Teacher Agency in Bilingual Spaces: A Fresh Look at Preparing Teachers to Educate Latina/o Bilingual Children

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Author
Author
Palmer, Deborah; Martinez, Ramon Antonio
Journal
Review of Research in Education
Details
Resource Type
Journal
Acquisition Number
BE025310
Published Date
01-21-2015 2:55 PM
Published Year
2013
Number of Pages
29
Language(s)
Subscription Only
No
Abstract
This review poses an increasingly commonand increasingly urgentquestion in the field of teacher education: How can teachers best be prepared to educate Latina/o bilingual learners? The answers that we offer here challenge some of the prevailing assumptions about language and bilingualism that inform current approaches to teacher preparation. To work effectively with bilingual learners, we argue, teachers need to develop a robust understanding of bilingualism and of the interactional dynamics of bilingual classroom contexts. Unfortunately, the conceptions of language and bilingualism portrayed in much of the teacher-directed literature fall short of offering teachers access to such understandings. In this review, we will make the case for developing materials for teachers that reflect both more up-to-date theoretical understandings of language practices in bilingual communities and a more critically contextualized understanding of the power dynamics that operate in bilingual classroom contexts. We recognize that helping teachers come to these more robust understandings of bilingual language practices and the interactional dynamics of bilingual contexts implies an ideological shift for educatorsand teacher educatorsin the United States.
Topics
Preservice Teacher Preparation
Culture
Bilingualism
Bilingual Students