Bilingualism in the Public Eye: A Dialogic Approach to Antiracist Teacher Preparation

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

Abstract

Research in teacher education has long established the need to develop content expertise (Ball et al., 2008) and the pedagogical expertise to teach the content (Shulman, 1986, 1987) in teacher preparation coursework. But teacher preparation has been a site of contention in a host of ways, in developing skilled and reflective practitioners for supporting culturally diverse learners, in preparing individuals to stay in teaching, and in supporting teacher candidates to implement the pedagogies they are learning about in their teacher preparation coursework (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016; Cochran-Smith et al., 2020; Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Goodlad, 1994; Sleeter & Owuor, 2011). Teacher candidates report experiencing a gap between the coursework they undertake in university settings and the instructional and assessment practices they see in schools and in the world (e.g., Cochran-Smith et al., 2020; Darling-Hammond, 2000; Kim & Green, 2013; Perrow, 2013). Teacher education that will shift teacher beliefs such that they will enact linguistically inclusive or antiracist or counter-hegemonic practices (e.g., Hawkins & Norton, 2009; Meskill, 2005; Settlage, 2011) must address this perceived gap and help teacher candidates see the relevance of the theoretical and pedagogical ideas from their classes as not only feasible in the classrooms they will come to inhabit, but as essential and vital to all students’ successes.
To do this, we aim to develop critical consciousness so that the teachers we prepare are able to recognize racism and linguicism and how it impacts their students' lives and the policies and programs where we teach. Critical consciousness grows out of theory developed by Paolo Freire (1970) and is currently defined as how people come to be able to understand and take action against systems of oppression in the world. Strong critical consciousness skills in adolescent students has been associated with a range of other positive socioemotional and academic outcomes (Chapman et al., 2020; Diemer & Li, 2011; Rapa et al., 2018; Seider et al., 2020). Additionally, the relationship between teacher critical consciousness development and diversity-focused teaching methods (such as social justice teaching) has been theorized and explored (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Styslinger et al., 2019). But given that many of the teachers who we work with are White and perceive themselves to be monolingual, reflecting the overall trend in the American teaching force (Irwin et al., 2022), teachers can have much to learn about their own experiences, typically as users of the dominant language of schools, the students they will teach, and the language practices of the communities within which their schools are situated. And in doing so, we have found it necessary to design reflective activities that connect the learning that takes place in our classrooms to the world of schools and communities outside our own classrooms. In this presentation we provide an overview of a critical dialogic, student centered activity that teacher educators can use in their work to prepare anti-racist language teachers and bridge the gap between university coursework and classroom experience.

Authors

• Christine Montecillo Leider, University of Massachusetts - Lowell

• Christina L. Dobbs, Boston University