With an ever-increasing multilingual student population in the United States, the teacher workforce remains White and monolingual, posing challenges for teacher educators to prepare teachers ready to embrace students’ linguistic and cultural resources and leverage them for learning. Furthermore, teachers feel unprepared to work with multilingual learners and to support their full linguistic repertoires due to a lack of emphasis on multilingual instruction in their methods courses and professional development opportunities. Therefore, this qualitative multiple case study explores how two teacher educators focused on the journeys of two White, monolingual, in-service teachers enrolled in a TESOL-oriented program that centered multilingual learners in their instruction during a community-based field experience. From this experience, the teachers scrutinized their beliefs and attitudes regarding schooling of multilingual learners, which ultimately led to raising questions about language, power, equity, and their role as educators. We collected multiple data sources: weekly reflections, action research project reports, teaching philosophy statements, and semi-structured interviews. We employed thematic analysis to uncover these themes in our study: recognizing complexity of student identity, leveraging student assets, raising critical consciousness with students, and questioning educational practices and balancing power. Our study contributes to the field of teacher education by exploring how these educators’ beliefs and actions were affected by equity-oriented coursework and the individualized tutoring of multilingual learners.

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Making Strides to Center Multilingual Learners: Fostering Equitable Pedagogies as Monolingual White Teachers

  • Ekaterina Koubek,
  • Stephanie Wasta

摘要

With an ever-increasing multilingual student population in the United States, the teacher workforce remains White and monolingual, posing challenges for teacher educators to prepare teachers ready to embrace students’ linguistic and cultural resources and leverage them for learning. Furthermore, teachers feel unprepared to work with multilingual learners and to support their full linguistic repertoires due to a lack of emphasis on multilingual instruction in their methods courses and professional development opportunities. Therefore, this qualitative multiple case study explores how two teacher educators focused on the journeys of two White, monolingual, in-service teachers enrolled in a TESOL-oriented program that centered multilingual learners in their instruction during a community-based field experience. From this experience, the teachers scrutinized their beliefs and attitudes regarding schooling of multilingual learners, which ultimately led to raising questions about language, power, equity, and their role as educators. We collected multiple data sources: weekly reflections, action research project reports, teaching philosophy statements, and semi-structured interviews. We employed thematic analysis to uncover these themes in our study: recognizing complexity of student identity, leveraging student assets, raising critical consciousness with students, and questioning educational practices and balancing power. Our study contributes to the field of teacher education by exploring how these educators’ beliefs and actions were affected by equity-oriented coursework and the individualized tutoring of multilingual learners.