The Digital Transformation of an Online Multilingual Teacher Education Program

• In Event: Leadership, Digital Transformation, and Critical Media Literacy: Evaluating Educational Innovations Across Contexts

Proposal

Multilingual learners comprise about 10.6 percent, or 5.3 million students, in the United States public schools (NCES, 2024). With an increasing number of multilingual students in the United States public schools, teacher education programs are in need of transforming teacher education programs to effectively attract, train, and empower 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 provide another perspective on the efforts to revise and transform a multilingual teacher education program into an online teacher education program. Specifically, the presentation will explore how an American graduate school’s academic program digitally transformed its curriculum to be online while ensuring the program was effectively training future educators across the state to cultivate multilingual and multicultural classrooms in primary and secondary schools throughout diverse geographic regions. Therefore, this presentation will explore the guiding research questions of “How do teacher education programs effectively train prospective teachers in an online teaching program? What digital tools can support or digitally divide the implementation of an online 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, online delivery, and teacher supervision to address the contexts and constraints existing in an online teaching program. 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 the digitalization of a teacher education program that prepares teachers to teach in multilingual classrooms. The presentation will provide attendees with best teaching practices that include digital tools and devices for teaching and learning via online college courses. The presentation will conclude by providing lessons learned for developing and implementing online multilingual teacher education programs to train and empower educators to teach in a digital and multilingual world. As a result of the presentation, it is the objective that online teacher education programs around the world will learn from these experiences to further support the transformation of multilingual teacher education programs in our digital world.

Reference
U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES),
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2024, September). English Learners in Public Schools. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf

Author

• Joanna Koch, NC State University