Language educators are well aware that these tensions are shaped by the strategic defunding of language studies, outright attack on academic initiatives on language, as well as the neoliberal instrumentalization of higher education and its devastating impact on our work (Schmenk et al, 2018). We face pressure to frame language learning in ways that urgently and uncritically prioritize its marketability (i.e., in language courses, programs, language learning as a worthwhile endeavor in general), stand in defense of it and all people who language (i.e., against the reduction or removal of foreign language requirements, the shuttering of language courses, programs, and departments), and/or commodify language expertise or skill (i.e., in job interviews, institutions, districts). This panel responds to these pressures by moving beyond historicizing and contextualizing common discourses about language education and actively countering them. The panelists are a diverse group of scholar-practitioners working in a range of career and professional positions, institutions, and countries.

Coss, Cinaglia, and Violin-Wigent note that in reports of declining world language enrollments, benefit is usually defined narrowly by highlighting career prospects (ACTFL, 2019) and other material benefits (Lanvers, 2024). When language study is framed as supporting non-material benefits, these goals may not be transparent to students, reflecting reported perceptions of instrumental rationales, irrelevance to students’ lives, and ineptitude for language learning (Coss, 2023; Coss et al in preparation). To counter these discourses, they began an initiative to reframe how students perceive what they learn from early stage L2 study. In a quasi-experimental study, 50% (n=125) of students in French courses completed a series of awareness-raising structured reflection activities. Based on convergent mixed-methods evidence of clear differences in the experimental and control groups’ reflections, survey responses, and enrollment decisions, they argue that even “basic”-level L2 learning can and must be reframed to students beyond merely linguistic or “individual material” benefits (Lanvers, 2024) to counter discourses of instrumentalism, ineptitude, and irrelevance. Furthermore, they found that systematically raising students’ awareness of their developments beyond L2 proficiency resulted in documentable shifts in their plans and ideas about diverse benefits of L2 learning.

Schmenk scrutinizes tensions arising from the conflicting demands on language teachers, focusing on care and surveillance, the incommensurability of which poses enormous challenges for educators. Using the adoption of reflective writing tasks in language teaching as an example, she illustrates this incommensurability and explores ways to address the tensions teachers face. Reflective writing tasks are widely seen as a staple of learner-centered teaching because they aim to engage students and make language learning personally meaningful. However, while most teachers’ intentions come from a place of care, the fact that students are asked to share their reflections on their learning or materials opens up possibilities for surveillance. The conflict between care and surveillance can be linked to what Ian Hunter (1994, p. 175) has described as the “hybrid pastoral-bureaucratic terrain of the school-system", a terrain that is particularly salient where boundaries between schooling and life are blurred. As appealing as this blurring may be to educators who wish to pursue a pedagogy of care and facilitate meaningful language learning experiences, it inadvertently leads to an expansion of the pedagogical gaze. While reflective writing tasks may subvert the order of the language classroom, they also expose students to the pedagogical gaze in ways that gives teachers (and possibly others) access to a fairly sophisticated surveillance system and places students under the scrutiny of well-intentioned pedagogues.

Warner proposes hope and hospitality as guiding concepts for reframing discussions of the value of language learning and the capacities developed in language and culture learning. Drawing from work in affect theory, she takes hope as a disposition towards the future as something that is yet-to-be-determined (e.g., Ahmed; Zournazi), and hospitality, and more specifically linguistic hospitality (Ricouer), as the potential role that welcoming others' language/languaging into one’s own might have in shaping what is to come. Drawing from her experiences as language program director, language center director, and associate dean—all positions where one is held accountable to quantifiable measures of impact—she outlines what hope and hospitality might mean for a public discourse around languages focused on potentiality instead of return on investment, and acknowledges the complexity of students’ futurities.