The rationale for this panel is to build off of the “multilingual turn” (Conteh and Meier 2014; Ayres-Bennett and Fisher 2022) that has marked research in second language acquisition (Calafato 2024; Chumak-Horbatsch 2025), sociolinguistics (Ayres-Bennett and Fisher 2022; Octu-Grillman 2022), and literary studies (Jones 2022; Mende et al. 2023) in recent years. This panel contributes to this interdisciplinary movement, inviting us to interrogate our pedagogical practices and how they may reinforce the monolingual North American English-speaker as the default student profile. Courses designed around this profile have the effect of marginalizing students with non-English heritage languages or students who grew up speaking so-called non-standard Englishes (Flores and Rosa 2015). While this work is crucial, it can be difficult to know how to best teach multilingually. This panel provides concrete examples of teacher-scholars who are designing inclusive courses specifically with multilingual students in mind.
As presider and organizer, Cameron Flynn approaches this topic from the perspective of a language teacher. After noticing how heritage Spanish-speakers in his French courses had unique strengths and needs when approaching the French language, he designed a new course at UC Berkeley, titled “French for Speakers of Spanish or Other Romance Languages.” While French was the primary language of instruction, grammar explanations would sometimes incorporate Spanish and English, resulting in an often trilingual classroom environment. This experience led him to seek out others, such as the following panelists, who are similarly incorporating multilingualism in their teaching. Each panelist will have 15 minutes maximum to present their papers, leaving 20 minutes for discussion.
Providing a parallel perspective from the language classroom is Mary Rutemeyer, a Ph.D. candidate in German Studies at Michigan State University. Her paper, “Teaching Multilingually in Postsecondary German Classrooms: Learner and Educator Perspectives,” details her work on the linguistic backgrounds of students in German classes and how it informs their approach to learning German. While her research is ongoing, she finds that learners tend to have a wider range of linguistic experiences than US-based German language educators often assume, and that instructors of German tend to think of learners' languages in terms of only English and German. Her work calls for a more holistic understanding of the language student’s linguistic knowledge base and invites creativity from curriculum designers to make full use of it.
Taking us from the L+ classroom to the English writing classroom is Aili Pettersson Peeker, a lecturer in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program. Her paper, “Ignorance is Key: Multilingual Belonging in the Writing Classroom,” speaks to her experience as a non-native English speaker teaching writing at a Hispanic-serving institution where over 40% of the students are heritage Spanish-speakers. Using multilingual texts (broadly defined) such as Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (1987) and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?” (2010), she centers ignorance in her pedagogy. By confronting (mis)understandings as readers, she argues, students can better navigate and appreciate the perhaps incomprehensible aspects of their own writing, which is exactly what makes it unique, challenging, and worth reading.
Similarly incorporating and celebrating her students’ home languages is Reid Gómez, a member of the Navajo Nation and Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her paper, “A Dialogue Where No Voice is Done the Slightest Violence,” speaks to a pedagogy that she has developed in her courses that treats language as an archive to be explored in the classroom space. With an interest in Black English and Navlish, she encourages her students to make use of their native and heritage languages in their writing and invites multilingual discussions in the classroom. She is interested in what can be done in English and in English-language writing when native (as in, L1) English competency is decentered—no longer treated as the default.
Composed of both native and non-native English speakers, language learners and teachers alike, and advocates for indigenous and marginalized linguistic forms, including a speaker of Navajo English, this panel provides a crucially multilingual and diverse array of perspectives on “The Multilingual Classroom” that will inspire attendees in their own pedagogical work.