Imagining Decolonized Bilingual Education: Unlearning Whiteness in Teacher Education

• In Event: The Unbearable Whiteness of Teacher Education: Theorizing a Decolonizing Framework

Abstract

Bartolomé and Trueba (2000) highlight the importance of examining teacher candidate ideologies and political dispositions in teacher education programs. Inducted into white normativities of culture, language, and ways of knowing, teacher candidates require learning and unlearning within a decolonizing curriculum of language education that locates their pedagogies in opposition to these forces. Integrating emerging bilingual educator praxis within a hegemonically oppressive schooling construct mandates clear positioning of future teachers’ histories, cultural experiences, and language ideologies in anti-racist and anti-subtractive efforts (Bartolomé, 2004; Delgado Bernal, 2002; Villegas & Lucas, 2002; Yosso, 2005).

A decolonizing bilingual teacher education historicizes schooling within the colonial project (Spring, 2016). Collective investigations into the contemporary manifestation of colonial values in urban schools - sites of linguistic and cultural conflict - serve to deconstruct teacher candidates’ own assimilative experiences. The negotiation of personal, cultural, linguistic, and transnational histories complicates assumptions of schools as sites of benevolence and undermines deficit framings. As “anti-racist cultural workers [teachers must] actively challenge, or trouble, white benevolence” (Bebout, 2011, p. 15). In the world of urban bilingual education, the sites of this activism are multilingual classrooms.

Unpacking the “overwhelming presence of whiteness in teacher education” (Sleeter, 2001) helps emerging teachers develop a critical lens on their own internalized coloniality (Comas-Diaz, 2001). “Many Latino and bilingual teachers perceive the social order to be fair and just and thus see it as their role to assimilate their students into the school culture and to ways of speaking and being in the world” (Alfaro & Bartolome, 2017, p. 12). In relearning bilingual teaching as complex anti-racist work, emerging teachers decolonize classroom spaces through the deconstruction of whiteness - in language performance, classroom culture, and ethnic-studies curricula (Au et al, 2016. While all political deconstructions of previous beliefs can be classified as unlearning (Diller, 1999), anti-racist bilingual teacher education encompasses complex deconstructions of inherited colonial language ideologies. Bilingual teacher education must navigate simultaneous learning, relearning, and unlearning in multilingual/multicultural contexts - all within an anti-racist, critically-conscious, and additive framework (Valenzuela, 2002).

Authors

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Victoria F. Trinder, University of Illinois at Chicago