Toward Exhilarating Classrooms: Representation vs. Inclusion in Japanese Language Education

Authors

  • Arthur M. Mitchell Macalester College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/jll.2020.141

Abstract

This article responds to the important effort, regarding diversity and inclusion, to draw attention to the imbalance in identity representation amongst the ranks of Japanese language teachers and to interrogate whether this is a symptom of native speaker supremacy bias. While recognizing the presence of this bias, I argue that addressing it through frameworks of representation (e.g. increasing the number of non-L1 female-identifying teachers) could inadvertently serve to support larger frameworks of oppression. Promoting, instead, a method of inclusive teaching that prompts us to look inward and actually transform the way we teach by having the courage to draw attention to our gendered, racial, national, and class identities within the classroom and connecting them to the content we teach, I offer a tactic for more directly addressing native speaker bias, as well as other structures of exclusion, that can be practiced by any instructor, no matter what their identities.

Author Biography

Arthur M. Mitchell, Macalester College

Associate Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures. Arthur Mitchell teaches courses in Japanese language and literature. His scholarship examines literary modernism in Japan from a transnational perspective with a specific focus on how modernist fiction critiqued the dynamic social developments of the 1920s in Japan. Mitchell has a keen interest in developing pedagogies of inclusivity and introducing equity into institutions of higher education.

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Published

2020-09-25

Issue

Vol. 54 No. 2 (2020): Japanese Language and Literature

Section

SPECIAL SECTION LANGUAGE AND PEDAGOGY

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