• Juliana Wijaya, PhD (University of California, Los Angeles)

With the rise of social justice movements locally, nationally, and globally, language educators in the United States have increasingly integrated diversity, inclusivity, and equity (DEI) in their teaching of foreign, second and heritage languages. What does promoting and integrating DEI in foreign and heritage language (HL) classrooms really mean? DEI efforts and implementation strategies require language educators to continuously reflect and evaluate their curricula, materials, approaches, and teaching practices. To achieve their teaching objectives, language educators need to provide equal learning access and opportunities to very diverse groups of students, many of whom are marginalized and have unique attributes and identities. How can diversity be promoted in language classrooms to create inclusive learning environment where our language learners feel valued, respected, and supported regardless their backgrounds? How can language learner’s different perspectives and experiences be utilized to help them develop and advance their linguistic and cultural competence in the target language? In this presentation, we will discuss what DEI movement means in HL classes with very diverse students like Indonesian. How do we embrace DEI initiatives and integrate DEI in heritage language classrooms? I will evaluate existing Indonesian teaching materials and specific teaching practices that discourage and encourage inclusivity. Examples from Indonesian language teaching materials and heritage language projects will be presented. I will also examine discriminative language in Indonesian and discriminative topics from Indonesian language teaching materials. Finally, we will reflect on the diversity of our HL students and discuss the ways in which we can bring HL learners and teachers together to create inclusive and cohesive learning environment and communities.