Search

I examine how three elementary-level preservice teachers of Color cultivated their asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogical learning and identities through multilayered community-engaged tasks. Systemic and structured support from multiple stakeholders played a critical role in helping the preservice teachers of Color to promote and sustain their asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogical learning and identities. This study demonstrates that giving students tasks with multiple modalities (e.g., individual and collaborative work, face-to-face meetings, online reflections) can cultivate their pedagogical learning and identity construction. This work has implications for creating asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogical spaces in both the classroom and the field.

Critically conscious care theories provide a framework for teacher candidates to name, analyze, and challenge structural injustice within and beyond the classroom during their teacher education. To support teacher candidates' enactment of such a critically conscious praxis in the postpandemic era, teacher educators must understand how teacher candidates during the COVID-19 pandemic adopted, appropriated, or resisted discourses of care that may enable or limit how they become critically caring teachers. This study examines how three elementary teacher candidates during the COVID-19 pandemic (co)constructed and (re) negotiated their identities as critically caring teachers through collaborative and individual body mapping exercises during online asynchronous coursework in the southeastern United States. The way that the participants drew and narrated their mapped bodies shows that participants positioned themselves in multiple, evolving, and sometimes conflicting ways in relation to the discourses of care across their education and work contexts and professional relationships. This study contributes to teacher education scholarship by shedding light on the affordances and challenges that discursive and semiotic tools like body mapping pose for teacher educators, who need to scaffold teacher candidates' understanding of care and rehearse pedagogical possibilities during emerging crises like the COVID-19 pandemic., Introduction The way that teachers practice care affects their students' academic performance and affects their students' trust in them (Noddings, 2012). For teachers to reach their full potential as caring [...]

Informed by the embodied perspective on humanizing pedagogy, this study examines how one Afro-Puerto Rican and one African American teacher candidate explored humanizing pedagogical possibilities during their urban fieldwork through multimodal counternarratives. By telling counter-stories through drawing bodies and mapping pedagogical spaces, participants used their embodied knowledge and experience as reference points to identify, question, and resist the inscription of body discourses--steeped in hegemonic power, structural racism, and educational inequities--onto their bodies. In particular, multimodal counter-storytelling opened up a visceral yet empowering space for participants to consider the challenges and possibilities of embodying humanizing pedagogies in the classroom. This study calls for programmatic attention to providing opportunities for teacher candidates of Color to rehearse and embody humanizing pedagogical possibilities, and for various stakeholders to collectively engage in counter-storytelling to resist oppressive body discourses surrounding urban schooling communities.

This year-long multiple case study examines how three elementary-level ESL teachers understood their advocacy for emerging bilinguals, what tensions arose during their advocacy, and how they dealt with those tensions. Interviews, teaching artefacts, and observations were analyzed using a theoretical model informed by third space theory and existing research on teachers' critically conscious advocacy. The way that these teachers conceptualized their advocacy (i.e. non-critical, critically emerging, and critically conscious) was tied to the tensions that they encountered as advocates (i.e. advocacy as core versus marginal ideas; advocacy beliefs versus actions; ideological alignment versus misalignment). Teacher participants often dealt with tensions by engaging with stakeholders in third spaces, which are hybrid zones between formal and informal spaces of social interactions. Some of the actions that teacher participants took within third spaces included co-constructing new cultural knowledge with emerging bilinguals' families; building bridges between the school and their students' communities; and reimagining alternative practices. This study shows that third spaces can help teachers and stakeholders to jointly identify tensions stemming from divergent goals and help them to collaborate in advocating for emerging bilinguals.

In order to create equitable and inclusive educational experiences, preservice teachers need to learn how to exercise their critical thinking to make critical pedagogy a part of their practice. However, preservice teachers often encounter dilemmatic tensions when they attempt to experiment with and enact critical pedagogical thinking during their practicum. Informed by the concept of dilemmatic spaces, this study examined the processes by which six preservice teachers identified and responded to dilemmatic tensions as they worked to understand and practice critical pedagogical thinking across three practicum spaces: a community inquiry project, onsite coursework, and classroom teaching. The findings reveal that preservice teachers often use one (or several) of three tactics to respond to dilemmatic tensions in engaging in critical pedagogical thinking and practice within and across these practicum spaces: (a) wait and see; (b) improvise and see; and (c) implement and see. The participants thus negotiated the emergent tensions and dilemmas across practicum contexts and professional relationships in varying ways, and with differing degrees of success. This study argues for explicit attention to dilemmatic tensions in practicum to better support preservice teachers' critical pedagogical thinking-practice within and against the spatial, interactional, and contextual complexities of practicum.

Teacher educators need to thoroughly understand of teacher candidates' (TCs) experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to support TCs' development and practice of care in the post-pandemic era. Here, I examine how TCs identified body discourses, and examine how those TCs understood and enacted critically oriented caring practices during the pandemic in online asynchronous courses in the Southeastern U.S. I used body mapping as a pedagogical tool for TCs to identify, critically reflect on, and respond to body discourses that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic in their process of understanding and enacting caring practices. I find that TCs conceptualized their care toward students, families, and colleagues in three overlapping yet distinct ways: (a) care as a motherly presence; (b) care as relational work; and (c) care as the promotion of critical consciousness. This study contributes to current teacher education scholarship by showing that a deeper understanding of TC's embodied experiences is critical for supporting TCs' understanding and practice of care. In addition, this work highlights how body mapping activities can be used in practice, in order to scaffold teachers' critically oriented care work.

This study investigates how an elementary-level content classroom teacher and an elementary-level ESL teacher in a metropolitan region in Massachusetts negotiated teachers' identities and identity dissonances in teachers' attempt to advocate for emergent bilinguals. Using critical discourse analysis of qualitative data, this study examines the cognitive, emotional and social dimensions of teacher advocacy identity negotiations. Furthermore, the current study illuminates two teachers' different ways of negotiating with advocacy identity dissonances, dependent on teachers' sense of agency and affordances in their social identity positionings and working contexts. The findings point to the importance of using teachers' identity dissonances as a tool to develop teachers' agency and enact advocacy actions. Specific suggestions are made for preparation and professional development of teachers of emergent bilinguals in the fields of language teacher education and teacher education in general.

Despite pedagogical efforts to promote preservice teachers' racial literacy, preservice teachers may resist critical racial pedagogies. Such resistance has serious, detrimental consequences in classrooms populated with students of Color. To study how interracial groups of preservice teachers (PSTs) engage with issues of race outside of their coursework and fieldwork, I investigated preservice teachers' engagement with race in discussing Claudia Rankine's "Citizen" in an informal online space. The preservice teachers were embedded in an urban emergent elementary school in a predominantly African-American community in the Southeastern U.S. I asked: (1) how do PSTs use their racial literacy in an online critical inquiry community? (2) how might we understand the possibilities and constraints of PSTs' practice of racial literacy? I found that some students continued to see issues of race and racism as an intellectual rather than a lived problem. Other students wrestled with their lived experiences of racism and those shared by their peers in response to their text. This work provides insight into how informal online spaces and small storytelling can be used to teach racial literacy, understand resistance, and implement antiracist action within teacher education.

AbstractScholarship on translanguaging has increasingly called for preparing content-area teacher candidates to understand and practice translanguaging during teacher education. However, few studies have taken up a decolonial perspective on translanguaging to examine how ­content-area bilingual teacher candidates of color (BTCCs) use their embodied memories vis-à-vis translanguaging as pedagogic resources for re-centering the humanity, livelihood, and dignity of translanguaging bodies of their own and their bi-/multilingual students in ­content-area classrooms. By combining the decolonial view of trans­lang­uaging with memory work, the purpose of this study is to unsettle and shift the disembodied discourse in research on pedagogical translanguaging in teacher education. By drawing on year-long data gathered from written and visual reflections and oral interviews, this study examines how two content-area BTCCs (i.e. Latinx and Asian American women) learned to become and act as translanguaging pedagogues through excavating, making sense of, and reconfiguring their memories of translanguaging during their teacher education. Guided by decolonial lenses of translanguaging and embodied memories, this study provides insights into how BTCCs’ pedagogical translanguaging can be embodied and transformed through their memory work in content-area classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars, activists, and communities strive for educational equity and justice for emergent bilinguals. The pursuit of advocacy, however, is often fraught with emotional tension, leading many teachers to question their identities as advocates. Relatively few studies have focused on language teachers of color, and on how they navigate their emotions as they construct their identity as advocates -- even though teachers of color are disproportionately called upon to act as advocates. By drawing attention to discursive and emotional aspects of identity positionings related to raciolinguistic ideologies, this study shows how one Latinx teacher's emotions shaped her identity as an advocate in support of emergent bilinguals. The participant, an experienced elementary ESL teacher, constructed her identity as an advocate in her striving to address issues of equity and social justice during a period of shifting language policy in Massachusetts. The analysis reveals that she variously adopted, appropriated, or resisted normative discourses around advocating for emergent bilinguals and power relations over her career, and over the changing education policy context. This study is a step toward giving minoritized language teachers greater institutional support in their pursuit of advocacy work, by focusing on their emotions and identities.

When teacher candidates learn to teach for equity and social justice during their practicum, they must learn to deal with the emotional conflict and tension that arise from fraught racial dynamics. Because limited research has focused on teacher candidates of Color during their practicum, little is known about how they agentively navigate conflicting emotions vis-à-vis the racial power dynamics at their field placement. Informed by critical race theory and its conceptualization of emotion work and capital, in this study, I examined what types of emotional tensions one Latinx and two African American teacher candidates experienced during their practicum. I drew on counter-narrative methodology and used written reflection, interview, and field note data for the analysis. The participants often drew on their community cultural wealth--the knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed and utilized by communities of Color to survive and resist macroscale and microscale forms of oppression--to navigate conflicting and contradictory emotional norms that governed how participants ought to behave and feel at their field placement. In this article, I argue for explicit attention to the power-laden emotion work of teacher candidates of Color in their access to and embodiment of community cultural wealth during teacher education.

This study examines how a white language teacher's understanding of race affected her teaching practice in an urban elementary language classroom with predominantly Cape Verdean immigrant students. The teacher relied on her experiences teaching English in Namibia and her experiences learning Spanish in the United States and Afrikaans in Namibia to ground her practice, which focused on cultural difference and standard English language teaching without specific reference to race in the context of the United States. I adopt the theory of LangCrit, an intersection between Critical Race Theory, Critical Language Studies, and Positioning Theory, to first demonstrate that the teacher's justifications of her teaching practices were contradictory and conflicting, and in fact shows how, despite her good intentions, whiteness is imposed, assumed, or negotiated in the context of urban language classrooms. Based on these findings, I suggest possibilities for and constraints on using critical theory-oriented praxis in the classroom grounded in teachers' personal experiences to help teachers interrogate and disrupt whiteness in language classrooms. Without greater support from critically-oriented urban teacher educators, many white teachers with the best of intentions will continue to struggle in their search for culturally responsive and empowering pedagogies for immigrant English learners of color in urban school settings.

This literature review reports findings from 19 empirical studies on the experiences of African American teachers in PK-12 desegregated schools. The research questions were: What do we know about the experiences of African American teachers in desegregated PK-12 schools? What are the challenges African American teachers experience in desegregated PK-12 schools? In response to these questions, the article first discusses school desegregation after the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision and its impact on African American teachers as a historical backdrop. Findings from 19 studies were analyzed through grounded theory. Two core themes were identified from our findings: persistent structural challenges and new challenges since "Brown." Subthemes, such as intercultural conflicts, teacher experience as a social construct, and a gap in research, were also identified. These themes were discussed in comparison to challenges of African American teachers during the process of school desegregation after the "Brown" decision.

This study examines how an ethnic Korean teacher candidate's professional disposition and teaching in an elementary mainstream classroom were influenced by her identity variables at the intersection of privilege and marginalization. The findings demonstrate the participant's identity negotiation through her past ethnolinguistic histories in China and current teacher preparation contexts in the United States. Despite her positive professional disposition for English-language learners, the participant faced inner tensions regarding her social class at a high-poverty urban school. Further, the participant encountered contextual tensions between the English-only approach and her desires in enacting her and students' plurilingual identity as resources. The findings point to the importance of supporting plurilingual teachers' teaching to recognize and cultivate the plurilingualism in English-only mainstream classrooms. Further research is needed to contextualize the intersectionality of plurilingual teacher identity with language learning and teaching, as a theory and methodology.

This study uses Bakhtin's theory of dialogism to examine how two preservice teachers of Color conceptualized and implemented culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy (CR/SP) during their practicum. The participants' development and practice of CR/SP were contingent on their lived experiences, appropriation of CR/SP, dialogic negotiations with multiple stakeholders, and critical engagement with circulating authoritative discourses during their fieldwork. By considering how preservice teachers of Color dialogically engage with CR/SP in the field, teacher educators can design field experiences that better prepare culturally responsive preservice teachers of Color.

This study examines how primary-level preservice teachers (PSTs) in an online asynchronous course (co-)constructed and (re)negotiated their professional identities through the use of metaphors in online asynchronous courses in the U.S. By using metaphors and narrating their lived experiences in relation to their chosen metaphors, participants expressed their desired and feared identities. Their metaphorical expression of identities reflects the complex interplay between participants' construction of their possible selves within the temporal, social, and spatial context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual and collaborative metaphor-based reflections provided a reflective space for PSTs to explore professional becoming and future possibilities at the interface between their sense of agency and their situated temporal, spatial, and social context, even within asynchronous online teacher education courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational teacher educators, who cross national, social, and cultural boundaries to prepare teachers, play a vital role in nurturing teachers' awareness and appreciation of learner diversity. However, transnational teacher educators tend to encounter tremendous challenges in developing their professional identities. To date, though many studies have investigated how teachers and teacher educators in general develop their professional identities, scant attention has been paid to that complex process of "transnational" teacher educators. To begin to close this research gap, this collaborative autoethnographic study examines how we develop our teacher educator identities through teaching a diversity course in the United States as transnational teacher educators from China and South Korea. The findings reveal that our transnational backgrounds (e.g., speaking English as a second language and holding particular cultural beliefs) initially challenged our identity development, but our continuous teaching and learning within a supportive institutional context turned the marginality of our transnational backgrounds into professional assets. The research findings can extend our understanding of teacher educators' identity development. The study also suggests practical implications for teacher education programs to create an inclusive and supportive professional community in which all teacher educators may grow.

This case study examines a Chinese and Korean-Chinese pre-service teachers' perceptions of their mentor teachers' role in supporting inclusive practicum experiences in USA elementary school contexts. The findings demonstrate that a mentor teacher's open conversations and willingness to host those students bring positive influence on their learning and growth. The findings also indicate that the facilitative roles of mentor teachers in the promotion of inclusive environments are intersected with the socio-cultural and political contexts of practicum schools and universities. The study concludes with implications for enhancing the inclusion of diverse pre-service teachers through collaborative roles of multiple practicum stakeholders, including pre-service teachers, mentor teachers, practicum schools, and universities.

Being a good teacher depends on many cultural and linguistic assumptions. Dominant definitions of a good teacher are often based on these implicit assumptions. Probing notions of a good teacher, we examine the endeavors of a Chinese international pre-service teacher, Ling, to become a "good teacher" through her encounters with micro-aggression in the context of her coursework and fieldwork at a U.S. university. The data presented here were collected through semi-structured interviews and field notes from 2014 to 2015 as part of a larger ethnographic case study. We find that the process of becoming a good teacher depends on many cultural and linguistic assumptions that are linked to micro-aggression. We conclude by reflecting on Ling's understanding of a good teacher in light of dominant views on the matter and her ambivalence to speak up, and make recommendations for further research to allow for alternative views of good teachers to coexist.

When Spivak (1988/2010) provocatively raised the question "Can the subaltern speak?" and concluded that they cannot, she did not mean that the subaltern literally or physically cannot speak. She meant that Western/Eurocentric/White ways of knowing and languaging produce colonial, epistemic violence that silences subaltern bodies. In this conceptual paper, I pose a related question: "Can subaltern, multilingual and multidialectical bodies feel?" Little attention has been paid to understanding the affect of multilingual and multidialectical students during English Learning and Teaching (ELT). As a teacher educator/researcher positioned within ELT in the white settler context of the U.S., I reach a conclusion similar to that reached by Spivak. When dominant ELT research and practice rejects the languaging and affective experiences of multilingual and multidialectical students, those students are treated as subaltern bodies that cannot speak or feel. Here, I ask how subaltern, multilingual and multidialectical bodies can speak and feel in learning English. I argue that the (de)coloniality of affects must be a key conceptual framework for teaching English to multilingual and multidialectical students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]