Fostering Equitable Classrooms

This page assembles some context, guidelines, suggestions, and further references for creating a safe and warm classroom space for linguistically diverse speakers. It is a resource for teachers wishing to foreground equity in their teaching of scholarly communication. For resources on linguistic justice that you can share with your students, click here.

Elsewhere on this site, we have discussed some of the ways the performance paradigm dominates in approaches to scholarly speaking—and shared our goals for shifting how speaking is taught at the post-secondary level. In our research, we have noted that one problem with the performance paradigm is that it is exclusionary: it sets limits on who can be considered a “good speaker.” ​Challenging the performance paradigm means protecting linguistic diversity and fighting for linguistic justice​.  

Linguistic diversity recognizes and values the many languages and dialects used in a given society. Linguistic justice is based on the premises that: ​  

• There is no natural hierarchy of languages​ 

• There is no natural hierarchy of ways to speak any given language​

Linguistic justice recognizes that hierarchized views of language are discriminatory in themselves and also encode social prejudices around, gender, race, sexuality, nationality, education, class, and so on​.  

The message of linguistic justice is that we are all “good” speakers​

What needs to change?

We believe that teachers need new tools for teaching oral communication in the university classroom. Our research, and our experience as post-secondary educators, reminds us what it looks like when equitable speaking pedagogies are not foregrounded in classrooms: 

• Implicit expectations around “clear speaking” 
• Deficit approaches to the work of multilingual students​ 
• Penalties for grammar errors when learning grammar is not a course outcome​ 
• Unexamined participation grades that reward frequency of speaking in class 
• Upholding of the “complaint tradition”—i.e., worrying that students don’t speak/write English “like they used to”​ 
• Unexamined rubrics for evaluating oral presentations 

These “status quo” practices harm our students, particularly students who speak in non-normative ways.  

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

The term “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies” refers to pedagogies that encourage instructors to respond to the diverse needs and backgrounds of their students—including their linguistic needs and backgrounds. Against traditional deficit-based approaches to teaching diverse students, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies take an asset-based approach to students expressing culture in their learning and invite students to express their cultural backgrounds continuously outside and inside of the classroom.  

“… [C]ulturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.” (Paris 2012) 

	Reflect
	Consider how you can help students sustain their culture in your classroom by fostering linguistic pluralism. How can you show students that the different ways they speak are valued in your classroom?

How to Promote Linguistic Justice

These are some general and brief suggestions intended to be widely applicable. They are intended to help work against the implicit linguistic biases that often inform our teaching practices in North American English-speaking universities.  

• Review your assessments to ensure you are assessing what you are teaching and not deducting marks for hidden expectations around speaking and communication. As the Writing Studies scholar Asao Inoue argues, every student should be graded in such a way that, “no matter where they come from or how they speak or write, [they] can have access to the entire range of final course grades possible.” 
• Emphasize the role of the listener in your classroom. Take time to talk to your students about what listening looks like, what it entails, and how important it is to successful scholarly communication.
• In low– stakes writing assignments, or oral group work, offer opportunities for students to write or speak in a voice or language they feel most comfortable in. For example, invite students to “free write” or outline in the language of their choice. This can help them bring the resources of the languages they are most comfortable with into your classroom. 
• Try to avoid rushing or correcting students when they speak, or finishing their sentences for them. If you need something to be repeated, take responsibility for that as the listener.  
• Consider opportunities to add multilingual readings or content to your syllabus 
  • A music professor may include music in multiple languages 
  • An English professor may assign a novel in a non-dominant dialect 
  • A professor teaching French may include resources from not only France but also Quebec [https://blogs.ubc.ca/mebouchard/publications/] 
• Talk to students about the politics of language standardization.  
  • Try having students survey their friends on how attitudes around language surface on social media. (See Curzan et al, 2023) 
  • Ask students to imagine they are “child language brokers” (multilingual children who translate for their parents). This gives the class an opportunity to consider the skills (for example, awareness of audience) this role entails. (see Simon, 2021)  
  • Take time in class to show short videos (like this or this) that start conversations around multilingualism, dialect diversity, or linguistic justice. 
• Add a statement around linguistic diversity to your syllabus (see examples below).