Disruptive French: Using OER to promote linguistic justice in the French-language classroom

A prestige-focused approach to language teaching, motivated by hegemonic definitions of “normativity” defined by a privileged few, is one that sustains inequity, misrepresents the speech community, and excludes learners by denying them access to the cultural and linguistic tools they need to relate to real-world users. Now more than ever, as language departments struggle to fill seats and argue for the relevance of their disciplines, educators must instead embrace a linguistic justice approach which simultaneously critiques monolingualism and integrates plurilingual practices essential to valorizing the linguistically-rich realities of 21st-century learners. #OnYGo, an Open Educational Resource (OER) for first-year French, employs a linguistic justice approach that redraws the francophone landscape through a lens of social justice and cultivates learners’ awareness of language variation and identity via translanguaging, the development of metalinguistic awareness, and the thoughtful use of digital tools which invite learners to create and interpret language across modalities, guided by a multiliteracies framework. Because OERs are free from the censorship of commercial publishers, we argue that they should not only be used to increase accessibility to language education but also to promote equitable and iconoclastic approaches to language teaching like the one on display in #OnYGo.