Calling for a Humanizing Turn in Language Teacher Education: Problematizing Content and Language Instruction

Abstract

Twenty‐five years ago, Freeman and Johnson positioned language teacher education (LTE) and practice as a socially learned and sociohistorically situated activity. Although this shift substantially broadened and contextualized our understanding of educator learning and practice, further substantive work is needed in LTE to offer an equitable experience for multilingual students, through more attention to the practices that teachers and teacher educators can leverage to support humanizing pedagogies. To date, humanizing pedagogies that are oriented toward advocacy and social justice have not been deeply woven into the pedagogical content knowledge expected of ESOL teachers of multilingual students. One area that is rich for further development is how we address content and language instruction in ESOL teacher preparation and practice, arguably considered the bedrock of their content knowledge. Drawing upon the call to offer opportunities for teachers to foster humanizing approaches to teaching and learning by connecting “ways of being” with “ways of doing” (Ladson‐Billings, 2008), in this conceptual paper, we question current tenets of preparing teachers to engage in content and language instruction, and argue that we need to find ways of preparing teachers for content and language instruction that support their enactment of humanizing pedagogy.