Chapter 2: Teach Critical Content and Aim for Transformation: The Potential of Language Study in K–12 Education as a Key to Active Citizenship

In this chapter, I present an approach to foreign language teaching in K–12 education which fosters social transformation and active citizenship. In particular, I provide an overview of a concrete experience carried out in Uruguay through a project titled “Symbolic Gender Violence: Where Do You Stand?” A brief introduction about gender in Uruguay and the concept of symbolic gender violence (Fernandez Fasciolo & Frade Pandolfi, 2019) leads to a synthesis of the class project and its impact on students and the broader community. Because language aids virtually all social interaction, the language classroom is a space for social change provided that learners are perceived as citizens who perform socially. In this chapter I will aver that (foreign) language study (i.e., teaching and learning) is a transformative practice when framed within a critical pedagogy paradigm (Freire, 1970/2005; Giroux 1980; Giroux & Freire, 1987). Research findings show there is a rich educational space for citizenship development in the (foreign) language classroom, with valuable results regarding the course’s linguistic and pedagogical objectives as well as students’ feedback.