable language instructors to think critically and teach dynamically about the ongoing social phenomenon of language, social justice, and gender equity.

Achieving diversity and gender equity is a vexing problem, long thought to be only possible through global educational outreach. Curricular processes, however, are not neutral and although world-wide efforts have been made to explore inequalities in education, few have been successful in exploring whether and how these processes, everyday practices of teaching and learning, contribute to promoting inequalities.

Our group, experts in language and language teaching and learning, proposes research that will substantially contribute to the discussion of whether language and gender in the language curriculum play a significant role in contributing to or reifying stereotypes and discrimination, and how language pedagogy might be marshaled to help advance gender equity in language education and beyond.  The essential questions our research tries to investigate concern the role of the curriculum, classroom context, and pedagogy, in furthering diversity and gender equity:

• In what ways does the language curriculum reinforce, exacerbate, and stereotype gender through the selection of specific language and cultural material?
• In what ways might language pedagogy be marshaled to disrupt cultural assumptions and help advance gender equity and diversity in education and beyond across multiple languages, multiple cultures, and multiple countries?
• What role does the classroom context play (background of instructors and students, for example) in advancing gender equity and diversity.

We are very grateful to the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs for supporting this important project.

Selected by a panel of esteemed judges, Northwestern Buffett Global Working Groups receive up to two years of support to pursue their research projects. During those two years, Global Working Groups undertake collaborative, interdisciplinary research that addresses complex global challenges related to one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in coordination with experts and citizens worldwide. Global Working Groups share and disseminate their research findings through presentations and publications, policy briefs, digital platforms and more. Learn more about the Global Working Groups and Global Catalyst Recipients.