EDI in South Asian Language Classes

Gyanam Mahajan, UCLA

While Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are stated mission goals of most higher learning institutions, the language classroom remains at the margins of serious reflection on EDI. The language learning community is the least diverse and little effort is made to be inclusive. Despite the fact that the students are pursuing their educational goals at American Universities, the language classroom, by the very nature of its content, traps them into an unequal encapsulated module with the limited goal of learning the target language and cultures. In this paper, I will outline specific features of EDI in a language class and then focus on South Asian language classes in particular. Using the World Readiness Standards as a guide, I will go through each of the Five Cs to isolate issues and suggest some measures to make our classes more equitable, more diverse and more inclusive. I will suggest that this can only be done by incorporating goals of higher education itself and the goals of learning in the Humanities, using Value rubrics of the American Association for Colleges and Universities. The aim of this paper is to provide syllabus templates and suggest curricular overhaul to make South Asian language classes meet EDI goals.

BIO: Gyanam Mahajan is a linguist at UCLA and a Faculty Co-Director of EPIC (Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms) in the Division of Humanities. She teaches some multi-scripted and multilingual Language Humanities courses, and her research interests are in the fields of second language acquisition, language pedagogy and inclusivity, and developing language epistemology.