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

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.