Inclusive pedagogical practices for multiple stakeholders

As US student populations diversify, educators’ job responsibilities and needs shift, and access to language education dwindles due to program closures and the removal of language requirements, it is time to disrupt the tradition of exclusion, inequity, and bifurcation in favor of inclusive pedagogical practices that create and provide access to inclusive and equitable communities for learners and educators. In the following, I summarize some of the changes the German Basic Language Program team at Michigan State University, which I led until summer 2022, has made to improve access, equity, and inclusion. I will first discuss the changes relevant for students and then those for educators.

Creating inclusive environments for the changing US college student population requires adjustments to a system that was built for one type of student, which in many cases no longer represents the actual student population. Adjusted curricula must also address the needs of those previously underrepresented. Anecdotally, service providers and educators on campus report an increase in students’ needs. Total undergraduate enrollment in the United States has decreased by 9% between 2009 and 2020 though enrollment in public institutions has increased (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022a). Undergraduate enrollment changed across racial and ethnic groups with a significant increase in Hispanic enrollment. There was also a significant increase in non-resident alien undergraduate enrollment. These shifts suggest an increase in multicultural and multilingual students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2022b), in 2015–2016 19% of undergraduates were students with disabilities, but only one-third reported their disability to the university. According to the Center for First-Generation Student Success (RTI International, 2019), in 2015–2016, 56% of students were classified as first-generation students. This is especially pronounced at public universities.

Our program, the German Basic Language Program at Michigan State University, has recognized that our pedagogical materials as well as our pedagogical practices were not meeting the needs of our current students. There have already been many initiatives to make materials more inclusive and representative (such as the textbook series Impuls Deutsch (Tracksdorf et al., 2019) or the German Studies Collaboratory, n.d.) and reports of and guidelines for such curricular changes are increasing (e.g., Cooper, 2020; Criser & Knott, 2019). Hence, I will focus here on some additional inclusive pedagogical practices: multilingual community building, universal design, and access.

The US higher education has seen a shift in the proportion of contingent, in comparison to tenured, professors, which has been especially pronounced in the Humanities (e.g., Mintz, 2021). In our German program at Michigan State University, contingent faculty positions were previously held by those without a doctoral degree or just after completion of a doctorate degree, and most of our contingent faculty today hold doctoral degrees. While previously, these educators worked in our department for a few years before moving on to a tenure-track position elsewhere, today's contingent faculty stay at our institution. While the contingent faculty's qualifications for the positions and commitments to the institution have increased, the inequitable working conditions have stayed largely unchanged: limited job security, higher teaching load, limited voting rights, and so forth. As Schweiger (2021) has pointed out, these inequitable conditions have an impact not just on the educators but also on the students.

There continues to be a bifurcation of the curriculum and associated perceived bifurcated value of the two parts of the curriculum (lower-language vs. upper-level content courses) resulting in inequitable distribution of educators across program levels (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, 2007). Some of the consequences of the bifurcation are that contingent faculty do not get to teach in their area of expertise or research focus (see also Mintz, 2021). These educators tend to have a higher teaching load with more student credit hours per course, which further impacts workload and disrupts their ability to focus on anything beyond the immediate teaching needs.

While the aforementioned credit reduction does not solve the bifurcation issues, the credit reduction, the multiple delivery formats, and online faculty meetings have resulted in all educators now having fewer teaching/meeting days on campus. One of our impacted educators said: “I finally feel like I can think again.” Non-teaching days have given breathing room, and the reduced workload has freed up time in our contingent faculty's schedule to concentrate on projects that go beyond the classroom. Furthermore, recent schedule assignments have included more tenure-stream faculty in the lower levels than prior to the 3-credit adjustment.

The above-discussed changes to our curricular policies, practices, and techniques have had the intension to improve equity, inclusion, and access and better meet the needs of our learning and teaching community. Where available, I reported the impact. While the changes we made at Michigan State University may not all be applicable to, feasible for, or even necessary in other contexts (e.g., credit reduction), some may be easily implemented (e.g., alternative participation options). With continuously declining enrollments in German, educators must commit to removing barriers to facilitating the development of German-language skills and to create efficient and effective pathways toward a German major or minor or at least advanced study of the language and culture.