Supporting Bilingual Teachers To Be Leaders for Social Change: “I must create advocates for biliteracy.”

ABSTRACT

Teacher leadership has been variously defined but generally understood as expanding teachers’ visions beyond their own classrooms. Bilingual education teachers, working with emergent bilingual students in often marginalized situations and contexts, must develop a critical consciousness to embrace leadership identities. This requires engaging in critical reflexive practice, embracing their own and their students’ cultural/linguistic identities, and locating allies to form a professional community. I share two experienced Latina bilingual education teachers’ journeys to embracing leadership identities, drawing on interviews and artifacts from both during and following their participation in a cohort-based university master’s degree program in bilingual education and teacher leadership. While data analysis occurred using a grounded theory approach, in the final stages Freire’s Critical Pedagogies was embraced as a theoretical framework. Drawing on conceptions of conscientizão, dialogue, and praxis, I offer a more theoretically and critically grounded definition of bilingual teacher leadership for social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• critical consciousness and teacher education
• critical pedagogy
• teacher agency
• teacher leadership
• teacher professional development