Justice-Centered and Equity-Minded Multilingual Professional Learning Communities (PLCs): Asset-Based Elementary Teachers’ Identity Construction

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 5:25 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Navigating Tensions in Social Justice-Oriented Teacher Preparation: Multilingual Pedagogies, Critical Frameworks, and Antiracist Practices (Table 6)

Abstract

In this paper I examine the multilingual learning and discourse identity development of a self-selected group of teacher candidates (TCs) in a Professional Learning Community PLC). We draw on Bilingual Pedagogical Noticing (BPN) (Author, 2018), Translanguaging Pedagogy (García et al., 2017) and discourse identity construction ( Gee, 2000), with unique attention to raciolinguistics, as a way to study the relationship that exist between language, race and power (Alim, 2016). Thus I inquired into how intentionally planned multilingual pedagogies through PLCs made linguistically-just elementary science identity development possible for TCs. This work revealed that the multilingual PLC learning space supported ethnically diverse TC’s developed affirming, socio historically conscious, and scientific sensemaking identities for themselves and for their students.

Author

• Patricia E. Venegas-Weber, University of Washington