Centering and Mobilizing Transnational Funds of Knowledge of Emergent Bilingual Children in a Social Studies Teacher Education Classroom (Poster 5)

• In Event: Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Social Studies: Research and Practice With and for Multilingual Youth

Abstract

U.S. schools today are more diverse than ever in terms of students’ races, ethnicities, religions, languages, and more. Emergent bilingual students are one of the fastest-growing student populations that increasingly diversify U.S. schools. As of 2019, there are 4.5 million emergent bilingual students that comprise 9.2% of the total student population in U.S. public schools (NCES, 2022). These emergent bilingual students speak more than one language other than English in their homes, and there are over 300 reported spoken languages among emergent bilingual students (US Census Bureau, 2015), including Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, and many more. According to the National Education Association (2020), emergent bilingual students will account for approximately 25% of the U.S. public school student population by 2025.
Despite the steady rise in the emergent bilingual student population that prompted the need for preparing future teachers for multilingual education (García & Kleyn, 2013), the vast majority of student teachers feel underprepared and overwhelmed to work with emergent bilingual students (Faltis & Valdés, 2016). In many cases, teacher certification programs are divided into disciplinary and content areas, providing a few opportunities for student teachers to learn across areas other than their own (García & Kleyn, 2013). Such policies and program structures contribute to student teachers’ mindset and beliefs where they position themselves as content area teachers, such as social studies teachers, who are not responsible for emergent bilingual students and their cultural and linguistic repertoires (Evan et al., 2005; García & Kleyn, 2013). Furthermore, the significance of recognizing and valuing the multilingual and transnational lives of emergent bilingual students is often untapped in teacher education (Kwon, 2022). Teacher preparation and professional development tend to emphasize emergent bilingual students’ language (English only) development, assuming that their multilingualism is “a problem that needs correction instead of an asset” (Osorio, 2020, p. 127).
In this paper, I share my teaching practices and examples in a teacher education program that employs asset-based approaches to emergent bilingual students in preparing social studies student teachers to work with these student populations. More specifically, informed by scholarship of transnational funds of knowledge (Author, 2022; Cuero, 2010; Dabach & Fones, 2016; Kwon et al., 2019; Sánchez, 2007), the paper provides vivid, rich, and detailed portraits of my teacher education class that help student teachers unpack their assumptions about emergent bilingual students and reimagine social studies classrooms as sites for centering and drawing upon emergent bilingual students’ multilingual transnational funds of knowledge. Given the limited attention paid to the intersection between multilingual education and social studies in the current teacher education context, this paper will offer curricular and pedagogical resources for many teacher educators, scholars, and current and prospective teachers who are dedicated to teaching emergent bilingual students in social studies education.

Author

• Yeji Kim, University of Missouri