"Disobeying Rules and Throwing Bricks": Generative Tensions on Academic Language Among Preservice Teachers

• In Event: Race, Language, and Resistance: Ideologies That Shape, (Re)Define, and Disrupt the Field of Teaching

Abstract

As part of a three-year study centered on Teachers of Color, this paper centers pre-service teachers (PSTs) as they discuss the concept of academic language in a virtual teacher education course. Scholarship on language ideologies and raciolinguistic ideologies offer interpretative lenses to show how PSTs reinforce or challenge appropriateness-based discourses (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Drawing from activity theory, we underscore how peers and educational research mediate collaborative teacher learning. Notably, one PST suggests youth adopt academic language to “dismantle it.” A week later, a shift occurs as the same teacher vocalizes how language hierarchies need to be dismantled. Inspired by activity theory, attention is placed on generative tensions as sites for learning as PSTs establish contradicting viewpoints.

Authors

• Elizabeth Castro, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Silvia Tovar, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author