News

TALK
Monday,  May 22 from 12:00 pm to  2:00 pm Central Time  in Kresge 1515
Learning to Unlearn: Education for Gender Transformative Futures

The lecture will explore the coloniality of gender and its role in shaping masculinities that enable a culture of violence in the Caribean Ashley Bernett will discuss the ongoing interventions and proposed additional solution that both utilize gender transformative approaches  in and through education to address gender-based violence in the Caribean.   

Presentation
Gender Equity in the Arabic Classroom: A “one-size fits all” approach?
Chicago Language Symposium, Northwestern University

WORKSHOP AND ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION
Friday,  April 28 from 2:00 pm to  5:30 pm Central Time  in Harris 108
The day before the CLI Chicago Language Symposium |  Workshop 2-4 pm – Round Table Discussion 4-5:30 pm
Workshop Material

In many world languages classrooms, textbooks are the primary shapers of language curricula and windows into the cultures of the people speaking the languages taught. However, cultures continuously evolve, and with it human interactions, relationships, behavior patterns, and cultural norms. It is therefore incumbent on us, as the language teaching profession, to more fully understand how textbooks represent target language communities and how language learning activities help students engage critically with the representation of the communities and culture. The goal is to encourage students to find their voice in second-language classrooms as well as fully engaging them as individual human beings in the 2020s.  Using a major revision of a first-year German textbook as a backdrop and the German Program Outcomes of the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies (CENES) at the University of British Columbia, we will focus on the efforts required to do justice to the evolving cultural landscapes of the target populations, of our student populations, and of the goals of world languages programs within a humanistic education tradition. During the workshop, we will provide hands-on examples of some of the issues involved, the pros and cons of various solutions, and the final decisions made by authors, consultants, and textbook publishers. We will also focus on how to deal with remaining sub-optimal solutions as well as with content in textbooks that are only starting to adjust to a changing world. Finally, we will provide some guiding principles for textbook and material selection for language classrooms that strive to achieve gender equity and diversity goals through foreign language and culture teaching. There will be ample time for attendees to discuss their own textbooks and teaching materials with workshop attendees.

JANUARY 26 from  12 – 1:30 PM
Maha Bali
American University in Cairo
https://www.aucegypt.edu/fac/mahabali

This session explored the Equity/Care matrix and its gender implications for language teaching. We discussed the praxis of Intentionally Equitable Hospitality and how it can be applied to enhance gender equity in the language classroom. Finally, we considered ways to enhance students’ criticality such as Women’s Ways of Knowing. Come ready to share from your own experience with other participants.

Maha Bali is Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (an equity-focused, open, connected intercultural learning curriculum). She writes and speaks frequently about social justice, critical pedagogy, and open and online education.

Dr. Rana Raddawi co-chaired the Women Forum and Workshop on Women in STEM in the Middle East at the Malta Conference.

Dr. Rana Raddawi  presented the Language Currricula and Gender Equality group at a Salzburg Global Seminar on Education, Transformation and Gender in Salzburg, Austria. The program brought together “key stakeholders from around the world to develop new solutions and ways of reframing longstanding challenges about ways in which gender continues to impact education outcomes.” 

Professor Mikhaeel travelled to Cairo, Egypt to conduct interviews on Gender equity and equality in education.

November 15, 2022
3:00-5:00 p.m. in Kresge 1515
Kristin Syrett
Rutgers University

Professor Syrett examined how we can and should create space for gender equity and inclusivity in our pedagogical practices, through the language of instruction, the materials we use to communicate concepts and field-specific phenomena, the language we use to outline our policies and practices, and through our manner of presentation.

Kristen Syrett is an Associate Dean in the SAS Office of Undergraduate Education at Rutgers University – New Brunswick and an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Her NSF-funded research on language acquisition and linguistic representation investigates how children acquire word meaning, and her experimental semantics and pragmatics research focuses on how we dynamically assign meaning to words and sentences in a discourse context. She has been recognized for her research, teaching, and mentoring with awards at the University level and in the field of Linguistics. Outside of her research, she is an advocate for gender equity and inclusivity in higher education and the field of Linguistics. She has served as a consultant and has been featured in the media as an expert on diversity, gender, and inclusive language.