Stories

Hsin-hung (Sean) Yeh organized a panel, "Inclusive Pedagogy and Multimodal Curriculum Design in L2 Chinese Classes," in the 2023 Annual Convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Chicago, November 16-20. The panel showcased evidence-based inclusive and multimodal teaching practices that align with diverse social identities of Gen Z and enhance their inner motivations in L2 Chinese classes. It also aims to remove implicit biases toward Gen Z who are usually considered highly digitally proficient and address the issues due to oversimplification of the de facto diverse student body of different SES and ethnicities. Sean Yeh's presentation discussed how to make instructional languages more inclusive to reduce learning anxieties based on qualitative research results, while his colleagues in the panel focused on how to tailor a lesson and its in-class activities multimodally to involve different perspectives from (non-)heritage students in a community that promotes collaborative learning and how to design learner-centered tasks that organically foster collaboration and cross-cultural literacy. The panel hoped to ultimately promote more inclusive pedagogical practices tailored for students to elicit their best performance via multimodal tasks.