Creating Anti-Oppressive Digital Spaces for Social Justice Language Education

Contemporary moves towards social justice education and digital pedagogies require language educators to examine the ways digital learning platforms reinforce economic, social, and cultural inequities, and to explore how to instead offer anti-oppressive pedagogies for diverse online communities. In this Teaching Issues essay, I draw from the principles of critical pedagogy to argue that non-linear, non-modular and multimodal digital learning platforms created on content-management systems (CMS) can provide anti-oppressive pedagogical affordances for 1) dismantling teacher-student power relations, 2) cultivating a sense of a digital learning community, and 3) promoting intersectionality within language teacher education programs. Next, I present a discussion of the challenges involved in designing an anti-oppressive, transformative digital learning space, and of several critical questions teacher educators can reflect upon while designing their own virtual environments.