Languaging a postdiscipline: Insights from teaching trans cultures of language

Presentation given at the International Trans Studies Conference.

[12 minutes.] Trans ways of knowing, being, and doing defy borders and binaries, be they the rigid disciplinary categorizations that isolate trans scholars from one another in the academy or the normative linguistic boundaries that artificially isolate trans languagers (i.e., people who do the social, relational act of language) from one another in the broader world. Scholars of language have demonstrated the ways that trans people actively draw on their full linguistic repertoires and find inspiration in trans cultures of language the world over, regardless of how this might defy others’ ideas about tidy, appropriate, or expected ways of languaging (e.g., trans translanguaging in Knisely, 2023; consider also Flores, 2023, Kosnick, 2023, Zimman, 2021). Applied to language education, this has meant questioning foundational (read: cisheteronormative) assumptions about what language is and what happens when we attempt to teach and learn this social, relational act through which we constantly (re)make our worlds. But we don’t just language in contexts of language education: Language is a part of near every social –and scholarly– exchange. Our enlanguaged lives –and the very worlds we imagine possible– are constrained by cislingualism (i.e., the valuing of cisnormative cultures of language and the ideologies that inflect them). In keeping, this presentation considers how coalition- and community-based, capacity-building approaches to gender-just language education can contribute to trans studies as an increasingly collaborative postdiscipline and how these contributions might support our work to prefigure a more liveable academy and world for us all.

Handout: krisknisely.com/T24

Knisely, K. A. (2024, September 5). Languaging a postdiscipline: Insights from teaching trans cultures of language. Presentation given at the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference as a part of the panel “Trans languages, trans lives: Offerings from language research to trans studies” organized by Montreal Benesch and Archie Crowley. “https://www.transstudiesconference.org/

Gender-just languaging, gender-just language pedagogies: Re-thinking language education through trans epistemologies

Plenary given at the American 2024 Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference

[44 minutes.] As scholar-educators in disciplines and departments where languages are taught, learned, and researched, the time for us to work towards forms of gender justice that honor, and revel in the knowledges and linguacultures of trans people has long since been here and is ever-more overdue as globalized and localized forms of anti-trans, anti-education, and other oppressive actions continue (Knisely, 2023; Knisely & Russell, 2024). As recent conference themes suggest, we have grown to understand our field in new ways “in times of reckoning and change” and through the kinds of capacity-building that “collaborating and mentoring” can afford us. Yet, another period of calling in, calling out, and calling forth is needed for us to “think otherwise” and understand distinctly trans approaches to applied linguistics beyond the confines of inclusionary discourses alone. Burgeoning research into trans ways of doing and teaching language has given us new ways of thinking about language-as-social-verb, learning as participation in languaging communities, and education as a site for gender justice. This work has also invited us to continue to intersectionally re-think key concepts in our field, such as through the consideration of distinctly trans approaches to translanguaging and to the undoing of competence. These ways of thinking otherwise invite us to reimagine what we do as language scholar-educators in conversation with trans linguacultures. They invite us to act for change by observing “the tensions of our own humanity, our own languaging and gendering, our own doing and undoing, and look through it for what might be our greater potentiality,” and what might be the greater potentiality of applied linguistics as a whole (Knisely & Russell, 2024). They invite us to ask: What will we do, as individual scholars in a field to work toward a world where language enriches the livability of all of our lives?

Handout: krisknisely.com/aaal

Knisely, K. A. (2024, March 1). Trans linguacultures, trans logics: Re-imagining the potentiality of applied linguistics through gender justice [Plenary]. American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2024 Conference. Online. https://www.aaal.org/events/aaal-webinar---kris-aric-knisely---trans-linguacultures-trans-logics

Knisely, K. (March, 2023). Gender-just language, Gender-just language pedagogies: Rethinking language education through trans epistemologies. (Keynote) International Conference on Gender-Inclusive Language Instruction. University of Southern California. (Online). https://dornsife.usc.edu/center-for-languages-and-cultures/gender-inclusive-language-conference/

Gender-just languaging, gender-just language pedagogies: Re-thinking language education through trans epistemologies

Keynote at the USC Gender Inclusive Language Instruction Conference

[48 minutes.] In this talk I focus on how we think with trans epistemologies as language educators, providing intellectual scaffolding for the development of increasingly gender-just pedagogies in sites of language teaching and learning. As a part of this conversation, I draw on the discussion of language and gender as both social and relational acts that we do, as opposed to things that are that Eric Louis Russell and I have outlined in our volume Redoing Linguistic Worlds. I also introduce the idea of trans trans languaging, drawing on my 2023 publication on this topic in The Modern Language Journal, alongside my more praxis-focused publications.

Handout: krisknisely.com/usc

Knisely, K. (May, 2022). The Gender-Just Language Education Project: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies for Engaging with Trans Knowledges. The Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy (CERCLL). The University of Arizona. (Online).

The Gender-Just Language Education Project: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies for Engaging with Trans Knowledges.

[95 minutes.] In this webinar, Dr. Kris Aric Knisely (University of Arizona) will introduce The Gender-Just Language Education Project, an open resource project to support language educators in engaging with trans knowledges and proactively planning for gender justice. This webinar will begin with an introduction to gender-just language pedagogies. Then, extending the critical ethical impetus for inclusion, Knisely will outline recent research that demonstrates the ways in which gender-just pedagogies can support holistic linguistic, intercultural, and symbolic competence development as well as intersectional thinking. Alongside a discussion of reasons for and ways to proactively plan for gender-justice, Knisely will discuss ways of proactively planning for resistance thereto. This discussion will be supported by a suite of open educational resources (OERs), which will allow attendees to build upon the content introduced in this webinar and adapt it to their own sites of language teaching and learning.

Knisely, K. (August, 2022). Gender-just language teaching and linguistic competence development. ACTFL’s From research to practice: Not your typical book club series. ACTFL. (Online).

Gender-just language teaching and linguistic competence development: A Summary

[9 minutes, 48 seconds.] This video introduces Knisely, K. (2022). Gender-just language teaching and linguistic competence development. Foreign Language Annals, 55(2), 1-24. It was created and shown as a part of ACTFL’s From Research to Practice: Not Your Typical Book Club event held on August 25, 2022.

Knisely, K. (2020, November). Weaving transness into the fabric of French L2 learning: Toward TGNC-affirming French L2 pedagogies. Paper presented at the Diversity, Decolonization, and the French Curriculum (DDFC) conference. (Online).

Weaving transness into the fabric of French L2 learning: Toward TGNC-affirming French L2 pedagogies.

[15 minutes. Focus on French.] Second language acquisition (SLA) is facilitated by pedagogies that explicitly attend to the identity (re)construction intrinsic to L2 learning and use (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton, 2013). Queer applied linguistics (ALx) has begun to focus this attention on sexual and gender diversity in L2 curricula, textbooks, research, and pedagogy (Nelson, 2009; Paiz, 2020; Saunston, 2017), bolstered by increasingly prevalent discourses of diversity and inclusion (ACTFL, 2019). However, trans, non-binary, and gender-non conforming (TGNC) bodies, lives, and concerns remain frequently marginalized in AL(x) (Knisely & Paiz, forthcoming) and are even more scantly treated in French SLA specifically (Ashley, 2019; Kosnick, 2019; Provitola, 2019). Given a parallel paucity of training and TGNC-inclusive materials, most instructors, students, and institutions alike are ill-equipped to build and maintain curricula, classrooms, and pedagogies that treat Francophone TGNC-ness and that affirm TGNC learners (Knisely, 2020/2021). To begin to redress this shortcoming, this presentation builds on existing ALx frameworks to offer possibilities for laying bare normativities and realizing locally-relevant, trans-affirming French L2 pedagogies. These possibilities extend existing linguistic models to consider TGNC-ness in the L2 classroom as fluid and flexible third spaces that spring out of the intersection of myriad cultures, systems, discourses, politics, and experiences of gender. Attendees will be invited to practice restive problematizing and reflect on representation, not as inherently liberatory or as a goal itself, but as a means –alongside invisibility and impossibility– to inextricably weave TGNC-affirmation and inclusion into the assignments, activities, pedagogical strategies, curricula, and the very fabric of French L2 education.

Gender-Just Language Pedagogies.

[53 minutes. CC available. Focus on English.] Within TESOL advocacy, the pendulum of focus for LGBTQ+ concerns seldom settles on the experiences of trans and nonbinary people. In this LGBTQ PLN academic session, Dr. Kris Knisely shares suggestions for gender-just language pedagogies and discusses how educators can engage with gender in ways that both center trans knowledges and honor trans and nonbinary colleagues and students.

Extended abstract: Language education represents a site for identity (re)construction, mediated through language acquisition and use. Through acts such as speaking, reading, and writing, learners and educators must linguistically position themselves and be positioned by others. In this way, language education encourages reflections not only on the identities that we take up as learners and educators, but also on other aspects of who we are in relation to the broader social world. Although language learning allows students to (re)imagine, (re)invent, and explore new linguistic and cultural identities, there is often limited attention to queer and trans knowledges in the curriculum, textbooks, research, and pedagogy of language classrooms. This has left many educators to report feeling particularly un- or under-prepared to engage in gender-just language teaching and, thus, many students to find themselves in classrooms that do not always engage deeply with gender justice. In following, this talk invites participants to reflect on the ways that we might all remake, reimagine, and reinvent our language classrooms, materials, and pedagogical approaches to resist normativities and narratives of oppression and to recenter trans knowledges and possibilities of being. This entails considering ongoing processes of queer and trans remaking, reimagining, and reinventing can help us to better serve all of our students, particularly in terms of increasing classroom inclusiveness, fostering tolerance of ambiguity, and the development of linguistic, symbolic, and intercultural competencies. This talk will focus on situating the teaching and learning of English in a gender-just, trans-affirming pedagogical framework, although much of the discussion remains applicable to the teaching and learning of languages writ large.

Knisely, K. (March, 2022). Gender-just language pedagogies. Illuminating the T in LGBTQ: Perspectives from the Field. LGBT Professional Learning Network Plenary session at the TESOL International Association Convention and English Language Expo. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Hybrid).

Knisely, K. (September, 2020). Un-boxing gender: Toward trans-affirming L2 pedagogies. The Berkeley College Language Center. The University of California-Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. (Online).

Un-boxing gender: Toward trans-affirming L2 pedagogies.

[2 hours, 8 minutes.] Language education represents a site for identity (re)construction, mediated through language acquisition and use (Atkinson, 2011). Through acts such as speaking, reading, and writing, learners must linguistically position themselves and be positioned by others. In this way, language education encourages learners’ reflections on their own identities in relation to the broader social world (Dornyei, 2014; Norton, 2013). Although language learning allows students to explore new linguistic and cultural identities, there is often limited attention to gender and sexual diversity in the curriculum, textbooks, research, and pedagogy of language classrooms (Nelson, 2009), leaving many educators to report feeling particularly un- or under-prepared to engage in gender-just language teaching. This webinar will discuss the broad ways that we, as teachers, can queer our L2 classrooms, materials, and pedagogical approaches to serve all of our students. Practically-focused, the content of this webinar will draw on Kris Knisely’s research into the ways that non-binary speakers of French are presently challenging, subverting, and adapting a grammatically binary linguistic system. In turn, this example will allow us to collectively consider the unique pedagogical opportunities that the identification and teaching of non-binary language forms affords. This pedagogical discussion addresses questions of curricular scope and sequence and argues for the theorized value for all students of teaching these non-standard forms in terms of increasing classroom inclusiveness, fostering tolerance of ambiguity, and the development of linguistic and intercultural competencies..