Reimagining ESOL/ESL workforce as a Space for Inclusivity, Equality and Social Justic

• In Event: Language, Technology, and Cross-Cultural Competence for Inclusive, Equitable, and Peace-Oriented Education

Proposal

In an era marked by increasing superdiversity- a condition where multiple languages, ethnicities, and migration trajectories converge in a single workplace due to intersecting global challenges, workplace learning occupies a critical and transformative juncture. For English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) or English as a Second Language (ESL), particularly those entering lower-cadre roles in sectors such as hospitality and the culinary industries, the challenges are compounded not only by limited proficiency in English but, in some instances, by minimal literacy skills even in their native languages. To foster the ideals of social inclusion, equity, economic mobility and peaceful coexistence, institutions serving ESOL workers must offer services that are cognizant of linguistic heterogeneity and pedagogically attuned to ESOL employees specific learning needs. Nevertheless, workforce training and other services in the Global North remain entrenched in colonial legacies and capitalist production logics- frameworks that overlook diverse non-western knowledge systems and ESOL learners' experiences.

This applied research paper details the steps taken by the Culinary Career Ladder (CCL) Project to ensure equal job opportunities for ESOL workers at a University in New England, with the broader goal of advancing social inclusion, promoting equality, and fostering redistributive justice. We are a group of reflexive practitioners committed to leveraging the affordances of technology to overcome historical barriers to employee promotability, career mobility and personal growth. Comprised of professionals representing diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, our team endeavors to sustain a critical self-awareness of individual biases and systemic institutional constraints. We seek to advance equitable and inclusive professional learning opportunities in a fast-paced, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous environment—where ESOL employees constitute the majority (76%), with 22 languages spoken in the workplace.

We recognize the workplace where people come to being as they engage in dialogue and respond to inherent power structures of inequality and forms of subordination enmeshed in institutional frameworks. In tandem with the CIES 2026 call to “re-examine peace and education in a divided world”, we reconceptualize training in ESOL environments as a space for disrupting and reimagining employee training. We define lack of access to information as information poverty. As a result, we re-examine workplace education through the lenses of redistributive justice and equitable access to information, training, promotability and ultimately the achievement of personal and career goals.

We deconstruct the taken-for-granted assumptions about the utility of digital learning in general, and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) translation tools in offering opportunities to expand access to training and dismantle racialized barriers. We critically interrogate the paradoxical role of AI-powered translation tools, both as enablers and impediments in the pursuit of just and equitable workplace learning environments. We posit that while AI translation tools can be especially useful in rendering learning texts in native languages, they tend to carry the dual risk of perpetuating inequities through biases, distortions, and the erasure of marginalized. We acknowledge, as Benjamin (2019) observes that there is need to “decode the promises of tech with historically and sociologically informed skepticism” (7).

Based on our work that centers multilingualism and builds on the Freirean concept of student experience1, we highlight the social imperatives of equitable access to information, training, and digital education. We perceive equitable access to workplace learning as a ladder towards the achievement of redistributive justice and peaceful coexistence in the workplace (Freire, P. (2000). We problematize the epistemic hierarchy that privileges western knowledge at the exclusion of nonwestern knowledge systems. As a result, we argue for multimodal, platform-based approaches that move beyond the hegemony of written literary texts and embrace diverse epistemologies that have been historically expunged from the canon of knowledge. By leveraging digital tools that bypass traditional western-centric barriers to learning, we demonstrate how carefully planned ESOL workplace learning can empower learners with lower levels of literacy to realize suppressed workplace potential, thereby reframing the AI landscape not merely as a technical tool but as a critical site of struggle where justice can be found and re-affirmed. Drawing on Foucault's Language and Power framework, we re-examine how existing AI systems reproduce structural exclusions2 (Foucault, M. (2010). We contrast these with what can be achieved by leveraging emerging efforts in critical computational linguistics to design more equitable translation interventions as we have done in our AI for Multilingual Workforce Development platform, developed in collaboration with the Computer Science department at the University of Massachusetts.

Authors

• Martina Achieng Amoth, The University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Nangyalai Attal, UMass Amherst