ABSTRACT
Classrooms are at the heart of the student experience at universities. When classrooms are inclusive and supportive, students and faculty feel more at ease to share and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. As instructors, fostering inclusivity and promoting diversity and equity can sometimes feel challenging in Romance languages, as many of these languages rely on binary systems (masculine/feminine). At the same time, historical entanglements with colonialism and imperialism loom in the background. Faced with these challenges, ergonomics, or the study of the interactions between human beings and their work environments, is used as a framework to build a methodology that outlines the step-by-step process for integrating ergonomic design thinking into curriculum design called Ergonomic Pedagogical Design Thinking (EPDT). By encouraging the use of postcolonial frameworks and advancements in user-centered technologies as strategies to provide more opportunities for multiple identities to find voice and support within our classroom communities, ergonomic pedagogy can provide a fluid, open model for transformative educational practices.
In this chapter, I demonstrate how blending human factors and ergonomics with pedagogy creates a supportive network of advancement. I am informed by engineering and the process of user-centered design (UCD) and user experience (UX), a process by which designers focus on the diverse needs of users throughout the design process of new technologies. In turn, UCD and usability engineering models the process by which educators can evaluate the context and use of a language in the classroom environment, specify requirements for that classroom to be successful, create educational design solutions, and evaluate outcomes to evaluate if practices used in the classroom have promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion while acknowledging the limits of the language and community efforts to develop more inclusive language in Romance language communities.
