Incorporating Culturally Inclusive Examples in a Language Course

Overview

Students focus on French-speaking countries around the world through assignments and media. In one unit, students compare wedding attire in Mali to that worn in their own cultures. They also complete a writing assignment on the debate about women wearing Muslim head coverings in public in France.

Why Use This?

Using more culturally inclusive examples can do the following:

Make the classroom itself more welcoming for students from diverse backgrounds.
Broaden student knowledge about cultures that have been excluded from the textbook or other learning materials.

How Does It Work?

You can easily add culturally inclusive examples (like articles, videos, or other media) to your course. Once you have your examples, you can develop an assignment or discussion that asks students to reflect on the learning material, as the instructor did in this course.

Keep In Mind

Be mindful of the examples you select. In this course, the instructor was very intentional about providing examples from around the Francophone world. She has the following advice:

Assess what voices or stories are and are not included in your learning materials. Pay attention to the level of thinking. Are students asked to do more higher-level thinking when stories of white, cis, wealthy, U.S./European folks are featured? Do materials mention but gloss over other stories?
Remember: You don’t have to be an expert on a story or identity that is not your own to include. Don’t pretend to be an expert. Plan your activities around exploration, seeking to understand, and making connections and comparisons. Make humility a part of the assignment.

Testimonial

I knew right away creating the course that modules would align well with the chapters of a selected textbook, and we would use the textbook’s interactive features for practice activities to guide student learning of new material. Before beginning to create modules, I created a chart to check the diversity of the textbook. On the left-hand side, I listed all the chapters and sections; across the top, I created columns for each region of the world where French is spoken. Every time a region of the world was mentioned, I noted it with a checkmark. If it asked students to think critically and do some work, I starred it. In this way, I was able to see the areas of the world that were missing (non-white countries mostly). As I designed the introductions to modules and summative assessments, I made sure to hit those parts of the world and include higher-level thinking activities. In two chapters, I also added an extra "culture" assignment to bring some nuance to topics that the chapter approached at a surface level (and in the case of the Muslim veil, the chapter made a big generalization based on one YouTube source completely missing that there is a large cultural debate happening around the topic all over the world).

Jackie Mauer, MPS, Instructor, UW-Superior