Preparing bilingual teachers on the U.S./Mexico border: including the voices of emergent bilinguals

ABSTRACT

Language policies in the U.S., including matters relating to bilingual education, are tangled up with political tensions and ideology. All too often, the dialogue among educators and policymakers about what constitutes best practices for people learning English – for whom we will use the term emergent bilinguals (EBs) (Garcia, Kleifgen and Falchi 2008) – fails to include the voices of those they serve. The Rio Grande Valley (RGV) of South Texas provides a uniquely valuable laboratory in which to study bilingual education because of its location, demographic makeup, and migration patterns. In this study, a pedagogical intervention was made with a cohort of teacher candidates studying at a university in South Texas; the participants had themselves experienced bilingual education, as children, in RGV public schools. The implications of this study can be extended to teacher preparation for other minority communities receiving majority language instruction. The analysis based on transcripts of focus group discussions and asynchronous online discussions among 26 teacher candidates, of Mexican origin or descent, applies LatCrit theory and illustrates the development of a critical awareness of the hegemonic forces impacting the linguistic development of EB students such as themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• language ideologies
• teacher preparation
• emergent bilinguals
• LatCrit
• U.S./Mexico border

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alcione Negrão Ostorga is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, in the Department of Bilingual and Literacy. Her 39 years of experience as an educator includes teaching elementary and special education students, working as a co-founder of a dual language public school in New York City and 18 years as a teacher educator working with Latinx preservice teachers. Her research focus has been on the development of professional identities, reflective practices and teacher action research through the application of adult learning and sociocultural learning theories. She is also conducting research towards the development of a border pedagogy for teacher preparation.

Peter Farruggio was a co-principal investigator in the research presented in this article but is now retired from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where he was an associate professor of Bilingual education. Prior to his work at the university, his 25-year teaching career in k-12 education included work as a bilingual teacher, a teacher trainer, a community outreach coordinator, and a reading specialist in New York City and northern California. Before becoming an educator, he worked for 15 years in the West Coast Longshoremen's Union (ILWU), specializing in education and organizing projects in Latino immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay area.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by US Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition: [grant number T195N070232].