Centering Race in Bilingual Teacher Education

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Interrogating Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on Racial Equity for Multilinguals (Table 21)

Abstract

Theoretical Background
Although Texas has strong legislative support for bilingual education, the state has historically witnessed animosity toward the bilingualism, with Spanish speakers becoming the target of hostile institutional measures (Sánchez & Ek, 2009). The growth of bilingual education triggered fears among white English-monolingual Americans, and in the 1980s and 1990s bilingual education again came under attack (San Miguel, 2013). Today, the state and the entire United States are facing the return of anti-bilingual education efforts and the dismissal of decades of research documenting the affordances of bilingualism. Current bilingual education programs sit upon this complicated history and continue to be plagued with deficit perspectives that shape Latinx youths’ views of their linguistic practices.
Given the above, it is unsurprising that Latina/o teacher candidates (TCs) at Texas universities start their bilingual teacher education having suffered linguistic discrimination. One tool used to engage TCs in reflecting on these experiences is language portraits. Rooted in the notion of language as repertoire, language portraits are visual representations where TCs depict their language practices, with attention to where and with whom they employ them. As a teacher learning tool, language portraits elucidate the opportunities and obstacles TCs have faced as racialized speakers. However, in the context of the United States, refusal to acknowledge racism may limit TCs’ opportunities to unpack and address experiences with linguistic discrimination. The above calls for teacher educators to double down on their efforts to center race as an axis of differentiation shaping life for people of color in the United States.

Objectives, Methods, and Data Sources
With the above in mind, we drew on Rosa and Flores’s (2017) raciolinguistic perspective to examine Latina/o bilingual TCs’ accounts of their experiences with raciolinguistic ideologies. The study draws from an ethnography conducted during the 2021-2022 academic year at a Hispanic-serving institution in Southwest Texas. Data included participant classroom observations, artifacts (i.e., language portraits TCs created for a class in their teacher education program), and individual semi-structured interviews. Using a deductive and inductive approach to thematic analysis, we aimed to inquire into: the ways TCs’ experiences of racialization showed up in their language portraits, and the semiotic elements that enabled them to depict their racialization. Our purpose was to envision ways race can be centered more in the implementation of language portraits as a teacher learning tool in bilingual teacher education.

Results and Significance
Findings demonstrate that TCs leveraged elements of time (past, present, future), space (home, school, work), and place (Mexico, south of the city) to describe their linguistic practices. Analysis of language portraits showed that what space/place TCs were referencing and whether they were describing a past/present/future event shaped TCs’ perception/description of their linguistic practices in connection to racialized identities. This suggests that TCs should be guided to focus on elements of time, space, and place in the creation/analysis of their language portraits, as part of enhancing their critical understanding of how they resist/acquiesce raciolinguistic ideologies in the process of forming their bilingual teacher identities.

Authors

• Cristhian Fallas Escobar, University of Texas - San Antonio

• Ryan W. Pontier, Florida International University