Empowering Multilingualism: The Revisioning of a Multilingual Teacher Education Program

• In Event: Education Policy and Improvement

Proposal

Multilingual teachers are significantly needed in primary and secondary schools throughout the United States. For instance, multilingual learners comprise about 10.3 percent or 5.0 million students in the United States public schools (NCES, 2023). The United States federal government implemented initial steps to attract multilingual teacher candidates and retain current teachers to meet the learning needs of multilingual learners, but will these efforts be enough? With an increasing number of multilingual students in the United States public schools, teacher education programs need revisioning to ensure the programs are effectively attracting, training, and empowering future multilingual educators. The COVID-19 global pandemic was a major force that intensified the teacher shortage, especially in attracting and retaining multilingual educators. This presentation will discuss the multilingual teacher shortage as it relates to defining it, explaining the impact of the pandemic on the multilingual teacher shortage, and evaluating proposed solutions to the multilingual teacher shortage at the federal, state, and local education levels. Additionally, this presentation will provide another perspective on the efforts to revitalize multilingual teacher education programs to be more culturally relevant and representational of our multilingual society in order to empower multilingualism. Specifically, the presentation will explore how an American graduate school’s academic program is being revitalized to ensure it is effectively training future educators to cultivate multilingual and multicultural classrooms in primary and secondary schools. The revisioning of the teacher education program is necessary to ensure it is modeling culturally relevant pedagogy and implementing asset-based practices that represent the multilingual student population. The presentation will explore the guiding research questions of “How do teacher education programs effectively train teachers to cultivate and empower multicultural classrooms? What forces can support or hinder the development of a multilingual education program?”. Within this presentation, a case study of a higher education institution in the United States will explain the revisioning of the graduate program’s name, curriculum, and delivery to address the contexts and constraints existing in both educational policies and practices of multilingual education, as well as the current recruitment conditions to attract prospective graduate students who will cultivate and empower multilingual classrooms. The presentation will showcase insights from a scholarly literature review, as well as apply a critical comparative perspective by assessing qualitative data from interviews, observations, and documents. The findings of the presentation will highlight the successes and challenges involved in actionable steps the teacher education program is taking to prepare its teacher candidates with high-quality courses and protest for equitable education opportunities for multilingual education. Further discussion will focus on increasing multilingual education as a form of empowerment by explaining curriculum changes as well as school-university partnerships. The presentation will conclude by providing another perspective on multilingual education models to ensure prospective teachers are prepared to thrive in multilingual and multicultural classrooms while students are being prepared to be multilingual citizens. As a result of the presentation, it is the hope that additional teacher education programs will be empowered to take future collective actions towards revisioning their teacher education programs.

Reference:
U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES),
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2023, May). English Learners in Public Schools. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf

Author

• Joanna Koch, NC State University