A Race-Radical Vision in the Preparation of Critical Preservice Bilingual Teacher Candidates

• In Event: 70.065 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 70.065-9 - Revitalizing Race-Radicalism in Bilingual Education

Abstract

This paper describes the development and implementation of a “Grow Your Own” (GYO) pipeline at Sacramento State University aimed to prepare future race-radical bilingual educators. More specifically, this paper will address the need to transform how pre-service candidates are prepared via teacher preparation programs and to thoughtfully reorient power relationships in order to cultivate and harvest a new generation of Raza teachers that are highly qualified in their respective content areas, culturally competent, grounded in the issues of their local communities, and proponents of a social justice orientation (Valenzuela & Lopez, 2012).

The above stated goal for pre-service candidates is critical in counteracting the conservative agenda towards bilingualism/bilingual education that have promoted “the hegemony of English” as a way to maintain position of power (Macedo, Dendrinos, and Gounari, 2003). Thus, bilingual education has become an entity used to enforce this hegemony of language through a particular instructional delivery system in which the ultimate goal is to “…deny effective education to millions of immigrant children in their native language” (Macedo, Dendrinos, and Gounari, 2003p. 9).This type of imposition is a form of neocolonialism that strips children of various ethnicities from their own identity, language, and culture (Macedo,et al 2003).

To counter such “hegemony” this paper proposes that future bilingual teachers be prepared through programs that ground themselves on the premise that their goal is to foster race-radical teachers. To do so bilingual pre-service candidates should be immersed in a paradigm that demonstrates a strong sociocultural and sociopolitical foundations focus, and be provided with the competencies needed to work with diverse students, generally, and more specifically understand “the contemporary political economic contexts that shape the lives of bilingual students and their families, communities” (Darder & Torres, 2004) and themselves as bilingual teachers.

Sacramento State University is offered as an example of a teacher education program. that achieves these goals Specifically, the school has developed a GYO that focuses on a race-radical pedagogy that include the following: courses that includes an analysis of contemporary educational settings for evidence of and responses to racialization, social class, cultural and linguistic diversity/difference and gender bias/difference; explanation of ideas about the relationship between education, society, language and culture in the context of contemporary school settings; and the use of principles of critical pedagogy in the examination of curriculum, instruction, and assessment in contemporary educational settings in conjunction with their student teaching experience; a student teaching placement representative of the Latino/a community; and participation in a two-semester Participatory Action Research (PAR) component within the context of their subject matter at their identified student teaching school sites.

References

Darder, A., & Torres, R.D. (2004). After race: Racism after multiculturalism. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Macedo, D., Dendrinos, B., & Gounari, P. (2003). The hegemony of English. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Valenzuela, A., Lopez, P.D., & Casanova, U. (Eds). (2012) A critical pedagogy curriculum handbook for teachers of Latino/a youth in schools: A national Latino/a educational research and policy framework. Austin, TX: NLERAP.

Author

• Margarita I. Berta-Avila, California State University - Sacramento