Teaching toward gender justice: Considerations in materials design, selection, and use

Language educators and organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of expansive approaches to gender. Research has demonstrated that this importance is not only one of inclusion but also one that stems from the very goals and objectives of language education: Gender-just language pedagogies support the development of a range of contemporary critical literacies. Despite this, educators are often challenged by insufficient training in these pedagogies and by materials that fail to engage in meaningful ways with trans knowledges and language practices. This chapter offers a review of gender-just language pedagogies, including their existing articulations and research into their affordances and constraints, as a foundation for addressing one of the hereto major hindrances to their uptake: the overwhelming cisheteronormativity of existing, mass-market materials. That is, the presentation of particular forms of cisgender heterosexuality as the only valued, valid, or possible ways of doing gender and sexuality. Readers are guided in navigating a constellation of considerations in materials design, selection, and use through concrete examples, activities, and questions for further reflection.