Sustaining and developing teachers’ dynamic bilingualism in a re-designed bilingual teacher preparation program

“I Can Write in My Language and Switch Back and Forth?”: Elementary Teacher Candidates Experiencing and Enacting Translanguaging Pedagogies in a Literacy Methods Course

“…These tensions call attention to implications for future research, including scholarship that takes an explicitly critical approach to translanguaging in teacher education, engaging candidates in meaningful discussion of the larger systems that perpetuate monolingualism. Collins et al (2019) provide an important example of this through their exploration of raciolinguistic ideologies with bilingual candidates; we also believe that TCs being prepared for English-medium placements need to deeply understand the intersections between race and language. Additionally, we believe that there is a need for research that follows TCs into their first years in the classroom, examining how they enact the translanguaging pedagogies they have explored as preservice teachers and how their contexts shape the stances they assume and the designs they employ in their own classrooms.…”

“…Building on this work, Collins et al (2019) brought frameworks of translanguaging and raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015) to bilingual teacher preparation. By offering courses almost entirely in Spanish, constructing assignments that asked TCs to reflect on their racial and linguistic histories, and creating opportunities for TCs to teach field-based lessons in Spanish, Collins and colleagues provided TCs with examples of translanguaging pedagogies in action.…”

“…They found that experiencing translanguaging pedagogies helped TCs feel confident in their use of Spanish, understand translanguaging as a transformative practice, and more deeply recognize how language and race are intertwined in bilingual education. Ultimately, studies like Collins et al’s (2019) and Musanti and Rodriguez’s (2017) shed light on the promise of translanguaging pedagogies to disrupt the dominance of English monolingualism and whiteness in bilingual teacher education. Because they were conducted with TCs preparing for roles as bilingual educators, these studies also raise questions about the possibility of translanguaging pedagogies for TCs preparing to work in English-medium settings.…”

“…In this study, we build on Collins et al (2019) and Musanti and Rodriguez’s (2017) work by bringing translanguaging pedagogies into a literacy methods course focused on the preparation of both English-medium and dual-language educators. While experiencing translanguaging pedagogies is undoubtedly important for bilingual TCs preparing to be dual-language teachers, we also believe that such work is critical for English-medium TCs, who can and should teach in ways that value their students’ communicative resources.…”

“…We developed class activities and policies through the lenses of translanguaging stance , design , and shifts (García et al, 2016) and modeled translanguaging pedagogies in the hopes that TCs might feel empowered to enact them in their own elementary school classrooms. Through this work, we sought to respond to Collins et al’s (2019) call for “liberating and boundary pushing instruction at our institutions so as to demonstrate how schooling can recognize and incorporate students’ experiences, identities, and linguistic practices” (p. 4). We also sought to highlight the potential of bringing translanguaging pedagogies into the preparation of dual-language and English-medium literacy teachers alike.…”