Negotiating a Futurity-Reality In-Betweenness: Extending Language Activism Through ESL Teacher Educators’ Curricular Remaking

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Dismantling Linguistic Racism Across Diverse Contexts (Table 35)

Abstract

Teacher education for multilingual learners is situated within the reality of a hierarchical sociolinguistic order where English monolingualism holds the high ground. García’s (2015) Language Activism envisions a futurity of education and of societies that is plurilingual, democratic. To shed light on how teacher educators can negotiate between this reality and futurity, I analyzed the curricular work of seven ESL teacher educators. My findings indicated that this group of doctoral-student teacher educators whose emerging scholar identities were informed by social, critical, and multilingual ‘turns’ in language teaching and learning scholarship, created spaces in their courses for Language Activism. I argue that their curricular remaking extended Language Activism through demonstrated meta-awareness of and negotiations with this sociolinguistic futurity-reality in-betweenness.

Author

• Mingzhu Deng, Georgetown University