Social Justice in Language Education: Strengthening Career Competencies, Intercultural Understanding, and Language Proficiency Through Specialized Materials (Social SCILS) has been funded for three years through the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI International Research and Studies Program. The Social SCILS program will create a suite of materials in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish that are grounded in multiliteracies pedagogy and address a range of critical social justice topics (e.g., racism, global health, language policy, environmental sustainability).
The Social SCILS materials will: develop students’ oral and written language proficiency and prepare them to communicate in personal, academic, and professional contexts; encourage complex intercultural understanding of social justice topics and how they are addressed through languages and across cultures; and foster the core career competencies of critical thinking, creative problem-solving, ethical reasoning and decision making, and engagement with diversity.
Kate Paesani, director of the University's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, will lead the project in close collaboration with a team of language-specific curriculum coordinators from the College of Liberal Arts. With input from consultants on social justice in language education and career readiness, the Social SCILS project will engage language instructors from the University and other institutions around the country to develop social justice materials in ten languages.
