Social Justice and the Language Classroom

Pedagogical principles and practices to integrate social justice issues into your language classroom

• Covers social class and neoliberalism, intersectionality, race, ethnicity and antiracism, environmental justice, gender and sexual identity
• Includes problem-posing and reflective tasks, sample lesson plans and activities to allow you to critically reflect on your practice and apply social justice pedagogies in your own teaching
• Includes case studies from across the world adopting a more international perspective and challenging the dominant US-centric and Eurocentric approaches to social justice language education

Challenging the liberal notion of the classroom as a neutral space, Social Justice and the Language Classroom invites you to become advocates, allies, and activists, and gives you the conceptual and practical tools to fight against systemic injustice in education and beyond.

This practical resource book examines issues of inequity, marginalization, discrimination, and oppression that are regularly experienced by language learners coming from diverse backgrounds in terms of race, ethnicity, social class, ability, language and sexuality. Drawing on examples from international contexts and including problem-posing and reflective tasks, sample lesson plans, activities and resource materials, this book provides you with vital knowledge for socially just language teaching and provides the pedagogical tools to apply these in classroom contexts.

With its emphasis on intersectionality and global competence, the book builds bridges between critical pedagogy, political economy, critical race theory, feminist pedagogy, and queer theory to equip you with the tools to recognize systems of oppression and inequality, understand how they interact, and to adopt social justice pedagogies for transformation and social change.