Nicholas Henriksen, Romance Languages and Literatures | 2020-2021
As the Associate Chair of one of the largest departments in LSA, as well as a professor who interacts with multitudes of students in my courses and my lab, I see firsthand the struggles of students who hold marginalized and underrepresented identities. Personal self-identification should not be subject to debate, yet many students in Romance Languages & Literatures (RLL) are not provided with tools to accurately self-identify in the RLL classroom. As an instructor in RLL, it has become evident that there is an urgent need for our curriculum to support students who live outside the gender binary and who choose to study a Romance language, as these languages contain binary grammatical gender markings. Such support is crucial — we know that students are most successful when they feel represented in an inclusive environment that is respectful of diversity.
My current proposal is situated within my pursuit of DEI initiatives as Associate Chair of my department. In that capacity I am currently working on developing anti-racist pedagogy through partnerships established with CRLT; at the same time, I also want to dedicate attention to broadening inclusivity to reflect the evolving perspectives on gender identity and expression. The Romance languages are no exception to these issues, each with a language system uniquely adapting to evolving cultural contexts. Therefore, working towards a classroom environment that embraces a multiplicity of experiences and identities should be treated as essential to both the student experience and the curriculum. I further recognize that language textbooks may take time to catch up in acknowledging the many identities that students hold; this makes it imperative that action be taken now to jump-start this progress.
The goals of this proposal are therefore:
1) to create a website and other online resources to be available for student and instructor use that include lists of currently-available options for students to pick non-binary pronouns (and related morphology), in addition to links to online sources for further information and reading;
2) to curate a list of best teaching practices for RLL instructors (classroom practices, assessment practices, syllabi statements, etc.) that is intended to facilitate the development of a department-wide policy for treating issues of gender diversity as essential to the curriculum;
3) to encourage interdepartmental collaboration in setting new standards for gender inclusivity.
The impact of this work is large, as all students in LSA must complete four semesters of foreign-language work as part of their degree, and Spanish is the one most commonly studied. In RLL’s Elementary Language Program, we typically have 6,000+ enrollments in a given academic year across our four languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). Across our four concentrations, at any given time we have 600+ students pursuing a major or minor in our department.