Chapter 14: Overlooked Interfaith Champions?: How Foreign Language Faculty Are Helping Students Engage and Appreciate Worldview Differences

Over the last two decades, diversity initiatives on college and university campuses across the U.S. have placed greater emphasis on students’ world-views, inclusive of their religious, spiritual, and nonreligious identities. This has stemmed in part from an increased appreciation of worldview diversity for its capacity to positively or negatively affect campus climate and student experiences (Mayhew, Bowman, & Rockenbach, 2014). To ensure that worldview diversity results in positive gains in key outcomes for students and their campuses, a new generation of interfaith initiatives have emerged, traditionally under the supervision of student life professionals, campus chaplains, and religious studies faculty (Patel & Meyer, 2009). However, some foreign language (FL) faculty have also been offering opportunities inside and outside their classrooms for students to engage and appreciate other worldviews (Athanasopoulos, 2015; Yu, 2014). This occurs as they teach students about the cultures and beliefs that backdrop the languages they are learning. Though not traditionally recognized as catalysts for mending social relationships and fragmented communities, a growing segment of foreign language faculty are in fact helping students develop the capacities to be peacebuilders and good neighbors toward people of other worldviews (Scott & Huntington, 2002; Wyllie, 2018).