The Language Curricula and Gender working group aims to investigate how language curricula draw on and perpetuate gender stereotypes and how these curricula can be reassessed to challenge and overcome these stereotypes in order to advance gender equality in language learning and beyond.

Visit the group's website

Pedagogical and curricular practices are not gender neutral. Although previous researchers have explored gender inequities in education, few have focused on how such inequities apply to the everyday practices of language education and the role that these practices play in promoting and perpetuating these inequalities.  Whether first language, second or other, language curricula, in particular play a significant role in contributing to and reifying gender stereotypes and perpetuating gender discrimination cross-culturally. Our primary objective is to investigate how language pedagogy and curricula can be marshalled to confront gender discrimination by interrogating these stereotypes in an effort to advance gender equality in language learning and beyond. Learn more in our Buffett Brief on curricula and gender equality.

Ultimately, our goal is to better understand the ways that language pedagogy reinforces and exacerbates cultural assumptions and stereotypes about gender while developing resources – both actual materials and community connections – that will enable language instructors to challenge and ultimately disrupt those assumptions and stereotypes and, at the same time, to think critically and teach dynamically about the intersection of language learning and social justice. Our project seeks to promote inclusivity through curricular and pedagogical changes that reconceptualize the language classroom as expansive spaces for critical reflection and language proficiency. Learn more about the group's latest developments >>

Co-leads:

• Rana Raddawi, MENA Languages, Arabic & Translation, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
• Marcelo Worsley, Computer Science and Education and Social Policy, School of Education and Social Policy

 
Group members:

• Franziska Lys, German, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
• Gregory Ward, Linguistics, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and, by courtesy, Philosophy, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
• Ragy Mikhaeel, MENA Languages, Arabic, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
• Julia Moore, English Language Programs, The Graduate School, and by courtesy, Linguistics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
• Ana Williams, Spanish & Portuguese, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
• Shannon Millikin, Spanish & Portuguese, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
• Xena Amro, PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Outreach & Engagement Activities  

• Group co-lead Rana Raddawi co-chaired the Women Forum and Workshop on Women in STEM in the Middle East at the Malta Conference in November 2022. 
• In December 2022, Rana Raddawi represented the Language Curricula and Gender Equality group at a Salzburg Global Seminar on Education, Transformation and Gender in Salzburg, Austria. The program “will bring 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.”