Preparing Bilingual Teachers to Enact Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Bilingual students and teachers in the U.S. live in a context where linguistic and ethnic minorities are associated with inferiority. Preparing bilingual teachers of color without explicit attention to issues of race, language, and power would maintain and feed the vicious cycle of linguistic hegemony. With the goal of preparing critically conscious future bilingual teachers equipped to enact culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), the authors centered issues of race, language, and power alongside bilingual instructional methodology and theories of bilingualism in their respective bilingual teacher preparation programs. Drawing on bilingual teacher preparation course material, student reflections, and bilingual teacher candidate interviews, they illustrate how two bilingual teacher preparation programs take two distinct approaches to developing bilingual teachers' critical consciousness and CSP practices. In this way, they outline how bilingual teacher educators can prepare and support bilingual teachers to enact CSP with their K-12 students.

The Role of Language Ideologies in the Self-Efficacy of Pre-Service Bilingual Education Teachers

This chapter examines how language inequities within education are associated with perceptions of Spanish language self-efficacy in pre-service bilingual education teachers. The chapter delves into how language ideologies play a role in shaping disparities amongst bilingual education programs. The teacher shortages which exist within the field of bilingual education have assisted in the increased demands placed on bilingual pre- and in-service teachers. The programs created to instruct bilingual teachers have had to modify their design in order to meet the needs of future teachers. The needs are determined by the perceptions of each bilingual. Additionally, each bilingual chooses what skills are needed in order to use Spanish as a medium of instruction and, in some cases, to teach Spanish as a foreign language. Using a grounded theory, this study analyzed the cycle of language ideologies, self-efficacy, and language inequities. The results show that language ideologies have impacted the bilinguals' self-efficacy. Finally, it was determined that language inequality has played a key role in shaping language ideologies.

Always at the Bottom: Ideologies in Assessment of Emergent Bilinguals

Recent scholarship has identified how the reading assessment process can be improved by adapting to and accounting for emergent bilinguals’ multilingual resources. While this work provides guidance about how teachers can take this approach within their assessment practices, this article strengthens and builds on this scholarship by combining translanguaging and raciolinguistic lenses to examine the ideologies that circulate through assessment. By comparing interview data from English as a new language and dual-language bilingual teachers, we found that while reading assessments fail to capture the complexity of all emergent bilinguals’ reading abilities, they particularly marginalize emergent bilinguals of color. Thus, we expose the myths of neutrality and validity around reading assessment and demonstrate how they are linked to ideologies about race and language. We offer a critical translingual approach to professional learning that encourages teachers to grapple with these ideologies and shift toward a more critical implementation of reading assessments.

Impact of virtual vs. face-to-face learning on 21st-century skills among pre-service bilingual teachers

The so-called ‘twenty-first century skills’ (Dudeney, Hockly and Pegrum, 2014) have been identified as essential literacies for the young generation, who must use creativity and innovation, collaboration and teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, autonomy, flexibility and lifelong learning to function effectively. Bilingual pre-service teachers are entitled to develop these skills for both their own education and that of their future students (Savage and Barnett, 2015). This research will analyse the opinions of 45 bilingual pre-service teachers on the development of their twenty-first century skills through either online or face-to-face teaching. Quantitative and qualitative data will be scrutinized under a mixed-methods research, which will throw light on how participants think such skills are better developed. Findings will show that teacher students think that some of these skills are better developed under a face-to-face modality of learning (e.g. teamwork and collaboration), whereas others (e.g. autonomy and innovation) evolve better under an online framework of learning. Twenty-first century literacies push the educational boundaries of bilingual teachers as they are entitled to have a repertoire of communication skills that make us, teacher educators, pursue academic rigour regarding our own teaching and updated training.

¡Los policías! Latinx children’s agency in highly regulated early childhood contexts

This article shows how two Latina bilingual teachers provided opportunities for their Latinx students from immigrant families to enact their agency in a highly regulated Head Start bilingual preschool classroom in ways that aligned with culturally sustaining pedagogy. Using video-cued ethnography and data from the Blinded Study, the authors center three- and four-year-old children who engaged in a collaborative, dynamic make-believe game involving a struggle between family members and los policías (“the police”). Using traditional qualitative methods, the authors first identify and name all the different ways in which the children enacted their agency and demonstrated capabilities in their play, particularly the cultural capabilities that challenge deficit discourses about Latinx immigrant communities. They contextualize the children’s play using teacher interview data in which the teachers explained their thinking behind the pedagogical decisions that made this type of learning and play possible. Finally, the authors explore how the teachers’ identities and histories positioned them to engage with their students in culturally sustaining ways. It is argued that with the growing global awakening to white supremacy structures and violence, there is urgency in creating time and space to support young children’s agency and their right to practice the skills they need to contribute to their communities’ well-being and survival now and in the future.

Politeness in professional contexts: foreign-language teacher training

This paper examines the professional context of teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), whose first language is not English but who are required to help learners adhere to target-language (TL) politeness norms and practices. Many of these teachers have had little or no contact with TL countries/cultures and have limited professional training in this area. This paper highlights the specific context of 39 Mexican EFL teachers who reflected on their understandings and “teaching” of politeness. I argue that by employing existing resources and knowledge and with further training, bilingual teachers can be helped to take “possession” of politeness rather than having to unquestioningly teach appropriate, socially-accepted, socially-expected usage.