Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to critically examine how language textbooks perpetuate colonialism. The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Julia Spiegelman, a PhD Candidate at UMass Boston.

In their book Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning, Liddicoat and Scarino talk about how textbooks are “designed to provide a comfortable encounter with a language rather than a nuanced encounter with a culture”. Often, these texts do not encourage participation in, or critical thinking about, the cultures of the language students are studying or even their own culture.  This episode’s guest, Julia Spiegelman, is talking about the flaws that she found while analyzing textbooks, but also about how, by using them thoughtfully, we can help students engage with their textbooks with more nuance. Specifically, she’s looked at teaching French and using French textbooks, though I think her findings and observations could apply to almost all of the languages that are currently taught in schools. The title of this episode is '“Challenging Language Textbooks” and I chose that because, as a language teacher, I’m a word nerd. And Julia gives us excellent advice on how to actively challenge (the verb) what we find in our language resources. But I also wanted to highlight challenging’s adjective form, because the work we need to do, as Julia and I discuss, involves making mistakes as we navigate our desire to be better teachers. Good luck on your not-so-impossible lesson with Agent Julia Spiegelman!

In our conversation we discuss:

1️⃣ How language textbooks position students as traveling consumers

2️⃣ Confronting linguistic prescriptivism and the idea of the textbook as the objective truth

3️⃣ Using the textbook to subvert the colonial narrative

Links mentioned:

• Multicultural Teaching Institute

• DDFC (Diversity, Decolonization, and the French Curriculum) Collective 

• Lesson: Impossible blog post on Inclusive French

• Lesson: Impossible blog post on heteronormativity in language textbooks

• Julia’s website

• Julia’s Twitter

Some other episodes that might interest you about language learning:

• Episode 18: Agent Rebecca Blouwolff (Teaching Language Authentically)

• Episode 24: Agent Mandy Yom (ELL Kindergarten)

• Episode 48: Agent Adriana Ramirez (Comprehensible Input)

UPDATE (02/15): There is a free, open source, culturally inclusive French textbook available called ‘CITOYEN.NE’ created by Annabelle Dolidon