Call for Papers
Pooling Open-Access Resources: Designing for Justice and Access
Diversity, Decolonization, and the French Curriculum (DDFC)
A Two-day Virtual Conference (Zoom)
November 8-9, 2024
Increasingly inclusive, representative, and accessible teaching resources are essential to a socially and pedagogically just learning environment. From traditional tools (textbooks, learning management systems) to new media, AI, and creative assessment design, the resources we use with our students shape not only their French learning experience, but also their sense of self and place in the classroom, and their imaginations of what is possible in the world. However, we may find ourselves in teaching situations where inclusive tools are not readily available, or even where harmful and exclusionary ones are imposed. Locating, assessing, and creating teaching resources can be a daunting and time-consuming process. These pressures are heightened in under-resourced institutions and for precarious and early career colleagues.
As we work toward a more just and collaborative version of our field, the DDFC invites participants in this year’s conference to reflect on the resources we use and make in our teaching, how these contribute to just and accessible learning environments, and how we can best mobilize our shared knowledge and connections to promote, create, and circulate resources. Focused on making these reflections into concrete materials, our goal is to build an open-access digital space in which to share resources made for or inspired by the conference. This share fair will establish guidelines that ensure contributors’ work is credited and official recognition from the DDFC will be provided where relevant, for job applications and tenure/promotion cases. Though this space will be generated after the conference, we encourage participants to prepare their proposals and contributions with a view to eventually producing these tools.
We encourage proposals for single papers (20 minutes), themed panels of three papers (60 minutes), round table discussions (60 minutes), reading groups or more practical or collaborative workshops (60 minutes). Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Mobilizing networks for sharing and co-creating resources
- Resisting non-inclusive materials imposed by our institutions
- Ungrading
- Incorporating diverse values and perspectives in our teaching tools
- Gender justice in French language teaching
- Economising our time and labor; when to make our own resources?
- Designing for disabled and neurodivergent students
- Assessing peer reviewed vs. open sourced resources
- Codesigning with our students
- Using non-traditional resources and media as teaching tools
- Designing accessible assessment
- Space as resource; rethinking our teaching environments
- Accessibility and online teaching
- Teaching resources in the age of AI
- Paywalls, textbooks, and economic barriers to resources
- Supporting graduate and early career teachers and under-resourced colleagues
Abstracts of 250 words (single papers) to 450 words (other formats) should be sent to ddfcemail@gmail.com by August 1, 2024. Selected contributors will be notified in September. In addition to your proposal, we ask that you submit the name of 3 to 5 references (including open-access resources) of your choice that resonate with our theme, ‘Pooling Open-Access Resources: Designing for Justice and Access’. These may but do not have to directly relate to your proposal. We will build a database to share with all participants during the conference.
This event is free and open to all. In lieu of conference fees, we encourage you to donate directly to your local organizations and mutual aid networks that support diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. We will provide a list of organizations/networks once conference registration opens.