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Courses / Modules / LING6091 Diversity, social justice and inclusion in language education

Diversity, social justice and inclusion in language education

When you'll study it
Semester 2
CATS points
15
ECTS points
7.5
Level
Level 7
Module lead
Sonia Moran Panero
Academic year
2025-26

Module overview

As language education seeks to prepare students to communicate in a world that is ever more interconnected, diverse and unequal, teachers and institutions are urged to explore how social justice-oriented pedagogies can help address forms of inequality, oppression and discrimination that are still reproduced in our learning materials, classroom practices and didactic spaces. In this module we examine the ways in which language educators and researchers around the globe are responding to calls for more inclusive and equitable approaches in education (UN, 2016, UNESCO, 2019), and the challenges resulting from efforts to eliminate barriers to participation and disrespect for diversity from language learning environments. Drawing from research on critical language pedagogies and classroom-based interventions from different global settings, we analyse: 1) the role that the language learning curriculum, materials and teacher agency can play in dealing with diversity as either ‘a problem’ or ‘a collective strength’; 2) what kinds of diversity and inequality dimensions need to be considered in our approaches to (English) Language Teaching and why (e.g. disability, race, rural/urban divides, religion, gender, class, emotionality); and 3) what resources, strategies and critical or social-justice pedagogies may be developed in local educational contexts to dismantle different forms of inequity, as we move towards a more critical, socially just and responsible (English) language education practice.