Chapter 1: Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice in World Language Education: Beyond Conscientização¹

During the past twenty years, there have been a number of important changes in the teaching of world languages, and nowhere is this more evident than in the growing efforts to implement and integrate concerns of critical pedagogy and social justice into the classroom. However, it is not clear that concerns with critical pedagogy and social justice in world language settings have had the kind of impact that critical educators had initially hoped. In this chapter, we begin the conversation necessary to make critical pedagogy more successful and effective in the context of the world language classroom.