Agent Julia Spiegelman (Challenging Language Textbooks)

Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to critically examine how language textbooks perpetuate colonialism. The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Julia Spiegelman, a PhD Candidate at UMass Boston.

 

In our conversation we discuss:

1️⃣ How language textbooks position students as traveling consumers

2️⃣ Confronting linguistic prescriptivism and the idea of the textbook as the objective truth

3️⃣ Using the textbook to subvert the colonial narrative

 

Click here for links and resources mentioned in the episode or more information about the podcast. Click here for Lesson: Impossible’s blog.