Becoming a language teacher educator: An outsider perspective

Abstract

This is a reflective piece theorizing my personal and academic experiences working with preservice teachers who are pursuing a Teaching English as a Second Language Certificate with immersion experience participating in a study abroad program teaching English to university students in Ecuador. Teaching predominantly white students as a woman of color is always full of stories, both real and imaginary. This is an opportunity to theorize the role of non-native English speakers guiding preservice teachers to teach English learners in the global south while discussing or contesting language aspects such as pronunciation, accuracy, proficiency, among others.

Keywords:

• Language teacher educator
• English hegemony
• decolonizing teaching practice

The teacher education field is complex enough as students try to figure out what they need to know to develop their own teaching practice based on a combination of theories, ideas, teaching models, and sets of rules enacted by schools, without a prescriptive set of guidelines to follow for perfect results. Teaching is a completely unpredictable undertaking since it varies based on student’s needs, diverse sociocultural contexts, and personal identities of teachers, among many other factors involved in the outcomes, and language teaching is not the exception. Yet, the latest research on language teaching suggests turning the attention to the development of language teacher identity (Sang, 2022). Hence, it is also important to consider the identity of language teacher educators, especially those who are non-native speakers. This is particularly important in supporting the efforts of language teacher educators who are endeavoring toward enacting decolonizing the curriculum and pedagogies.

Barkhuizen (2021) identifies 14 categories as partial representations of the types of language teacher educators according to their roles, place of work, the work they do, and perceived images of themselves. Barkhuizen also reviews that language teacher educators work to support the learning of teachers by training, mentoring, coaching, or formally instructing them; highlighting how much teachers and scholars are usually involved in educational research; and if they are affiliated to academic institutions.

In this reflective piece, I share an account of how my experience as a language teacher educator evolved during a study abroad program to Ecuador and the implications in my identity as a language teacher educator and the implications in decolonizing my praxis.

Starting points

As a teacher educator, I constantly find myself encouraging—more like convincing—students of the need for teachers to be prepared to work with multilingual learners. Living in a small town in a non-urban area in the Northeast, it is not uncommon that preservice teachers, who are mostly coming from the surrounding areas, have never had any interactions with English learners. Thus, it is difficult for them to imagine working with multilingual students when they are in the classrooms. Only a few of them have experienced some interaction with international students (who were usually already proficient in English) in high schools as part of international exchange programs. Sharing my personal experiences learning English as an adult immigrant to this country and at the same time my experiences as a mother of English learner students navigating the U.S. school system, helps them a bit to begin to see different perspectives and become a little more aware of the multilingual learners’ needs and experiences in schools. Still, many preservice teachers, especially in areas where the numbers of multilingual learners are still very low, do not seem to be concerned about being equipped to face such challenge. Despite this fact, I keep persuading students about the importance of this task, especially since my class is the only one in the program addressing this issue.

In the summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to be part of a group of faculty leading a study abroad program with preservice teachers who were pursuing a Teaching English as a Second Language Certificate with immersion experience. They participate in a study abroad program teaching English to university students in Ecuador for five weeks. Although, the certificate is open to students across many campuses, the students participating in it are essentially from the university’s main campus, which is not my home campus.

As an immigrant in this country and a lifelong learner, I still often think of myself as an English Learner. I occasionally encounter new words and find other ways to express my ideas when writing. Thus, co-leading a program focused on teaching native English speakers how to teach English feels like a daunting task to me at times. The impostor syndrome recurrently chasing minoritized people appears suddenly making me question my role in this place and skeptical of my abilities to do the job. Teaching predominantly white students as a woman of color has always fetched plenty of stories, both real and imaginary. This writing presented an opportunity to theorize the role of a non-native English speaker guiding preservice teachers to teach English learners in the Global South while discussing or contesting language aspects such as pronunciation, accuracy, proficiency, among other aspects of the hegemonic global English.

Proficiency is never enough

I am an immigrant brown Latina

purposedly speaking with my accent

even without your consent

and this I do not lament

’cause your demands are not well-meant

The constant pressure for language learners to speak or sound like native speakers is an idea that has been disputed in the last years (Fang, 2018; Lowe, 2020; Slavkov et al., 2021). Probing the way a person speaks is not a question about the knowledge of the language, the skills or ability to do it, or the capacity of the individual, it is also an inquiry about identity and validation of the self. Julissa Arce (2022) recounts she witnessed how her father could drain his confidence every time he mispronounced a word or didn’t know how to say something and how he could forget the whole conversation or situation as he immersed in his own shame. I personally relate to that feeling in my language learning process. I can remember how I could be repeating a conversation in my head over and over blaming myself for the mistakes I made when I clearly knew how to say things “correctly” and simply didn’t do it at the time for whatever reason. But the worse is the inner dialogue that comes with this, the powerless sense I/we feel for not being able to “sound” like I/we belong. It is an assault to the soul. As Arce puts it, “how in English we become more afraid instead of more confident–how often it robs us of our dignity” (Arce, 2022, p. 51). Teachers of English Learners repeatedly have opportunities to support students’ language development and praise them for their efforts and improvements. However, we have multiple evidence of the lack thereof (i.e., Chaka, 2021; Fuentes, 2018; Marshall, 2009; Santa Ana, 2004; Shapiro, 2014). English Learners in public education are still the subject of deficit ideologies impacting their personal identity.

I [we] constantly self-conscious

troubled by our own hush

trying not to sound obnoxious

as we feel all eyes on us

endlessly judged by how we sound

let alone for how we look

no matter that we abound

we still cannot confound

but hope to be unbound

Getting validation

Being aware of my accent and grammatical or otherwise errors that every now and then I make, I usually ask my students to correct me when this happens. I want them to see that I still have a lot to learn, and at the same time, I want to show them that language learning is an ongoing process. We, language learners may acquire full proficiency, may master grammatical rules, and even may learn exact pronunciation; however, that does not mean we are going to speak perfectly all the time and we are never going to make mistakes, as we all occasionally do it in our native language. In fact, mispronouncing or misspelling a word is a common mistake in English, since it is not a phonetic language (I cannot tell you all kinds of variants I’ve heard when people try to pronounce my name). Thus, we all should be more lenient toward English learners and non-native English speakers. Consequently, I encourage my students to tell me when they notice my mistakes by offering extra points if they do it. I do this to make them aware of how I, and many other English speakers, could mispronounce or make mistakes unconsciously, even when we know the proper grammar or the correct way to say it, just because our brain is thinking bilingually. While they may understand this, they have never mentioned it in class. Sometimes, I catch my mistake and correct it immediately, and some of them just slightly smile, others don’t even notice it. Perhaps it is the power dynamic as they see me as the authority figure in the classroom, or maybe it is they really perceived it as “normal” and are fine with it. The truth is that I have never asked them. Possibly, the next step would be to guide them in questioning the white listening subject stance they take in this native/nonnative speaker power relation.

English is the language most spoken in the world

although sometimes it feels like is cursed

for those of us whom at times seems forced

when what we really want is to be endorsed

for we have conversed

even if it is not superb

so please, let us not to be condemned.

For the first time while in Ecuador, students felt comfortable enough to point out my mistakes overtly. This allowed us to deepen our relationship and have a better connection. Seeing me being vulnerable, open to recognize and correct my errors (and even laughing about the absurdity of my misspelling) showed them I was there to learn along with them and that it is okay for teachers to slipup. This had never happened to me in my regular classes. I’m still not sure if it’s the sociocultural context, my positionality in that context (the only Latina and native speaker of Spanish in the group in a Spanish speaking country), or my role in the language teacher education program. I’m still wondering if being language learner themselves (as they are taking either Spanish or Kichwa) while teaching English, placed this particular group of preservice teachers in a position where there are more relatable to those of us who speak English as a second or additional language. The fact is that after that first incident, I not only felt more comfortable with making mistakes, which rarely happened afterwards, but also became more confident in my role as language teacher educator. Being called out on my language blunders internally validated my professional knowledge and gave me self-assurance because of the trust students were having in me.

Nonetheless, is this new gained confidence and the internal or external validation enough to balance out the power of English, white supremacy, and systemic racism that non-native speakers experience frequently? Absolutely not. It has been well documented Language proficiency does not guarantee belonging (i.e., Arce, 2022; Borgonovi & Ferrara, 2020; Cornejo Villavicencio, 2020). The reality is that the English language carries a colonial history and imperialistic ideologies of the world as well as schooling/educational practices that too often are unquestioned, and thus perpetuated a conservatist approach to teaching English centered on a hegemonic perspective of the language (Kumaravadivelu, 2016). As Arce (2022) claims, “Almost every English learner I have ever met has a story of how English crushed them at a young age” (p. 63). However, there is also a vast documentation on the urgency for decolonizing language teaching practices and pedagogies (i.e., Canagarajah, 2023; Qin, 2021; Tupas, 2022) to disrupt those practices leading to epistemicide and language deficit ideologies (Phyak, 2021).

Decolonizing my teaching praxis

While creating a learning community and establishing reciprocal relationship with the preservice language teachers was positive and successful, I still struggled with how to enact sustainable decolonizing practices in my teaching. Knowing that I want to disrupt traditional views of language learning and encourage language teaching practices founded in decoloniality and anti-oppressive pedagogies, I’m constantly questioning if I am radical enough or not pushing too hard for the change I strive to see. To me, teaching is an act, a practice that should promote interrogations of what is and foster what if, it is a field where the possibility to think otherwise should thrive, rethinking what we know and imagining what it could be. I aim to instill in my students the desire for developing a language teaching practice that respects and validates multiple ways of speaking English refusing the dominance and resisting its globalizing hegemony. I aspire to cocreate radical possibilities of alternate models of language teaching and learning that are centered on students’ local contexts and at the same time transformative of its politics (Canagarajah, 2023; Walsh, 2022).

This experience attested my identity as a language teacher educator in spite of my language practices as a non-native English speaker, but it did not certify that my teaching practice reflects my eagerness for decolonial teaching. Still, it reinforced my commitment to continue centering my pedagogical and theoretical approaches from a decolonizing framework (Borelli et al., 2020; Fandiño Parra, 2021) and paying attention to the context in which the teaching occurs, and keep emphasizing it for preservice teachers. Following Catherine Walsh’s (2022) ideas that planting is an insurgent act. I see my role as a decolonial language teacher educator as planting seeds with insurgent intentionality, expecting my class to serve as the nurturing soil for those seed to sprout, flourish, and emerge ready to revolt and disturb and “disobey the dominant logic-system and global order but also contribute to its fissures and cracks” (p. 234), creating possibilities for other ways of being and doing.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Freyca Calderon

Freyca Calderon works as an Associate Professor in Elementary and Early Childhood Education at Penn State Altoona. She completed her Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies at Texas Christian University. Her research interests are centered around linguistic diversity and multiculturalism in education through the lens of critical-dialogical pedagogies aiming to address social equity and justice. Her work privileges intersectionality approach and qualitative methods exploring possibilities for community building for marginalized and under-theorized groups and contributing to the teacher education field by linking theoretical perspectives with everyday experiences and developing culturally relevant understandings.