INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES AND PERFORMED LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES : STORIES OF BECOMING A US K-12 CONTENT TEACHER

Teacher educators have been reimagining ways to train pre-service teachers with the necessary background knowledge, methodological tools, and skills to address the growing needs of multilingual and multicultural classrooms (Carter Andrews, 2021; Cochran-Smith, 2003; Li & Sah, 2020). As classrooms grow in cultural and linguistic diversity within the United States (de Brey et al., 2019)—the national context of this study, there is a need to train the predominately White teaching force (Irwin et al., 2021) to be equitable educators who are linguistically responsive (Lucas & Villegas, 2011, 2013) in order to attend to and foster linguistic development within their content classrooms. However, educational linguists (e.g., Bacon, 2020; Coady et al., 2016; Metz, 2019) have found that equipping both pre-service and in-service teachers with “correct” methodologies and knowledge about supporting culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students was not enough due to their beliefs about supporting multilingual learners within the content classroom. In light of these findings, more research is needed to investigate how undergraduate pre-service teachers’ experiences and identities inform the various language ideologies they bring into their training (Freeman & Johnson, 1998; McKinney, 2017; McKinney & Tayler, 2019) and how their language ideologies impact their engagement with the current training to be linguistically responsive K-12 content teachers.Within this dissertation, I set out to examine how undergraduate pre-service teachers’ language ideologies, their lived experiences, and their intersecting identities (e.g., linguistic, socioeconomic, race, and nationality) inform their understanding concerning whether language should be integrated into their content teaching and multilingual students’ learning. To achieve this goal, I conduct a narrative case study where I provide a complex picture of my four White male undergraduate students who are training to be K-12 content teachers at a Midwestern university. Through survey responses, semi-structured interviews, and guided reflective responses, I used an ideology-as-praxis approach to find my participants performed their linguistic ideologies through their stories of personal experience with learning a language, their coursework, and their teaching experience. While my participants expressed juxtaposing language ideologies, such as supporting students’ full linguistic repertoire while preparing them for a dominant monolingual society, I found my participants shared stories to perform their language ideologies related to perceived contextual incentives. These perceived contextual incentives ranged from the larger US society wanting everyone to be a participating member through the use of English to my participants’ imagined classroom where multilingual learners’ linguistic repertoires would be leveraged to learn the required content. In reporting these findings, I conclude this dissertation by discussing the implications for teacher education that blends pre-service teachers’ lived experiences and ideologies with the theoretical and technical learning they need to support the academic achievement of their students in multilingual and multicultural classrooms.