Teacher educators’ critical language awareness: building toward transformation in critically conscious teacher education

ABSTRACT

Calls to prepare all teachers to effectively teach multilingual learners are not new. Nevertheless, preservice preparation programs continue to fall short of this goal, despite enormous effort from teacher educators and researchers alike. This commentary leverages this IMRJ special issue on Critical Multilingual Awareness/Critical Consciousness in teacher preparation to both interrogate and consider solutions to this longstanding problem. Building on the featured articles’ valuable contributions to the field’s understandings about possibilities and challenges surrounding the development of teacher candidates’ critical consciousness, the commentary argues the importance of working toward program-level, rather than incremental, change. Grounded in recent, firsthand experience with the redesign of the elementary teacher education program at their own university, the authors offer insights for cultivating program coherence centered on teaching multilingual learners, while also noting necessary areas for growth and raising complex questions about the interplay between institutions of higher education and critical teacher education programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical language awareness
• culturally/linguistically diverse learners
• teacher preparation

Disclosure statement

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