Resumen en español

Educational practices are increasingly required to address the needs and promote quality and equitable learning environments for learners with different race, ethnicity, gender identities, religious and cultural backgrounds. Representation is key when our goal is to make all students feel included and catered for. Thus, in educational settings, materials become fundamental resources for our everyday endeavor. Ideally, English learning textbooks should be sensitive and inclusive to cultural diversity, and ensure representations that reflect multiculturality, especially in contexts like Colombia where factors such as gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and family backgrounds find a way in our classrooms. Because of this, students’ identity may be affected when they do not feel identified with the representations portrayed in English textbooks if they do not reflect traits or establish connections with students’ own culture. This study aimed to identify the way ELT textbooks used in different private schools from Montería represent diversity and the way representations are interconnected with students’ own context. To gather the data in this research project, three different textbooks from Cambridge publishing house were evaluated. The textbooks were analyzed in terms of race, gender, disability and cultural representations. Elements from content analysis were used to draw conclusions about the way diversity is portrayed and represented in these materials. Findings indicated that the representation of diversity in ELT textbooks is partially represented. English textbooks still hold stereotypes regarding whites dominance, afro-descendant engendered roles, Latinx and Asian stigmas, and ethnicity and disability invisibility.