Racial Literacy Development of Preservice Teachers: Exploring Race, Culture, Language, and Privilege Through ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Coursework

• In Event: Preparing Antiracist ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Professionals: Creating Racially Just Educational Spaces for Multilingual Learners

Abstract

With increasing numbers of multilingual learners (MLs) in U.S. schools, the task of preparing teachers to teach students who are ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse has been an important focus of many teacher education programs across the United States. Teacher identity development during an early career period is a crucial area of investigation in this context. Several scholars in the field of second language teacher education have investigated how various intersections of teacher identity and positionality impact the way new teachers conceptualize their pedagogies while navigating complex issues they encounter in everyday classroom life, whether these issues are related to cultural adjustments or literacy development of their students (e.g., de Oliveira & Silva, 2013; Kayi-Aydar, 2015). While much scholarship is produced to train teachers that are attuned to ML students' needs, most of this research doesn’t center on the issue of race and its interrelation with language education.

Using a raciolinguistic framework (Flores & Rosa, 2015) to expand the borders of language teacher education and disrupt the color-blind teaching practices and language ideologies around MLs, we argue for the role of racially aware ESOL curriculum to increase pre-service teachers’ racial literacy. Aiming to untangle the early identity development of pre-service teachers, this multi-institutional study explores 38 pre-service ESOL teachers’ identity development in relation to how they perceived race and cultural relationships as they progressed in their foundational ESOL teacher training courses at two universities in the U.S.Through engaging teacher candidates in readings and assignments that pushed them to examine the dominant structures in place, race, class, gender, and power relations through which they are produced, this chapter discusses how preservice teachers studying to be ML teachers gain racial literacy through their coursework and uncovering their own identities as future teachers of racially diverse MLs.

Authors

• Rabia Hos, Southern Connecticut State University

• Lisya Seloni, Illinois State University