Raciolinguistic Dystopias and Utopias: Centering Latina/o Bilingual Teacher Candidates’ Negotiation of Raciolinguistic Ideologies

• In Event: Engaging With Raciolinguistic Ideologies Through Transformative Pedagogies

Abstract

Daniels and Varghese (2020) called for centering how Latina/o teacher candidates’ (TCs) experience language and race in relation to one another. As bilingual teacher educators, we have witnessed TCs’ grappling with these ideologies and address this issue in our teaching and research. We have also experienced how these critical explorations leave us feeling hopeless. Here, we use notions of utopia (Stroud & Kerfoot, 2021) to examine TCs’ imagining of raciolinguistic utopias. Raciolinguistic utopias consist of the conditions of possibility that are not yet realized but emerge from racialized individuals’ disruptive linguistic practices and their reconfiguration of racializing identities. We argue that we should frame bilingual teacher education programs as sites for the co-creation of such utopias.

Authors

• Cristhian Fallas Escobar, University of Texas - San Antonio

• Lucila D. Ek, University of Texas - San Antonio

• Kathryn I. Henderson, University of Texas - San Antonio