Caminos de convivencia: A comparative case study of bilingual pre-service teachers’ biliteracies development

ABSTRACT

In a bilingual teacher preparation milieu fraught with high stakes and little time to develop biliteracies in humanizing ways, the researchers engaged in a comparative case study of two types of bilingual pre-service teachers, a heritage bilingual and an initially Spanish-dominant bilingual, to explore how they grew in their biliteracies after the redesign of three bilingual teacher preparation courses. Focused on holistic biliteracies and a Latina/Chicana embodied pedagogies of care, the data collection including discussion posts, papers, lesson plans, surveys, and interviews over three years. Findings reveal the biliteracies development process (the many ways of making meaning in and between languages) for both students followed a camino of convivencia, a journey with incisive stages with guides that encouraged their biliteracies and bilingual identities. They were further marked by highs and lows in confidence, as they contrasted their own biliteracies with others. Importantly, they each connected their biliteracies journeys to those of their future students, which they envisioned as a legacy of courage. Taken together, this study adds nuance to how holistic biliteracies a can be intentionally and comprehensively developed for two typologies of language minoritized students in bilingual teacher preparation programs while also preparing them for bilingual teacher certification.

Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank Blanca Jurado, Ph.D. student at Texas Woman’s University, for her editorial contributions during the revisions of this work. We’d also like to dedicate this work to past, present, and future bilingual teachers. Juntos se puede.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We alternate between using the terms “biliteracy” in its singular form and “biliteracies” in its plural throughout the article. In general, when referring to others’ work, we use “biliteracy”. When discussing our views, we use “biliteracies”.

2. We use the phrase “multiply minoritized” to refer to the specific experience of bilingual Latinxs being simultaneously minoritized by several systems of oppression. Most often these systems include linguicism, nativism, and racism, as described by LatCrit scholars.

3. We use the terms “heritage bilingual” and “initially Spanish-dominant” as loose, imperfect labels to represent two major typologies of bilingual teachers explained in depth by Hernández and Alfaro (2020). We agree with Flores and Rosa (2015) that these terms often regiment racialized bilinguals as deficient according to the white perceiving subject. This study seeks to explore their complex realities to further humanize them as part of our greater equity work in bilingual education.

4. In Texas, bilingual PSTs must take and pass a total of five tests to be certified. Two of these tests relate specifically to bilingual education: one English test assesses PSTs’ knowledge of bilingual history, theory, and best practices. The second test is the Bilingual Target Language Proficiency Test, or BTLPT, which assesses PST’s pedagogical Spanish across four language domains.

5. When discussing language dominance, we take a sociocultural view that doesn’t only or mostly focus on language proficiency (Montrul, 2015). Dominance can include “proficiency” as well as language use and preference/value. In this way, a dominant language can be one that a person is more “proficient” in, but it can also be the language one spends more time in, and/or prefers or values.

6. We choose to honor the translanguaging corriente (García, 2017) and not translate students’ responses that are best captured or originally communicated in Spanish as a way to reinforce a translanguaging stance in academic spaces that favor parallel monolingualism.

7. América Ferrera is a Honduran-American actress and activist made famous in the mid 2000s for her interpretation of Betty Suarez in the U.S. adaptation of the Colombian telenovela Ugly Betty.