Doing Language and Gender in the Classroom: Teaching toward Justice

Gender, language, and education are social and relational acts; they are things that we do and do together and through this social doing they are constantly remade. Conversations about language education often recognize the role of social languaging collectives in the ways that we continuously relearn to do language. Such recognition has historically extended less frequently, however, to the ways that gender and its modalities are enmeshed with language learning. Where language research, training, and praxis have begun to attend to gender and its modalities, myriad misunderstandings often persist. These misunderstandings are regularly steeped in a combination of ideas about language (e.g., cislingualism or (cis)normative conceptions of language, prescriptivism, anthropomorphization), gender (e.g., binarism), education (e.g., apoliticization), power (e.g., language authorities), and legibility (e.g., cislation or the translating of seemingly illegible genders for cisgender recognition, type-marking). In keeping, this chapter reflects on the importance of expansive, equitable, and just approaches to gender in sites of language education and upon the growing body of literature related to gender-just language pedagogies, particularly those articulated through the frame of trans-affirming queer inquiry-based pedagogies (TAQIBPs). Considerations include the relationship of gender justice to student learning and to the broader discipline. In so doing, this chapter offers readers a lens for thinking about the complex intersections of gender and language in the context of language education and language education research.