"Social Justice Work or Disservice Work for AAL Speakers?" Interrogating Bilingual Education Teacher Preparation Spaces

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging and Reimagining Racialized Spatialities Within and Across Bilingual Educational Settings

Abstract

Objective: Bilingual education has been criticized for the injustices imposed on African Americans and other language-minoritized students by several scholars (Flores, 2016; Valdés, 1997; Valdés, 2018). Additionally, critical scholars have also pointed to the myriad of ways in which dual-language education upholds the ideals of white supremacy through the continued cycle of underserving linguistically-minoritized students with language restrictive contexts and policies. This paper seeks to press “rewind” and address how we have underserved African American Language (AAL) speakers from the beginning, with insufficient preparation of bilingual education teachers in professional development and teacher preparation program spaces. Integrating insights from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Raciolinguistics, this paper explores how the structures of bilingual teacher preparation program spaces and district-level teacher training spaces operate to reinforce the cycle of excluding AAL from bilingual education.

Theoretical Frameworks: In this study, I problematize bilingual teacher preparation and in-service professional development spaces from two critical frameworks that ungird the study: CRT (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and Raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2016).

Methods: This presentation emerges from a 15-month ethnographic case study that takes place in an elementary school with a TWI bilingual program. Situated within a multilingual, multiethnic community in a Midwestern city, this school’s composition is predominantly students of Color, with almost half of the population being African American students. The data sources include observations and semi-structured interviews with DL teachers. Data was analyzed through an open coding process with a critical lens.

Results: The data demonstrate how bilingual teachers often feel underprepared to teach linguistically-minoritized students, specifically AAL speakers. At the university level, bilingual teacher education programs fail to address AAL speakers as bilinguals, resulting in courses that barely tap into the rich linguistic resources of AAL speakers and field experiences that limit pre-service teachers to serving in communities that do not adequately prepare DL teachers for the lived experiences of teaching AAL speakers. In addition, the data demonstrate that professional development sessions are also spaces of injustice for AAL, with short-lived trainings that oversimplify AAL to Mainstream English (ME), undergirded with pedagogical methods that are culturally irrelevant to African American communities.

Scholarly Significance of Work: While academic scholarship on AAL in bilingual education addresses how DL programs can be suppressive spaces for linguistically-minoritized youth, this paper extends the conversation to encourage us to take a look at the structure of bilingual teacher education and ongoing professional development. This works builds on the “cautionary note” that Valdés (1997) shared with us a few years ago when she described the marginalization of minoritized communities that dual-language programs continue to eradicate (Valdés, 2018). Additionally, this paper highlights how insufficient teacher preparation and district-level training sessions contribute to the injustice towards AAL speakers in DL program spaces and a call for progressive strides towards the inclusion of AAL in teacher preparation spaces is recommended.

Author

• Brittany Frieson, University of North Texas