Subverting the Electronic Language Textbook to Make it Relevant

The current article was inspired by two incongruous phenomena: the perception of the lack of gender sensitivity and inclusiveness in a particular language textbook and the coronavirus disease pandemic. As we went completely remote over the past 2.5 semesters, students were encouraged to address those issues via chat and voice modalities. If there is a silver lining to the tragic events of the past 15 months, it was that remote, synchronous discussion was vastly more participatory than in-class discussion with regard to those and other issues. I argue that, in designing our textbook-dependent courses, we can use such deficiencies to our advantage through some of the tools that many of us were introduced to during the pandemic.