Nicholas Henriksen, Romance Languages and Literatures | 2022-2023
In the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures (RLL), gender-diverse students face a major pedagogical and communication barrier because the languages we teach (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) employ a binary grammatical gender in their lexicons. This strict masculine/feminine distinction is exclusionary to students who do not identify within this dichotomy and to their peers and allies who understand how harmful it is to misgender classmates. While native speakers of the Romance languages have already adapted to the linguistic needs of gender-diverse individuals, the RLL curriculum is not yet equipped to teach students how to use such forms in tandem with the well-established masculine and feminine designations. Through my NINI proposal, I aim to address this lacuna by creating new instructional materials that complement RLL’s learning outcomes for each level of instruction in the department. I will serve as the team leader for the project, and my collaborators will include members of RLL’s Gender Diversity Committee. We will create new instructional materials with two goals in mind: (i) to ensure that RLL students can effectively use gender-neutral language in a variety of communicative contexts; and (ii) to introduce RLL students to cultural discussions regarding gender identity and gender diversity in both the United States and Romance language-speaking countries. The primary deliverable will be an online resource library that will host the instructional materials created by the project’s team members. For each of RLL’s four languages, this resource library will contain twenty-one lesson plans with corresponding instructional materials, resulting in a total of eighty-four sets of innovative pedagogical exercises.
In sum, my project involves a vast curricular update with respect to gender identity in RLL courses. The major innovation comes through the intentional recognition of gender diversity at all levels of instruction through lesson plans geared toward practicing the use of nonbinary forms in a multitude of linguistic and communicative contexts.