BEYOND ESL TEACHERS: NEGOTIATING CURRICULAR SPACE FOR LANGUAGE ACTIVISM TOWARD A PREPARATION OF “TEACHERS OF MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS” By Mingzhu Deng A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education – Doctor of Philosophy 2023 ABSTRACT This research analyzed a university-based ESL teacher education programmatic curriculum in the state of Michigan, with the intention to highlight the affordances and constraints of curriculum making for preparing teachers with critical awareness of and activist stance toward sociolinguistic inequalities. I synthesized a Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of Multilingual Learners and its core dimension, critical multilingual awareness (CMLA), was the focus of my curriculum analysis. CMLA has four components: 1) Knowledge of Language (User), 2) Knowledge about Language (Analyst), 3) Pedagogical Practices of Language Teaching (Teacher), and 4) Language Activism (Activist). The findings suggested that this ESL education program curriculum drew knowledge produced in multiple disciplines concerning language teaching and learning and addressed all four components of CMLA. Further analysis illuminated a triple-faceted theoretical disjuncture that compromised curricular space for Language Activism at the program level. Moreover, my analysis of a focal group of instructors highlighted their agentive curricular work that to varied degrees temporarily reconciled the theoretical disjuncture and extended space for Language Activism. I argue for a ‘people-centered’ approach to ESL teacher education curriculum making that centers the multilingual and social being of multilingual learners. In addition, the instructors’ curriculum (re)making, negotiating an in-betweenness of a hierarchical sociolinguistic reality and a plurilingual democratic futurity, extended the concept of Language Activism. Copyright by MINGZHU DENG 2023 This dissertation is dedicated to all my teachers and mentors. Thank you for walking alongside me on this journey. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I carry with me a full heart of gratitude and love for my mentors. I am blessed to have your guidance, support, and care at both difficult and joyful times. Sandro, thank you for reminding me of where my heart lies when I feel lost in the academic world. Peter, thank you for showing me the crafts of bridging my thinking with conversations within our fields. Lucia, thank you for guiding me to find my true passion. Deb, thank you for offering your valuable insights and expertise in constructing of my dissertation research. Jungmin, you bring light to me when you joined MSU. To all my friends, thank you for your friendship. Laura, you showed me the essence of mentorship. Laxmi, Danny, Hannah, thank you for supporting me during the challenging moments of my dissertation writing. Lindsay, your love and acceptance of all aspects of my being mean the world to me. Andrew, Kim, Yiran, thank you for the food and unconditional love. Celine, thank you for your gentle guidance and wisdom and for teaching me self-compassion and self-advocacy. I am also indebted to my students for joining me in conversations and asking thought- provoking questions. Thank you for holding space for me to grow as an instructor. Jacob, thank you for being by my side at the darkest moments when hope seemed out of reach. Tharja and Gizmo, thank you for your company and cuddles when I wrote at home. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Literature Review and Conceptual Framework ............................................................. 7 Chapter 3 Research Methodology................................................................................................. 23 Chapter 4 A Triple-Faceted Theoretical Disjuncture in the Program Curriculum ....................... 51 Chapter 5 Reconciling the Theoretical Disjuncture: Instructor Curricular Work......................... 93 Chapter 6 Discussion and Conclusion ........................................................................................ 120 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 149 APPENDIX A: Pilot Study Interview Protocols ........................................................................ 162 APPENDIX B: Main Study Interview Protocols ....................................................................... 166 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BL Black Language CDA Critical Discourse Analysis CMLA Critical Multilingual Awareness ESL English as a Second Language EFL English as a Foreign Language PhD Doctor of Philosophy PST Preservice Teachers SIOP Shelter Instruction Observational Protocol SLA Second Language Acquisition MLL Multilingual Learners US The United States vii Chapter 1 Introduction My quest for English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher preparation programmatic curriculum originated from a question that the ESL preservice teachers (PSTs) in my class often brought up. They asked, “why did I never learn about this?” By “this”, they meant theories and pedagogies that challenged ‘commonsensical’ beliefs or practices for teaching multilingual learners (MLLs)1, such as English-only classroom language policy. By “never”, they meant the time they spent in other courses required for their ESL teacher certificate. Getting this question repeatedly from PSTs, I developed interest in knowing the ESL teacher education curriculum programmatically and specifically in how issues of linguistic inequity were discussed across curricular spaces. Significance of Study Teacher preparation for students of color, including multilingual learners (MLLs), face multiple perennial challenges. Continued demographic change toward a more culturally and linguistically diverse student population in US public schools is not mirrored in the teacher profession. In the past two decades, teachers of color increased from less than 10% by 2000 to 21% by 2018 (NCES, 2020). K-12 teachers remain predominantly white, monolingual, middle- class whose linguistic and cultural experiences differ from those of MLLs (Faltis & Valdés, 2016; Goodwin, 2002). Thus, teachers could benefit from additional guidance on issues of race, class, language, and culture from teacher education; however, the teacher education professoriate is largely white and “uncomfortable with or unprepared to address issues of diversity” (Goodwin, 2017, p. 440). Faltis and Valdés (2016) are concerned that little is known about what teacher 1 I use multilingual learners (MLLs) to refer to students whose family language is not English dominant or English only. Within this group, some are classified for formerly classified as English Learners (ELs), and some are not identified or opted out for EL identification. Therefore, MLLs refers to a broader group of students than Els. 1 educators know about language and language diversity. Watson et al. (2005) posit that there generally appears to be a null curriculum about MLLs in teacher education (Watson et al., 2005). Furthermore, scholars who examine the social and racial aspects of language have informed that the current design of the US educational system sustains white control of language and social order through perpetual white English hegemony (e.g., Alim, 2005; Baker-Bell, 2020; Rosa & Flores, 2017). It is in this sociolinguistic context that teachers of language-minoritized2 students. Alim and Smitherman (2012) documented that well-meaning teachers genuinely committed to their Black students’ well-being often do harm if they lacked critical awareness of the social struggles around language hierarchies. Their teaching practices were informed by beliefs of ‘standard’ English that deemed the Black Language ‘bad’ English (Alim & Smitherman, 2012; Flores & Rosa, 2015). It is imperative that teacher education addresses deficit-based language ideologies and pedagogical practices in per- and in-service teacher development programs. Teacher education should afford curricular and dialogical spaces for teachers to engage and question the relations of language, power, and education (Seltzer, 2022), to problematize the dominance of White Mainstream English (WME; Baker-Bell, 2020); and to imagine and advocate for linguistically just futures (García, 2015). Against these sociolinguistic and educational backgrounds, I set out to inquire about how teacher education prepares teachers to address linguistic inequalities. 2 Language-minoritized students refers to students who do not come from a white, English-monolingual language environment. It refers to a broader group of students than MLLs and include those who speaks a nondominant variety of English. 2 Questions and Scope This study focuses on a university-based ESL teacher education program in Michigan. A lesson from Michigan affords insights for states with similar demographics and teacher education policies. First, the percentage of students classified as English Learners (ELs) in K-12 education is 6.5% and around 22 states identified 6.0% to 10.0% ELs in fall 2019. (NCES, 2022). Second, Michigan preservice teachers are required to complete an ESL education program to be eligible for teaching K-12 ESL programs (MDE, 2017), a state policy shared by others (López & Santibañez, 2018). In response to a scarcity of empirical research on teacher preparation for MLLs beyond individual course level (Solano-Campos et al., 2020), I analyzed the curriculum programmatically. Importantly, I acknowledge that teacher education curricula are always changing. My analysis of this ESL teacher education program was based on data collected uptill summer 2022, thereby not reflecting changes afterwards. My two research questions were: To what extent is critical multilingual awareness (CMLA) integrated into course contents in a university-based ESL teacher preparation program? How do instructors negotiate space in the curriculum for Language Activism? Based on current literature, I synthesized a multidimensional knowledge framework with critical multilingual awareness (CMLA) at the core. I was particularly interested in the Language Activism tenet of CMLA which has three components: plurilingualism and its merits for democratic citizenship, histories of colonial and imperialistic oppression, and language is socially created, and thus socially changeable (García, 2015, p. 6). I intended to analyze the enactment of Language Activism in teacher education. An additional objective of this study was to shed light on curriculum development for preparing ESL teachers, including the cultural, structural affordances and challenges of this work. Further, I sought to illuminate what 3 discourses, epistemologies about language teaching and learning were underscored in the curriculum and whether the dominant ideology and knowledge was aligned with Language Activism. Overview of the Structure Chapter 2 is Literature Review and Conceptual Framework. The first part of this chapter reviews literature discussing the educational policy contexts and pedagogical orientations for teaching K-12 MLLs, the policy trends of teacher preparation for MLLs, and current teacher preparation research on the topic of MLLs. Generally speaking, the literature reflected insufficient policy attention for preparing teachers for increasingly multilingual classrooms. Teacher education research on this topic has not sufficiently addressed issues of systemic inequalities and how to change the status quo. Some scholars call for a radical shift in teacher education for MLLs through decentering dominant language and culture to transform the continuous marginalization of MLLs in school and society. In the second part of this chapter, I proposed a Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs, which guided my inquiry conceptually. This framework has five interrelated dimensions: • critical multilingual awareness sitting at the core • sociopolitical knowledge of the education of MLLs • sociocultural and sociolinguistic knowledge of MLLs and their community • knowledge of L1/L23 acquisition and dynamic bilingualism • knowledge and skills for integrating content and language instruction 3 Traditionally in applied linguistics, L1 refers to first language and L2 refers to second language. For MLLs, these labelling are often not accurate. I acknowledge that these labels also signal L1 and L2 separability of learners bilingualism. I use “L1/L2” to signal a togetherness of the two (and often more) named languages in MLLs’ language repertoire. 4 In Chapter 3, I discuss my research methodology. I provide context of the study through my researcher’s positionality and the pilot study. Then I detail the process of my research from formation of the research questions to data collection, and to data analysis. This study was informed by Dyson and Genishi’s (2005) case study method. My primary data sources were curricular materials and instructor interviews. For data analysis, I used analytical tools developed in narrative inquiry and Fairclough’s (2003) critical discourse analysis (CDA). In Chapter 4 and 5, I present my findings. Focusing on the integration of the four tenets of CMLA in the program curriculum, Chapter 4 details a triple-faced theoretical disjuncture in the analyzed curriculum across the program. There was an ideological conflict between monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies and plurilingual-oriented ideologies. Second, an epistemological discrepancy was identified between course content drawing from cognitive- linguistic second language acquisition (SLA) and those drawing from social perspectives of SLA. The former SLA research has been criticized for its monolingual biases and continuous use of native speakers as a yardstick of additional language development. Third, a contextual difference surfaced between K-12 ESL classrooms and English as foreign language (EFL) classrooms because learners and their learning goals differ. This clash in ideology, epistemology, and context compromised curricular space for Language Activism in the program curriculum. Relatedly, PSTs’ struggled to wrap their minds around translanguaging and pushback against plurilingual classroom language policies. A structural constraint for reconciling this disjuncture was the lack of an established communication channel across the two programs housing the courses, by the time of this study. In Chapter 5, I account for the curricular work of individual instructors that reconciled the theoretical disjuncture — to varied degrees — by creating curricular and dialogical spaces for contents aligned with Language Activism. Then, I delineate a 5 group portrait of the instructors whose teacher and scholar selves are committed to multilingualism and linguistic equity. Chapter 6 closes this dissertation. I discuss a ‘people-centered’ approach to ESL teacher education curriculum development that values multilingual learners’ multilingualism and lifeways that transcends linguistic, cultural, nation-state borders. A ‘people-centered’ curriculum draws from equity-oriented perspectives, critical and translingual theories and pedagogies, and social perspectives of learners and language learning, the goal of which is to prepare “teachers of MLLs”. I critique a ‘language-centered’ ESL teacher education curriculum that is uncritical of the testing regime and English-only practices informed by monolingual biases. A ‘language- centered’ curriculum prepares “ESL teachers” who are directed to focus on English proficiency and testing other than their learners and their lived experiences. Based on the curricular work of the instructors, I argue for an expanded understanding of Language Activism by bringing into the picture the notion of an in-betweenness. The work of teacher educators and teachers of MLLs is situated between a hierarchical sociolinguistic reality and a plurilingual democratic futurity. Teachers’ awareness of and ability to negotiate with this reality-futurity in-betweenness is critical for their enactment of Language Activism. I close the chapter with the implication of this study for teacher education, research, and policy. 6 Chapter 2 Literature Review and Conceptual Framework Multilingual learners (MLLs) have become the fastest growing group of students in US schools (Mills et al., 2020). According to published data from National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES; 2022), students classified as English Learners (ELs) in US public schools increased from 9.2% (4.5 million) in fall 2010 to 10.4% (5.1 million) in fall 2019. MLLs are unevenly distributed geographically but they are present in schools across the nation; states with a small percentage of MLLs historically have witnessed dramatic increases in this segment of student population (Villegas et al., 2018). Although these learners are usually identified/stigmatized by their bi/multilingualism and their emerging English proficiency, educators should be aware that the vast majority of MLLs today at US schools are also racially marginalized (NCES, 2022). In addition, they are more likely to experience poverty (Goodwin, 2017; Mills et al., 2020). Within this group, there is an increasing number of children and youths whose everyday lives are affected by political uncertainty toward immigration due to their own or their caretakers’ undocumented status (Goodwin, 2017; Massey, 2013). In essence, MLLs are a diverse group of students who enter US schools with unique individual stories, but their educational experiences have not always been responsive to their lived realities outside of schools (de Jong, 2019; García & Sung, 2018; Teemant, 2018). The educational history of multilingual, immigrant children and youth is characterized by a tug of war between assimilationist and pluralist frameworks (de Jong, 2019). One illustration is the controversies surrounding the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 and the subsequent English-only movement demanding English-only instruction for MLLs (Mavrogordato, 2012). 7 English-only Orientations and Critical, Translingual Trends From national to school to classroom policies, the bilingualism of MLLs is often perceived as a problem. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002 and the succeeding Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 have “essentially legislated knowledge as language/English acquisition and learning as standardized test scores” (p. 441), holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ English proficiency and the testing regime (Goodwin, 2017). Winke and Zhang’s (2019) recent analysis of Michigan Third Grade Reading Retention Law indicates that based on the indicators of reading proficiency in the law, most third grade EL-classified students are subjected to retention4, especially those who are economically disadvantaged and those who speak Arabic or Spanish. High school EL-classified students are subjected to in- school course policies denying them equal access to core academic content and college- preparatory courses (Callahan, 2005; Callahan & Shifrer, 2016; Callahan et al., 2010; Robinson- Cimpian et al., 2016). Examining institutional processes, policies, norms of secondary teachers’ placement, Dabach (2015) sampled seven California comprehensive high schools and found that novice teachers, in comparison to those with seniority and higher professional status, are more likely to be assigned to teach in separated EL content-area classrooms, a placement perceived by many as undesirable. Henderson and Palmer (2015) investigated the articulated and embodied language ideologies of two teachers in a two-way dual language program. They found that both teachers articulated positive attitudes toward bilingualism, but the English language arts teacher embodied English-only ideology and the Spanish language arts teacher embodied a hybrid language ideology. Notably, the dominance of English is apparent in this program with the English language arts classroom being an English-only space and the Spanish language arts 4 The retention portion of Michigan Read by Grade Three Law was discontinued as of March 24, 2023 after being in effect for two school years. Governor Whitmer signed Senate Bill 12, now known as Public Act 7 of 2023. 8 teacher pressured to also teach in English for subjects tested in English in state exams (Henderson & Palmer, 2015). The English-only approach, contributing to subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999), has proven largely ineffective as is indicated by the large number of long-term EL-classified students and the higher dropout rates of multilingual, immigrant youths (Kamhi-Stein & Osipova, 2019). Against this backdrop, educators have become aware of the vitality of linguistically and culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogical practices (Paris & Alim, 2014; Lucas & Villegas, 2011; 2013). Moreover, scholarships and grassroot reforms concerning the teaching and learning of MLLs have seen critical, translingual trends. The Mexican American Studies program at the Tucson Unified School District was highly successful in increasing the graduation rate of their racially/ethnically minoritized students through an innovative social-justice curriculum, which turned into a national model for ethnic studies programs (Cabrera et al., 2013; Palos, 2011). Translanguaging pedagogy, a teaching approach that transgress monolingualism and monoculturalism, has been used to develop students’ positive and transformative understandings of their plural language and culture identities (Anya, 2017; Back, 2020; García et al., 2012; García-Mateus & Palmer, 2017). Further, translanguaging teaching, utilizing students’ entire linguistic repertoire, promotes authentic student engagement, bi/multiliteracy as well as content development (Cárdenas Curiel, 2017; García et al., 2017). Policy Trend for Preparing Teachers of MLLs By and large, teacher self-efficacy for working with MLLs are low (López & Santibañez, 2018). Many states’ departments of education are aware that pre- and in-service teachers need preparation and professional development support for effective instructions in linguistically diverse classrooms (Peter et al., 2012). Across US states, teacher licensure policies vary in what 9 teacher preparation should entail for a teacher to be qualified to teach MLLs. For example, California requires all teachers seeking certification to complete a California Teacher of English Learners (CTEL) preparation program and the CTEL exam (López & Santibañez, 2018); meanwhile in most states, adding an ESL endorsement is optional. Moreover, to obtain an ESL endorsement, states require varied teacher preparation ranging from completing an ESL teacher preparation program to minimal course credits; some even allow teachers to waive course credits and/or clinical training by passing a test on ESL instruction (Peter et al., 2012). In addition to a shortage of ESL and bilingual specialists, many who are certified receive little to insufficient preparation (Cervantes-Soon, 2018). López and Santibañez (2018) investigated the impact of state teacher preparation requirements on emergent bilingual student achievement and teacher self-efficacy. They found: 1) that students currently and formerly classified as English Learners in states (Texas and California) with more rigorous teacher training policies outperform those in a state (Arizona) with ineffectual requirements; and 2) that new teacher self-efficacy in working with MLLs is positively correlated to the rigor of their preparation after the first three years of teaching. Although there is abundant evidence in the established scholarship that all teachers must have access to specialized preparation for increasingly linguistically diverse classrooms, policy responses have not been substantiated. Importantly, MLLs in today’s schools are under the care of ESL/bilingual specialists as well as mainstream teachers. The limited capacity of bilingual and ESL programs is met with a fast growth of MLL population; in addition, schools are pressured to mainstream MLLs due to mandated annual report of EL subgroup performance on state testing programs since the NCLB (Villegas et al., 2018). Villegas et al. (2018) infer that a large number of MLLs are placed with mainstream classroom teachers underprepared to serve 10 them. According to Rafa et al. (2020), around 28 states require EL-specific training and professional development for mainstream classroom teachers and the rest do not specify. Teacher Preparation for MLLs All teachers should receive sufficient preparation to work in linguistically diverse classrooms (Brisk & Kaveh, 2019). Teacher education should seek to bridge the gaps between teachers’ and learners’ cultural and social differences (Faltis & Valdés, 2016; Valenzuela, 1999). Given the educational inequality experienced by MLLs, teacher education should develop teachers’ awareness, knowledge, and skills for socially just teaching (Palmer, 2018b) that challenges the marginalization of MLLs in the schooling system. De Costa and Norton (2017) share the sentiment that “[t]eacher training is important for good language teaching, and good language teaching promotes social equality” (p. 4). Literature on teacher preparation for socially just teaching is emerging. This body of work borrows insights from critical, translingual curricular and pedagogical innovations for the preparation of bilingual teachers and English monolingual teachers (e.g., García et al., 2017; García & Kleyn, 2016). Seltzer (2022; 2023) advocates for a critical translingual approach in teacher preparation that engages teachers with theories and scholarly literature, such as translanguaging, raciolinguistic ideologies, critical literacies, and critical language awareness, to inquire the intersections of language, power, and identity. Using a critical multiliteracy approach, Cárdenas Curiel et al. (2023) analyzed the translanguaging practice of bilingual pre-services teachers and found that art mediated translanguaging can potentially promote teachers’ cross-linguistic awareness and critical language awareness leading to their interrogation of linguistic inequalities. Reporting on professional developments (PDs) centering translanguaging for in-service teachers, 11 Back (2020) and Seltzer (2023) both reported positive impact of the PDs in shaping teachers’ beliefs and practices. Reviews of literature show that there is a small body of research exploring how to prepare mainstream teachers (Mills et al., 2020; Solano-Campos et al., 2020; Villegas et al., 2018), content teachers (e.g., math, De Araujo et al., 2018; science, Rutt et al., 2021; literacy, Wetzel et al., 2019), and special education specialists (Tran et al., 2018) for linguistically diverse learners in the US context. The vast majority of empirical research on teacher preparation for MLLs studied courses and seminars designed and led by the researcher(s) (Mills et al., 2020). The focuses were on, among other things: • the usefulness of innovative pedagogies and strategies such as using an immersion foreign language approach that put PSTs in the position of MLLs in English monolingual mainstream classrooms in order to develop PSTs’ empathy for students learning language and content simultaneously (Bunch, 2013; Galguera, 2011; Settlage et al., 2014); and • PSTs’ engagement with learners and members at linguistically and culturally diverse schools or communities (Hadjioannou & Hutchinson, 2010; Hutchinson, 2013; Kelly- Jackson & Delacruz, 2014); and • PSTs’ development during cross-cultural immersion experiences abroad (Palmer & Menard-Warwick, 2012; Zhao et al., 2009) or in a domestic multilingual community (Ference & Bell, 2004). PSTs in these courses and programs are engaged with a range of activities and interventions, including inquiry projects, tutoring experiences, journaling and reflections etc. (Mills et al., 2020). A positive direction shown in research on mainstream teacher preparation is teacher educators’ attention to teacher beliefs, including efforts to challenge PSTs’ negative beliefs about 12 MLLs, to develop PSTs’ sensitivity to and empathy for language learners, and to foster PSTs’ willingness to deploy pedagogical practices that make content learning accessible to MLLs (Mills et al., 2020). Villegas et al. (2018) noted that the majority of their twenty-one reviewed studies of mainstream teacher preparation focused on teacher beliefs about MLLs, but less attention was given to PSTs’ pedagogical knowledge and skill development for effective instruction. Solano- Campos et al. (2020) categorized 64 studies of mainstream PST preparation (8 on PSTs pursing ESL/bilingual endorsement) into two groups: those focus on beliefs (orientations) and those on method (pedagogical knowledge and skills), stating that it is unclear how these two dimensions are integrated or not in studied teacher education programs. They inferred that there might be a theoretical disjuncture between method-focused and orientation-focused systems as the former draws on “theories of cognition and knowledge development” while the latter on “critical theories and social justice perspectives” (p. 211). Specifically, Solano-Campos et al. (2020) called for more research on the integration of sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects into teacher education. An overwhelming majority of the reviewed research looked broadly at one or two courses but failed to provide sufficient details on how teacher education programs integrate a wide range of orientations, knowledge, and skills teachers need to teach in linguistically diverse classrooms (Solano-Campos et al., 2020). This proposed study moves one step further with an attempt to provide first a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of an ESL teacher education program and second potential insights into the theoretical disjuncture across courses. Many scholars have expressed their dissatisfaction with incremental changes in teacher education for MLLs and have urged for radical changes. Teemant (2018), for example, called for a reframing of the ESL teacher profession that “has focused too narrowly on preparing language 13 specialists from a language perspective at the expense of preparing every teacher to address interrelated aspects of human difference” (p. 353). ESL teaching is not socially, culturally, historically, and politically neutral as it has long been (mis)treated (Teemant, 2018). Envisioning future directions of K-12 TESOL profession based on current research findings, Kamhi-Stein and Osipova (2019) contended that teacher preparation must reject the myth of English-only pedagogy and the myth of nativespeakerism used to justify language-based discrimination against teachers and learners whose language practices do not conform with English monolingual norms. Similarly, reviewing twenty-nine peer-reviewed empirical studies on how prospective mainstream teachers are prepared through the lens of sociology of knowledge, Mills et al. (2018) asserted that this body of research is “generally silent about the power dynamics that sustain existing inequalities in schools and society”(p. 36), failing to engage PSTs in questioning the normalization of dominant language and culture in schools or the ideological underpinnings of English-only educational policies and practices. Cervantes-Soon (2018) suggests bilingual teacher education programs to use anticolonial epistemologies and pedagogies such as Xicana feminist approaches to transgress school spaces that continue to marginalize minoritized communities’ ways of languaging and knowing. It is among scholarships advocating for radical changes in teacher education with a hope for transformative education that I situate this proposed study. With this goal in mind, I synthesized a multidimensional knowledge framework from current literature, positioning teacher critical multilingual awareness (CMLA) at the core teacher preparation for linguistically diverse classrooms. A Proposed Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of Multilingual Learners I developed a knowledge framework (See Figure 2.1) that synthesized literature discussing the types of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that teachers should have to teach in 14 linguistically diverse classrooms (de Jong et al., 2013; Faltis & Valdés, 2016; García, 2015; Lucas & Villegas, 2011; 2013; Menken & Antunez, 2001; Fillmore & Snow, 2000; Turkan et al., 2014). It is not my intention to provide an exhaustive list of what is proposed in the literature. Rather, I created a broad list initially, and then categorized the list. For instance, included in Lucas and Villegas’ (2013) list of three orientations and four types of pedagogical knowledge and skills for preparing linguistically responsive teachers is the need to develop the “ability to identify the language demands of classroom tasks” (p.101); this need echoes the call for disciplinary linguistic knowledge put forward in Turkan, Oliveira, Lee and Phelps (2014) that referred to teachers’ ability to identify linguistic features of the disciplinary discourse and to model and engage MLLs in communicating meaning in disciplinary language. Similarly, Fillmore and Snow (2000) recommend that teachers take courses on the language of academic discourse to understand “how language production and language understanding interact with content learning” (p. 34), and plan language use in instructional activities to promote children’s language development. Galguera (2011) and Bunch (2013) proposed a similar knowledge base named pedagogical language knowledge. Discussions on these types of knowledge overlap and complement each other. Building on these developments, I combined them into the dimension “Knowledge and skills for integrating language and content instruction” to refer to: • understandings of the critical role of language as a medium of instruction • the ability to identify language demands and to model linguistic features of a disciplinary discourse and related instructional activities • skills for scaffolding, assessing student development in interpreting, interacting, and presenting meaning of content through language of a discipline (Bunch, 2013; Faltis & 15 Valdés, 2016; Galguera, 2011; Lucas & Villegas, 2011; 2013; Fillmore & Snow, 2000; Turkan et al., 2014). This synthetic process was applied to each dimension of my knowledge framework. There are five dimensions in this framework (see Figure 2.1). They are 1) Sociopolitical Knowledge of the Education of MLLs, 2) Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Knowledge of MLLs and their Community, 3) Knowledge of L1/L2 Acquisition and Dynamic Bilingualism, 4) Knowledge and skills for integrating language and content instruction, and 5) Critical multilingual awareness (CMLA). It is important to note that these five dimensions are not mutually exclusive; rather, they overlap and interconnect with each other. Importantly, “Critical multilingual awareness (CMLA)” is the core dimension of this framework which I shall account for first in what follows. Then I move to discuss what the other four components entail and how each connects to CMLA. This multidimensional framework serves as a heuristic to guide my inquiry. Specifically, the framework will also guide my analysis at each policy level: ESL standards text, ESL teacher preparation curriculum, ESL teacher candidate narrative, etc. Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) García (2015) posits that the simple recognition of linguistic diversity is not enough and that teachers must work to dismantle monolingualism and linguistic discrimination in schools through language activism, the basis of which is language awareness. Unsatisfied with traditional understandings of language awareness for teachers that disregard the role language plays in creating, sustaining, but also potentially changing a social and sociolinguistic order, García (2015) proposed Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA), emphasizing teacher’s awareness of the historical process, current condition, and future direction of plurilingualism, and of the 16 entanglement of language, power, and equity. That is, in addition to knowledge of language (user), knowledge about language (analyst), and pedagogical practices for language teaching (teacher), teachers should develop awareness of: • plurilingualism and its merits for democratic citizenship • histories of colonial and imperialistic oppression, • and language is socially created, and thus socially changeable (García, 2015, p. 6). In the remainder of this article, I call them the three components of Language Activism. García (2015) sees the potential of language education to transform the “linguistic hierarchies that have been socially established and thus change the world and advance social justice” (p. 8). Palmer et al’s (2019) concept of critical consciousness echoes CMLA in emphasizing teacher’s continuous interrogation of power and historicized view of schools that “deconstructing mainstream explanations of the past and foregrounding individuals’ and communities’ local histories” (p. 125). According to García (2015), teachers with CMLA leverage students’ translanguaging to empower their authentic voicing and identities while developing their creativity and criticality. As noted, CMLA, imbued with a spirit of strong language activism, sits at the center of my framework. Preparing teachers of MLLs who take a strong advocacy stance (Faltis, 2014) as envisioned by CMLA should go hand in hand with developing teacher leadership (Lindahl & Baecher, 2019; Palmer, 2018a; 2018b). A teacher with an advocacy commitment will not be able to undertake activism work if they assume the role of a follower in the school community and beyond, rather they must take up roles of leaders to become changing agents of established oppressive educational environments (Palmer, 2018a; 2018b). Linville and Fenner (2019) call for more close research on the impact of teacher leadership training on the effectiveness of their advocacy work. 17 CMLA is constituted by strong language activist and teacher leadership stances derived from teachers’ deep knowledge of language, power, and society. I will illustrate how each of the other four dimensions connect to this central dimension. Sociopolitical Knowledge of the Education of MLLs The complex and convoluted story of US bilingual education is an ongoing battle over language of schooling and essentially the embodiment of constant ideological conflicts over who are legitimate members of the U.S nation-state, and whose language represents US national identity (Ovando, 2003). It is in this very social context that the education of MLLs is situated, and thus teachers should be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to navigate this sociopolitical environment. Specifically, teachers of linguistically diverse classrooms should have knowledge of the “policy, history, and legislations, as well as current reform issues surrounding bilingual education” (Menken & Antunez, 2001, p. 12). Such teachers should also be able to navigate, critically engage with, and adapt top-down local, state, and federal policies to create inclusive learning environments for MLLs in their own classrooms and beyond (de Jong et al., 2013). This sociopolitical knowledge dimension connects to the CMLA dimension through a shared vision on teacher activism. With a knowledge base of policies and legislations impacting the learning of MLLs, teachers can not only ensure the legal rights of their MLLs are preserved and fulfilled, but they can also challenge deficit-oriented educational policies and reforms that have led to the marginalization of MLLs and their languages in school systems (Faltis & Valdés, 2016). There is general agreement (e.g., Lucas & Villegas, 2011; Faltis, 2014; Faltis & Valdés, 2016) that to counteract the monoglossic and English hegemonic approaches toward the education of MLLs, strong and diversity-oriented teacher advocacy is vital. 18 Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Knowledge of MLLs and their Community Teachers of linguistically diverse classrooms should have knowledge and awareness of language and cultural diversity including language contact, shift, loss or isolation (Fillmore & Snow, 2000; Menken & Antunez, 2001) and of the interconnectedness of language, culture, and identity (Lucas & Villegas, 2013). They should be able to (1) identify the language attitudes in their immediate teaching environments and the broader societies, (2) question the hierarchization of language as “standard vs. nonstandard” or speakers as “native vs. nonnative”, and (3) understand the harmful consequences of such ideologies on the education of MLLs (Faltis, 2014; Fillmore & Snow, 2000). When it comes to their individual classrooms, teachers need skill sets for learning about the linguistic, cultural, and academic backgrounds of the learners and their communities in order to use this knowledge to inform their teaching (De Jong et al., 2013; Lucas & Villegas, 2013). This sociocultural and sociolinguistic dimension emphasizes teachers’ general and classroom-specific knowledge of multiculturalism and plurilingualism, which is essential for incorporating CMLA-oriented teaching in their classrooms. Knowledge of L1/L2 Acquisition and Dynamic Bilingualism Teachers of linguistically diverse classrooms should understand that the language development of their MLLs does not fit in the norms of monolingualism-informed language acquisition theories or research; rather, they develop dynamic, translanguaging communicative repertoires (García & Li Wei, 2014). Faltis and Valdés (2016) observe that there are two main approaches to L1 and L2 acquisition with different, if not incompatible, theoretical frameworks. The first approach posits that language acquisition is “biological, residing innately in the human brain” (p. 568); the other approach contends that language is culturally transmitted through communicative interactions which requires an integration of cognitive and sociocognitive skills 19 of intention reading and pattern finding (p. 568) but is not genetically coded “universal grammar” in the brain. It is the socially oriented position that teachers should adopt while knowing the different positions on language as well as “the implications that these different views have on the teaching and learning in classrooms as social settings” (Faltis & Valdés, 2016, p. 567). Knowledge of language acquisition as a social process – where one becomes a user of a language and of dynamic bilingualism – is key to developing teachers’ understandings of how language separation, monolingualism, and nativespeakerism are socially constructed and thus socially changeable. Knowledge and Skills for Integrating Language and Content Instruction Knowledge and skills for integrating language and content instruction emphasize teacher’s awareness, knowledge, and skills related to the role of language as it inhabits all aspects of the curriculum, teaching and learning activities (Faltis & Valdés, 2016). Specifically, and as mentioned earlier, teachers should have: • understandings of the critical role of language as a medium of instruction; and • the ability to identify language demands and model linguistic features of a disciplinary discourse and related instructional activities; and • skills for scaffolding, assessing student development in interpreting, interacting, and presenting meaning of content through language of a discipline (Bunch, 2013; Faltis & Valdés, 2016; Galguera, 2011; Lucas & Villegas, 2011; 2013; Fillmore & Snow, 2000; Turkan et al., 2014). Teachers’ ability to scaffold language for learning subject matter is key to this dimension. Based on sociocultural theory, Walqui (2006) discusses six types of scaffolding to use for MLLs: modeling tasks and language use, bridging prior knowledge and new concepts, contextualizing 20 disciplinary language, building schema, re-presenting text and developing metacognition. Importantly, the notion of disciplinary discourse in this dimension departs from the notion of academic language or cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) (as opposed to basic interpersonal communication skills/BICS). Proposed by Cummins (1979), academic language/CALP has been repeatedly criticized for its vague and varied definitions, and its deficit-orientation easily leading teachers to draw “environmental explanations” (Faltis & Valdés, 2016, p. 572); such explanations, Faltis and Valdés (2016) add, lay blame on the lack of input from student homes when their MLLs experience difficulty in using disciplinary discourses. Guided by a critical stance toward the notion of academic language, teacher educators can still utilize useful components from approaches such as the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA; see Chamot & O’Malley, 1996) and Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP; see Echevarria et al, 2006) that offer instructional strategies for teachers to scaffold disciplinary language development. This dimension aligns with CMLA in the sense that it takes the stance that content and language development are equally important for MLLs and it rejects deficit framing of students’ emerging bilingualism. 21 Figure 2.1 A Proposed Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs 22 Chapter 3 Research Methodology All reflective inquiry starts from a problematic situation, and no such situation can be settled on its own terms. — John Dewey In this chapter, I detail my research methodology. I start with my pilot study, including how I designed it and what was learned from it. Contextual information of the researched ESL teacher education program was also accounted for in the pilot study section. I then present the research design, methods of data collection, and methods of data analysis for the focal study. Contextualizing the Study In this section, I contextualize the study from perspectives. I first state my researcher’s positionality. Then I ‘historicize’ this study through my angling process at the initial stage of the research. According to Dyson and Genishi (2005), angling means that researchers decide, amongst ample possibilities, which story to tell and how to tell it based on their intellectual, personal interests and local specificities of the research site. Angling on-going, allowing the researchers to adjust the case as they develop their knowledge of the site and the data (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). Researcher’s Positionality I believe equity-oriented and asset-based language education can conduce tolerance of diversity and appreciation of shared humanity across social groups. For this reason, I dedicate my work to nurturing educators who understand, celebrate, and leverage plurilingualism in their teaching and who understand culture as dynamic, plural, and interactive in the global world. I did not come to this study from a ‘neutral’ place. My inquiry came from “a problematic situation” (Dewey, 1929, p. 189) that I sensed in ESL teacher preparation curriculum through interactions 23 with preservice teachers. My interpretation of the situation as “problematic” came from my scholarly commitment to linguistic equity in schools and societies. I see language standardization that privileges certain language(s) or variation(s) in multilingual/multidialectal societies as a means of social control, often through schooling. I am classified on my Hukou5 as a member of Han Zu, the dominant ethnic group in China. I was schooled in Mandarin Chinese, the standard language of China by law. In my schooling experience, the history of China was the history of Han. I was told that Han built a higher civilization, thus everyone else assimilated into it. The presence of ethnic minority groups was collapsed into one chapter of my history books or featured in chapters about certain regions in my geography books. Diversity unified under Han was the dominant discourse. I did not question why Han was righteous in every war against another ethnic group in history. I did not question the absence of ethnic minority cultures and languages in spaces I was in. I did not question the mocking accent of ethnic minority speakers on national TV. Such is the power of schooling. Yet, it was through more education that the oxymorons became visible to me. For the researcher-me, a problem-oriented stance means to problematize the reproductive power of educational systems through normalizing linguistic, cultural dominance and oppression. I was born into a family of migrant workers with middle school education and educated at a highly under-resourced K-9 school in rural China. I experienced a schooling system that treated my mother tongue as inferior to the official Mandarin Chinese language and a curriculum normalizing the lives of middle-class city families. It took me a long journey to relearn my pride in my roots and the abundance of knowledge surrounding me growing up in a mountainous farming village. However, the science involved in planting and harvesting, the social webs 5 Hukou is the household registration system in mainland China. The system identifies each family as a unit and the Hukou book indicates the name, registered address, date of birth, marital status, ethnicity of each family member. 24 within the village, the old stories of the mountains around us, or the ancient tongue spoken to tell the stories, was treated as subordinate to the school curriculum. It is these experiences that inspire me to contribute knowledge to linguistically responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies through my research and teaching. My view of linguistic equity is entangled. In a society where linguistic dominance is established structurally and culturally, linguistic equity means that minoritized speakers should have access to the dominant language. Meanwhile, if linguistic dominance is to be changed, linguistic equity must go beyond access to the codes of power and toward plurilinguaism. The irony, as I am writing now, is that my words are reaching you because English serves as our lingua franca, but my words are also confined to English because it's the institutionally accepted language practice, the dominant language of knowledge production (Mignolo, 2012) in our current state of being. I find my writing and my research in entanglements as such. Thus, it is the social dilemmas, contradictions, uncertainties of language and language education that I inquire about as an educational researcher. My thinking in this research was influenced by pragmatism and interactionism. Pragmatists assume that knowledge is created through acting and interacting of self-reflective beings (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Interactionists study “how we use and interpret things as symbols to communicate with each other, how we create and maintain a self that we present to the world and a sense of self within us, and how we create and maintain the reality that we believe to be true” (Cole, 2020, para 3.). I took interest in the coming-into-being of the “problematic situation” through my interactions with preservice teachers in my class. But I was more interested in the ‘becoming’ of this situation. If knowledge is created through action and interaction, I view it fruitful to center 1) the actions of instructors in the studied ESL teacher 25 education program and 2) their interactions with their many inner selves, with the curriculum, and with societal discourses. With the methodological choices of this research, I aimed to create spaces where the participants and I co-constructed meanings by engaging with the “problematic situation”. Our ways of knowing were relational to the cultures of the social and academic groups that we were socialized into, which also sparked my researcher curiosity. That’s why this research put emphasis on disciplinary knowledge — its traditions, reflections, and futures. The acting and meaning making of the instructors in the process to create and maintain a reality in alignment with their cultural values, created new understandings of the “problematic situation”. The accumulation of new understandings shall aid our acting and interacting in the ‘becoming’ of the situation. Last, I will discuss my ethical considerations as a researcher (Mortensen & Kirsch, 1996). First, my primary concern is that my research does not cause any harm. I have stated that my researcher stance was “problem-oriented” but I am aware that this approach must be exercised with caution to prevent adopting deficit-based orientations at any stage of the research process. As a researcher and participant observer of the ESL teacher education program I examined, I participated in teaching and curriculum development for the Practicum course in the K-12 teacher education department (see more descriptions of the courses in the next section). I acknowledge that my initial understandings of the program were influenced by my involvement in this particular course. To mitigate this limitation, I used the pilot study to speak with faculty supervisors from the other collage, seeking insights into the past, present, and future of the three TESOL courses. I bracketed my judgements during these conversations, sharing my curiosity of their side of the stories, challenges, and hopes. When reporting this study, I took care not to frame the participants in a deficit-oriented manner. Therefore, while I am interested in 26 identifying problems, I consider it counterproductive to assign blame. Hence, I highlighted the participants’ interactions with the problems, including the constraints they could not overcome in the given context and the affordances they employed to resolve perceived issues. My intention is that with knowledge of the situatedness of the participants’ actions and decisions, readers of this research report will approach their judgments with consideration and avoid hasty conclusions. Second, I value a mutual beneficial relationship between my research and the researched. After gaining insights of the programmatic curriculum, I shared my knowledge with faculty supervisors and instructors at meetings and in private conversations. Furthermore, to some extent, this research per se served as a platform for cross-departmental curricular dialogues, which proved much needed for the program to move forward. Casing the Joint: The Pilot Study “Casing the joint” is the starting point for case studies as researchers explore potential research sites to map its “configurations of time and space, of people, and of activity” (Dyson & Genishi, 2005, p. 20), which in turn will further inform their design of the project in terms of what questions to engage with and what data should and can be collected (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). With a vaguely shaped “problem” in mind, I designed my pilot study which I started in summer 2020. Because my interest was to explore not only the what of ESL teacher education curriculum but also the how and why of it, my pilot study also included a policy component, assuming that state standards played a significant role in how university programs developed their curriculum. Thus, my research questions for the pilot study were: 1. What are the competing discourses represented in Michigan Standards for the Preparation of Teachers of English as a Second Language (2017)? 27 2. At the university teacher preparation level, how is the policy interpreted and how does the policy interact, align and compete with contextual discourses? 3. How do ESL teacher candidates interpret this policy and how does the policy interact, align and compete with their classroom discourse? There were two important contexts for these research questions. First, Michigan Standards for the Preparation of Teachers of English as a Second Language (from hereon referred to as Michigan ESL teacher standards) was approved by the Michigan State Board of Education in February 2017. After its approval, Michigan Department of Education (MDE) required all Michigan ESL teacher preparation programs to realign their programs with the updated standards. In 2018, programs submitted applications that demonstrated alignment (if misalignment existed, a plan for improvement was included) between program and the updated standards. Programs were given five years to gather data on their implementation of the 2017 standards and would seek final approval during these years. In addition, in Michigan, an ESL teacher certificate must attach to a content area teacher certificate, thus called an endorsement. This meant the primary goal for PSTs in ESL teacher education programs was to be prepared to teach in general education classrooms. Second, this researched ESL teacher preparation program is at a public university in Michigan. At the time of the pilot study, this program just went through the 2017 standards realignment and program reapplication process. In total, there were six courses in this program. They were (department and course names are pseudonyms): ● College of Education: K-12 teacher education department (TE) ○ #1 ESL Endorsement Practicum ● College of Arts and Letters: Language and linguistics department 28 ○ TESOL program (TESOL) ■ #2 Pedagogical Grammar ■ #3 Second Language Learning ■ #4 Methods of Teaching English ○ #5 Introduction to Linguistics ● College of Social Science: Anthropology department ○ #6 Anthropology of Language and Culture PSTs were required to complete this set of 24-credit courses and 30 hours of clinical experiences in K-12 ESL classrooms. Among the six courses, courses #1 through #4 were designed for ESL teachers but courses #5 and #6 were not designed with teacher candidates in mind. Course #2, #3, #4 were housed in an independent unit in the language and linguistics department at the time, which I shall call the TESOL program. My study ended up focusing on course #1 to #4 for two reasons. One, based on teacher candidate interviews, they found little connection between courses #5 and #6 to teaching. Two, faculty supervisors and instructors of these two courses were not accessible for interviews. In the reminder, I refer to course #1, #2, #3, and #4 as Practicum, Grammar, SLA, and Methods respectively. The pilot study was inductive in nature and offered abundant contextual information about the program. The sets of data I collected were summarized in Table 3.1. See Appendix A for interview protocols used in the pilot study. Table 3.1 Pilot Study Data Collection (Summer 2020) Research Data Collected Question RQ 1 Policy documents: ● 2004, 2017 Michigan ESL teacher standards ● Michigan Test for Teacher Certification study guide: Field 126 ESL Interview: ● One policymaker involved in making the 2017 standards 29 Table 3.1 (cont’d) RQ 2 Documents: ● ESL endorsement program application of the studied program ● Course #1 to #4 syllabi Interviews: ● Two standards realignment workgroup members ● Four faculty supervisors of course #1 to #4 ● One instructor who taught course #1 ● One PhD student instructor who taught course #2, #3, #4 RQ 3 Artifacts: ● Teacher candidate coursework in course #1 Interviews: ● Three teacher candidates who completed the program Classroom Observations: ● Did not happen due to prolonged Covid-19 pandemic I analyzed these data with open coding (Saldaña, 2013). Amongst all the knowledge I gained about the standards and the program from the pilot study, the following four aspects were important for reshaping the study. First, the standards committee did not want the standards to have too much language about advocacy but to focus on classroom practices, which was reflected in the standards. However, teacher educators from TE in this study tried to underscore content about advocacy in course #1. Second, conversations about courses were absent but desired by faculty course supervisors from both TE and TESOL. Although courses #2, #3, #4 were primarily populated by PSTs affiliated with TE, TESOL had full control of their course contents. Third, teaching responsibilities of courses #1 through #4 were shouldered by PhD students studying teacher education (TE instructors) or second language acquisition (TESOL instructors). Faculty supervisors did not always teach the courses or know course contents as well as PhD student instructors. 30 Fourth, because PhD students’ scholarships were heavily influenced by their academic advisors and the intellectual conventions of the program they’re in, these instructors approached language education in theoretically varied ways. Some focused on critical and social perspectives and others focused on cognitive-linguistic perspectives. Instructors always shaped course curricula based on their scholarships. Going back to the research questions of my pilot study, which had a strong interest in competing discourses, the polit study suggested 1) a contradiction in the standards between educational equity discourse and deemphasizing teacher advocacy, and 2) a discrepancy in the programmatic curriculum between plurilingual and English-monolingual oriented pedagogies. Therefore, the “problematic situation” that was vaguely shaped at the outset of the pilot study showed a silhouette. It became clear that from state standards to the program curriculum, to each individual instructor’s classroom, divergent understandings in what an ESL education curriculum should entail existed. Further, my assumption that state standards had a significant impact on the how and why of universities’ ESL teacher education curriculum was not supported by data from the researched program. This program was approved as already aligned with the updated standards and no significant changes were made in the realignment process. TE faculty and instructors had a different philosophy from the standards in terms of how much teacher advocacy should be emphasized. The standards in general reflected a focus on methods (Seltzer, 2022), namely, classroom teaching practices and strategies. TE instructors posited that methods and strategies were not sufficient for ESL teacher education and the curriculum should address relations of language, power, and identity. What’s more, except for a few, TESOL faculty and instructors were not aware of the state standards. In fact, when I treated course faculty supervisors and 31 instructors as top-down and bottom-up influences respectively, top-down influence on course curricula was relatively small during the time frame of this study (summer 2020 to summer 2020). Individual PhD student course instructors had a lot of say in how they wanted to approach the courses. Following the leads in my pilot study, I decided to foreground the programmatic curriculum and instructors’ bottom-up curricular work while backgrounding the policy component. Getting on the Case: The Design of the Study A programmatic curriculum and instructors’ curricular work still had a plethora of stories that can be told. To further construct the case, I delved into the literature in hope of finding scholarship to shed light on the divergences in what knowledge, skills, and dispositions teachers of MLLs should have. The nature of this pursuit meant that I needed to synthesize. As a result, I developed the five-dimensional Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs presented in the Chapter 2. In an ongoing process of data collection and data analysis, the central dimension of this framework, Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) proved the most illuminating of divergences in the curriculum. Again, CMLA has four tenets: Knowledge of Language, Knowledge about Language, Pedagogical Practices, and what I call Language Activism. My hypothesis was that certain knowledge addressing the first three tenets lacked social- and multilingual-lenses and thus attenuating Language Activism in this ESL teacher preparation programmatic curriculum. In the end, I reached my refined research questions: 1. To what extent is CMLA integrated into course contents in a university-based ESL teacher preparation program? 2. How do instructors negotiate space in the curriculum for Language Activism? 32 With these research questions, I focused on the “integrating” rather than “addressing” of CMLA programmatically and on instructors’ curricular work. I interviewed seven instructors of course #1 through #4, who were PhD students at the time when they were teaching in this program. I recruited these participants through emails and I knew the broad scholarly focus of the majority of them. Therefore, my choice of participants was impacted by my own scholarly interests which influenced the spaces I was in and the individuals I had direct or indirect connections with. Dyson and Genishi (2005) posits that a detailed case, though deeply contextual, bridges people’s meaning making in everyday particularities (e.g., a social event, a mundane practice) to abstract phenomena in the wider societal context (e.g., identity, ideology, social structure). While my study centered on one ESL teacher education program, my goal was not merely to describe the particularities of this site; rather, I sought to understand the phenomenon of ESL teacher preparation against the backdrop of conflicting language ideologies (i.e., monolingualism vs plurilingualism; see de Jong, 2016) in US schools and the society. Gathering Particulars: Methods of Data Collection The primary sources of data for this study were interviews, curricular materials, and fieldnotes. As aforementioned, my summer 2022 data collection focused on seven course instructors. I conducted a semi-structured interview with each instructor and collected their version of course syllabi. In addition, I asked them to share three to five representative students’ course assignments. I wrote fieldnotes after each interview and initial analysis of curricular materials. The Participants Below are short bios of the seven instructors (see Table 3.2 for a summary) that I interviewed, ordered by their appearance in Chapter 4 and 5. They were all former instructors of 33 their corresponding course(s). By the time of the interviews, Angela and Hillary already graduated from their doctoral study and the other five instructors were yet to complete their programs. Angela and Hillary, in addition to their roles as course #1 instructors, did the realignment of this program with the 2017 Michigan ESL teacher standards. Hence, they had insights of the programmatic curriculum. They were interviewed using the second sets of protocols in Appendix B that focus on the whole program while other five instructors were interviewed using the first sets of protocols in Appendix B focusing on individual courses. Angela was an instructor of the Practicum course. She is a PhD student in K-12 teacher education. Her scholarly interest is in bilingual education and culturally-sustaining school curriculum. She is an international scholar who identifies as Hispanic White and a woman of color in the US. She speaks Spanish, English and some Portuguese. She taught English to all age groups at public schools and private academies in her home country and taught Spanish in a secondary school in England. Josephine was an instructor of the Practicum course. She was a PhD student in K-12 teacher education. Her scholarly interest was in teachers’ language ideologies and shifting teacher’s monolingual ideologies and practices through teacher education. She is a US-born scholar who identifies as a racialized White, female. She speaks English and French. She taught English Language Arts and ESL classes in US urban and suburban schools to mostly language- minoritized students, including Black Language speakers and multilingual learners. Kim was an instructor of the SLA and Grammar courses. She is a PhD student in second language acquisition. Her scholarly interest is in second language vocabulary learning. She is an international scholar who identifies as Asian, female. She speaks English and Chinese. She did not have K-12 teaching experience. 34 Luke was an instructor of the Grammar and SLA courses. He is a PhD student in second language acquisition. His scholarly interest is in language learner identities, language teacher identities, and multilingualism. He is a US-born scholar who identifies as White, male. He speaks English, Spanish. He did not have K-12 teaching experience and taught Spanish language classes at college level and tutored refugee students in community ESL programs in the US. Ruth was an instructor of the Practicum course. She is a PhD student in K-12 teacher education. Her scholarly interest is in multilingualism, adult literacy, and antiracism education. She is a US-born scholar who identifies as a White cisgender woman. She speaks English and Spanish. She taught at a bilingual high school in Honduras and then at two urban middle schools (one all-Black and one bilingual) in the US. Hillary was an instructor of the Practicum course. She was a PhD student in K-12 teacher education. Her scholarly interest is in bilingual children’s biliteracy development. She is a US- born scholar who identifies as White, female. She speaks English, Spanish. She taught at mainstream elementary and Spanish-English dual language immersion schools in the US. Leo was an instructor of the Methods course. He is a PhD student in second language acquisition. His scholarly interest is in language learners with disabilities and language policy. He is a US-born scholar who identifies as Hispanic, male. He speaks English and Spanish. He taught in elementary classrooms with ESL learners in the US. Table 3.2 Instructor Bio Summary Course(s)/ Prior Teaching Pseudonym Scholarly Focus Languages Other Experiences bilingual education and Spanish, Secondary English Angela Practicum culturally sustaining English and Spanish as school curriculum Portuguese additional language 35 Table 3.2 (cont’d) Practicum teachers’ language English English Language Josephine Standards ideologies French Arts and ESL realignment Grammar second language Chinese No other Kim SLA vocabulary learning English experiences language learner College Spanish and Grammar identities, language English Luke community ESL SLA teacher identities, and Spanish program multilingualism multilingualism, adult English Mainstream and Ruth Practicum literacy, and antiracism Spanish bilingual secondary education Mainstream and Practicum bilingual children’s English dual language Hillary Standards biliteracy development Spanish immersion realignment elementary language learners with Mainstream English Leo Methods disabilities and language elementary with Spanish policy MLLs The Interviews Participants were sent a copy of the Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs prior to the interview. The interviews were semi-structured, and the questions focused on: 1) participant’s professional backgrounds and scholarly interests, 2) mapping each course or programmatic curriculum with the framework, and 3) reimagining the course or the programmatic curriculum in relation to the framework under the scenario that all constraints were taken away. The first group of questions threw light on the subjectivity of each instructor which contextualized their interpretations of the framework and their curricular work. The second group of questions led conversations to the gaps and overlaps between the course contents and the framework. The third groups of questions attended to the instructor's sense- making of their agency given the constraints and affordances they perceived in their curricular spaces. 36 During the interviews, participants were prompted to use Jamboard for the second and third groups of questions. Jamboard is a digital whiteboard developed by Google that allows collaborations in real time, thereby aiding the conversations visually. I created two Jamboard pages with images of the knowledge framework at the center and prompts at top left corners. Page one asked the participants to post about their comments, questions, and recommendations for the knowledge framework based on their reading of it; page two asked them to map their course curriculum before and after their revision with the framework. Figures 3.1 and 3.2 are examples of the two pages after Luke edited them. The participants primarily used the post-it note function of Jamboard and some used the drawing function. Figure 3.1 Jamboard Page One: The CMLA Framework 37 Figure 3.2 Jamboard Page Two: Mapping CMLA with the Curriculum Informed by animated interviews (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011), I treated myself and my interviewees as co-constructors in the knowledge constructing projects of interviewing. Neither is the interviewer a neutral interrogator and the interviewee a passive vessel-of-answers, nor is the interview “a neutral conduit for converting undistorted knowledge” (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011, p. 152). This meant that I was not merely a reader of pre-written questions or an impersonal listener but an engaged participant conscious to providing an environment conducive to emergent forms of responses and narratives of range and complexity. For instance, at times my interviewees crossed the interviewer-interviewee boundary and asked me questions. At times I probed at specific aspects of the respondents’ experiences and encouraged storytelling. I offered sympathy to difficult emotions brought up in the stories. Interviewing as a knowledge constructing project meant that I was not only interested in the respondents' prior knowledge but also their new thinking enabled and influenced by the process of animated interviewing. For example, the third group of interview questions asked the participants to radically reimage the 38 course or programmatic curriculum in an ideal world, creating a space where the instructors could reassess the boundaries of their agency. All interviews were conducted on Zoom and recorded. I decided to use Zoom because COVID-19 was still a health threat in summer 2022. Using Zoom for interviews has its benefits and concessions (Oliffe et al., 2021). Some concerns for Zoom interviews are: being there differently for interviewers and interviewees, internet connectivity issues, unplanned environmental noises or disruptions (Oliffe et al., 2021). My interviews were in general not impacted by connectivity or environmental issues. In addition, all my participants and I had been taking courses, teaching, and socializing through Zoom regularly since the spring of 2020, hence familiar with navigating the space for academic and personal use. On average, each interview was around ninety minutes and in English. I used Otter.ai 6, a speech to text transcription web application, to assist my audio transcribing. Interviews were transcribed verbatim but minor changes were made in cases where clarity was affected. For example, at times speakers repeatedly used the same fillers in one sentence, which reflected that they were thinking while speaking, and the verbatim transcription was not reader friendly. In this case, I deleted some of the fillers in the sentence when transcribing. Furthermore, when needed for data analysis, I transcribed audible non-verbal languages, including laugh, tone of speech, and stress of certain words. Curricular Materials Curricular materials I collected in this round included each instructor’s version of course syllabus and the previous version of the syllabus they were handed. I asked them to share five 6 Otter.ai is a Mountain View, California-based technology company that develops speech to text transcription applications using artificial intelligence and machine learning (Wikipedia: Otter.ai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otter.ai). 39 representative students’ course assignments that they believed reflected student learning in the course. Some instructors also shared their slides, supplemental readings, assignment handouts, exams, and video lectures (summarized in Table 3.3). In addition, I collected textbooks (all published books, see Table 3.4) used for each course. These curricular materials, although ended up not used as my primary data, were critical background for this case. I analyzed them to better understand the instructors’ interpretations of their courses and the programmatic curriculum. Table 3.3 Summary of Curricular Materials Prior Revised Representative Instructor Other Syllabus Syllabus Student Work Josephine   PowerPoint slides, Kim    supplemental reading, Recorded videos, exams PowerPoint slides, Luke    supplemental reading, Recorded videos Ruth    PowerPoint slides Hillary   Leo    Angela    PowerPoint slides Table 3.4 Course Textbooks Course Textbooks Instructor Book Choice The translanguaging classroom: Leveraging student bilingualism for Hillary and Angela introduced learning. (2017). García, O., these two textbooks to the Johnson, S. I., & Seltzer, K. Practicum course supervisor in summer Rethinking Bilingual Education: 2017 and they were Welcoming home languages in our subsequently adopted classrooms. (2017). Barbian E., Gonzales G, & Mejia P. Grammar for teachers: A guide to American English for native and Grammar No change non-native speakers. 2nd Ed. (2017). DeCapua, A. 40 Table 3.4 (cont’d) Luke used instead: How languages are learned. 4th Key topics in second language Ed. (2013). Lightbown, P. & Spada, acquisition. (2014). Cook, V. N. & Singleton, D. SLA Introducing Second Language Introducing second language Acquisition. 3rd Ed. (2017). Saville- acquisition: Perspectives and Troike, M., & Barto, K. practices. (2014). Hummel, K.M. Reading, writing, and learning in ESL: A resource book for teaching K‐12 English Learners. 7th Methods No change Ed. (2017). Peregoy, Suzanne F. & Boyle, Owen F. Methods of Data Analysis For clarity of writing, I divided this methodology chapter into: Casing the Joint, Getting on the Case, Gathering Particulars, and Constructing Assertions, but the research process in actuality was rather messy. The process involving research design, data collection, and data analysis was not linear because researchers’ questions and the data themselves both shape the analytical process (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). Using Dyson and Genishi’s (2005) metaphor, case study researchers piece data into a patterned ‘quilt’ through an interpretive and reflexive analytical process. After the initial open-coding analysis, my interview data suggested methods of narrative analysis as illuminative, which I combined with analytical tools from critical discourse analysis. Yet, my study was not narrative inquiry research but case study research utilizing some methods of narrative inquiry for data analysis. I combined methods of short story analysis (Barkhuizen, 2016; 2020) and small story analysis (Georgakopoulou, 2015; Gray & Morton, 2018) because storytelling was commonly seen in my interview data. I kept all the stories as they were told. For transparency, there were 41 three ways that I altered the original data for excerpts used in Chapter 4 & 5. One, when some lines could be deleted without affecting the meaning of the excerpts to cut down the length. Two, when the same topics were discussed by the participant at multiple places of the interview, I replaced some lines in one coherent narrative with lines expressing the same meaning but better articulated from another place. Third, I deleted lines when they might draw negative interpretations of the participant or their curricular work if read out of context. Methods developed in Fairclough’s (2003) critical discourse analysis (CDA) were used for analyzing interview and text data. These textual analysis tools were illuminative of how meanings were constructed and what social relations or structures were realized (Fairclough, 2003) narratively or textually. These methods were aligned with the animated interview approach that I took. I did not view my interview data as “reality reports” but “experiential reality” (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011, p. 162) narratively constructed in collaboration with me. I was as interested in the substance of what was said as much as the process of how it was said. See a detailed discussion of how I used methods of narrative analysis and CDA in the Narrative Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis sections. Coding with MAXQDA2022 I began my data analysis reading through all data collected from the pilot study and the second round of data collection. Before coding, I used MAXQDA2022’s paraphrase function and divided each document into a series of smaller paraphrased units. In conjunction, I did open coding where I searched for coherences and contradictions in the data, highlighting segments that caught my attention. I wrote analytical memos (Saldaña, 2013) after reading each document. Figure 3.1 is a screenshot from the MAXQDA2022 software when the Paraphrase mode is on. 42 The right margin of the page shows my paraphrase of this paragraph and an Evaluation Code 7 “addressed sociopolitical dimension”. A section of this paragraph is highlighted in green, indicating further analysis should be given. Figure 3.3 A Screenshot of MAXQDA2022 The open coding process allowed me to immerse myself with the data and let the data speak for itself. Then, I developed a codebook (see Figure 3.2) based on the Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs for deductive coding. The inductive and deductive coding process were iterative and accompanied by analytical memo writing (Saldaña, 2013). In the end, I identified the interviews as my focal data and realized that many of the extracts contained story-telling narratives. Further, I connected the many codes and dots with two themes: multilingual- and social-orientations in language education. My analysis turned to focus on how the programmatic curriculum related to these orientations and on how the instructors’ negotiated the space between the curriculum and these two orientations. 7 Evaluation Code assigns judgment about the merit, worth or significance. 43 Figure 3.4 Codebook in MAXQDA 2022 Narrative Analysis “Narratives are how we make sense of what we know, what we feel and experience in the world in which we live” (Souto-Manning, 2014, p.162). We construct our personal identities and our perspectives of events in micro-level interactions where narratives are shared (Souto- Manning, 2014). I generated data on a spectrum of story form and non-story form (see Figure 3.2) from the interviews and analyzed them for content (what is said) and for interaction (how it is said). Short stories narrate experiences from the past or imagined future in a story-like forms, which embodies 1) common characteristic of a story: who/characters, when/time, and where/place and space, 2) an action, and 3) reflective or evaluative commentary portraying emotions or beliefs on the narrated experiences (Barkhuizen, 2020). Small stories fall toward the 44 non-story data side and are “snippets of often mundane talk in conversations which tell of past, current, imagined, or hypothetical events” (Barkhuizen, 2015, p. 100). Figure 3.3 Storied Data (Barkhuizen, 2020, p. 194) Short story analytical approach focuses on “the content of the story and the contexts in which that content is produced and interpreted” (Barkhuizen, 2016, p. 662). Small story analysis focuses on three levels: ways of telling, sites, and tellers (Georgakopoulou, 2015), among which ways of telling and tellers were relevant to my data. Ways of telling refers to the semiotics and verbal choices of a story embedding recurrent sociocultural practices; tellers refer to the participants as complex entities: communicators here and now, characters of the narratives, members of social and cultural groups, and individuals of specific biographies (Georgakopoulou, 2015). Importantly, my data extracts normally didn’t fall neatly under either category, so did the ways they were analyzed. In what follows, I give an example of analysis for content. Excerpt 5.2: I need to never forget this question this semester 1. Luke: the [Grammar] course 2. there was one unit or one part about prescriptive and descriptive grammar 3. I think language variation was talked about there 4. elsewhere in the course 5. it was just absent 6. I think I think as much as possible 7. I tried to go back to that idea 8. there was a comment a student made early in the course 45 9. a question that that the student asked on their initial survey 10. that really stuck with me 11. she said 12. if variation is the norm 13. why are we focusing so much on rules 14. I was like- I wrote that question down on a post it note 15. stuck it right on my desk 16. and I was like 17. I need to never forget this question this semester 18. because this is the big question 19. I guess what I came down to 20. in the videos that I made was 21. … (Describing videos, omitted for space) 22. and I would say in small ways I would come back to that idea 23. grammar social construct you know what I mean 24. so it was really hard to stay true to my value of diversity is the outcome 25. variation is the outcome Lines 1-5 gives the context of this narrative story: the Grammar course with a curriculum focused minimally on language variation. Lines 8-20 describes an event resulted from Luke introducing the notion of language variation into the context of the Grammar course. This event started with a student’s question, “if variation is the norm, why are we focusing so much on rules?”, followed by Luke’s actions. Luke’s initial action was writing the question down on a post-it note and sticking it on his desk; his follow-up action was creating a video explaining the 46 usefulness and problems of teaching grammar rules. In lines 22-25, Luke offers his reflective commentary to summarize this narrative event. He commented that: one, “in small ways”, he tried to tie the course content to the idea of language variation; two, generally he wasn’t able to “stay true” to his value of linguistic diversity in the context of this course. Next, I give an example of analysis for interaction. Excerpt 4.10: Our two departments need to work together 1. Ruth: we talked about this before 2. but the other barrier’s maybe being clear about what our students learn in their [TESOL] classes 3. and maybe working closer with that department on how we want to communicate 4. I think our two departments need to work together 5. in order for our students to say 6. okay here's this perspective and then here's this perspective 7. how am I going to develop my own understanding of language learning 8. I think that is another barrier 9. because our students get all like flustered by how we tell them 10. everything they learned in all of their (TESOL) classes in their entire minor is wrong 11. in one class 12. where we only meet one hour a week The teller is and instructor of the Practicum course, an emerging scholar invested in multilingual- and social-orientations of language education, and a former teacher of language-minoritized students. In lines 10, Ruth uses quantifiers indicating high quantity in contrast with “one” and “only” indicating low quantity in lines 11 and 12. Ruth did not actually told her students that 47 “everything” they have learned were wrong but explored dramatization to textually highlight this “barrier”. Critical Discourse Analysis Fairclough’s (2003) refers to discourses as “ways of representing aspects of the world – the processes, relations, and structures of the material world, the ‘mental world’ of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and so forth, and the social world” (p. 124). Genres, discourses, and styles (ways of acting, representing, and identifying) are three elements of an order of discourse which “can be seen as the social organization and control of linguistic variation” (p. 24) in particular areas of social life; genre/Action, discourse/Representation, and style/Identification correspond to relations with others, knowledge, and self, thus analyses of orders of discourse “bring a social perspective into the heart and fine detail of the text” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 28). For this study, I was particularly interested in the instructors’ relations with the curriculum and the knowledge it represented. CDA offers a rich set of textual analysis tools that bridge micro/internal textual relations with macro/external relations in the material and social world (Fairclough, 2003). Texturing, or the establishment of varied kinds of social relations in the process of meaning-making/text- making, was a useful analytical concept because I was interested in how the instructors’ constructed positions and relations in their narratives. Textual analysis was compatible with small story analysis, both interested in semiotic/verbal choices and their embedded sociocultural meanings. Souto-Manning (2014) posits that narrative analysis and CDA approaches complement each other and a combination of the two connects everyday narratives (micro-level positionings) with institutional discourses (macro-level power inequalities). In addition, CDA 48 methods were used to analyze curricular materials. Table 3.5 summarizes the analytical tools I employed. Table 3.5 CDA Analytical Tools Social Relation Examples of Texturing Semantic/Grammatical/Lexical Strategy relations Assumption The capacity to exercise social • Markers of definite reference power, domination and hegemony such as definite articles and includes the capacity to shape the demonstratives nature and content of a common • Verbs (e.g., realize, help) ground, what remains unsaid, • Textual absence ideology Classification Logics of difference/equivalence: • Relations between clauses creating and collapsing differences and sentences between objects, entities, groups of o Contrastive people etc. o Additive and elaborative Universalization A particular representation seeking • Relations of meaning dominance, hegemony inclusion (e.g., hyponymy) • Statement of fact Legitimization Explanations and justifications of • Reference to authority salient social, institutional elements • Moral evaluation • narrative Evaluation Value: what is good/bad, • Evaluative statements desirable/undesirable, important, • Evaluative adjectives/verbs useful etc. • Modality Below is an example of CDA analysis that illustrates how CDA could be used to analyze speakers’ positionalities and relations constructed in the conversation. Excerpt 4.2: I don’t know how compatible they are with translanguaging (Partial) 1. Celine: the other issue which is harder to deal with 2. that I hoped would be part of these conversations with the TE faculty is I do have concerns 49 3. if there's a little- there's a difference in sort of philosophy or understanding of second language acquisition [Mingzhu: um hmm] 4. the approaches I think are quite different 5. so I think I mentioned this to you last time 6. in some ways 7. I see sort of usage-based theory of acquisition and translanguaging at odds with each other 8. they don't have to be (laugh) A range of modality between Assertion/maximal commitment and Denial/minimal commitment is employed in Celine’s speech, signifying a reluctance to commit to this “difference” and a search for reconciliation. For example, in line 1 she brought up this issue with an evaluation “which is harder to deal with” indicating high level of commitment, but in line 8, she closes with a Denial “they don’t have to be”. In line 3, she starts with an modalized Assertion “there’s a little” but switches to an Assertion “there is a difference in”, immediately followed by a downtoning “sort of”. Similarly in line 4, she uses the modal adverbial “quite” that signifies high commitment to “different”, but then in line 5, she made a speech move to bring me, her interlocutor, into her monologue, followed directly by three downtoners in a row: “in some ways”, “I see”, “sort of” before asserting “usage-based theory of acquisition and translanguaging at odds with each other”. 50 Chapter 4 A Triple-Faceted Theoretical Disjuncture in the Program Curriculum A mapping (see Figure 4.1) of this ESL teacher preparation curriculum with Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) showed that at the program level, the curriculum addressed each tenet of CMLA: Knowledge of Language (user), Knowledge about Language (analyst), Pedagogical Practices of Language Teaching (teacher), and Language Activism (activist). This is a result of an inter-college and inter-discipline collaboration. This coming-together between the K-12 teacher education program (TE) and the TESOL program (TESOL) for ESL teacher education was natural because TE had the expertise in K-12 teaching and TESOL in English as a second language teaching. That said, a programmatic curriculum drawing from different academic disciplines required cross-disciplinary collaborations beyond – to use a cooking metaphor – throwing all ‘ingredients’ together. When my analysis moved from addressing CMLA to “integrating” CMLA, a theoretical disjuncture that partly compromised language activism in the programmatic curriculum arose. The ins and outs of this theoretical disjuncture is what I will piece together in this chapter. This disjuncture first revealed itself as a divergence of classroom language policy, that is, teachers of multilingual learners (MLLs) often must decide whether to adopt an English monolingual or a plurilingual language policy approach in their classrooms. While the Practicum course in TE promoted plurilingualism, the three courses in TESOL either reflected monolingualism or an ambivalent stance. Both TE and TESOL became aware that this issue warranted cross-departmental curriculum deliberation, but formalized channels of communication between the two colleges at the time of the study had yet to materialize. 51 Figure 4.1 Mapping the Program Curriculum and the Four Components of CMLA Further analysis revealed that the abovementioned disjuncture was triple-faceted: ideological, epistemological, and contextual. The ideological facet illuminated a disjuncture between monoglossic and plurilingual ideologies, which together informed knowledge about ESL teaching. For example, a discourse analysis of the Grammar course textbook revealed narratives that appeared to endorse monoglossic and raciolinguistic constructs that positioned some speakers of English as more legitimate than others. By contrast, in the Practicum course, translanguaging, a concept that challenged linguistic hierarchy, was emphasized. Given this somewhat ‘contradictory’ information being out by these courses, preservice teachers (PSTs) struggled to unlearn the idea that their classrooms should be English monolingual spaces. Second, the program curriculum showcased an epistemological disjuncture in SLA research. Course content in the three TESOL courses reflected the dominance of a cognitive-linguistic SLA (Ortega, 2019) perspective, which appeared to parallel the broader imbalance in the field itself. Thus, curricular space for the ‘social’ perspectives of SLA was insufficient. Third, a contextual disjuncture that complicated the appropriateness of knowledge produced in English as a foreign language (EFL) context for ESL teachers of K-12 classrooms was identified. My analysis illuminated that EFL often focused on international or domestic adult 52 English class settings, which are different from K-12 classroom settings with MLLs. The ideological, epistemological, and contextual facets of this theoretical disjuncture in tandem underscored a difference between ‘language-centered’ and ‘people-centered’ perspectives in research and pedagogy. With a language-centered approach to language teaching and learning, an English-only classroom language policy was acceptable because the English language was the point of departure for curriculum and pedagogy. However, this policy was unacceptable when learners, social and multilingual beings, were at the center of concern. I would like to reiterate that this theoretical disjuncture, which encompassed a clash ideology, epistemology, and context, meant that Language Activism was somewhat compromised in the program curriculum. And I would like to emphasize that this compromise was especially jarring because CMLA is social- and multilingual-oriented in nature. In the remainder of the chapter, I will account for each facet of this theoretical disjuncture in greater detail. 4.1 The beginning of an inquiry: English-only or Translanguaging My inquiry started with a curiosity about what knowledge, skills, and dispositions PSTs were exposed to on the TESOL side of the program because they reacted to the Practicum course with many laments along the lines of “Why didn’t I learn this before?”. One of the biggest challenges for PSTs was having to wrap their minds around the concept of translanguaging pedagogy. Importantly, their ways of interrogating such pedagogy made clear a monolingual vs plurilingual dilemma they were having difficulty grappling with. The story below, which exemplifies this struggle, was from Angela, a course instructor of Practicum for four semesters; she spoke about this ‘battle’ with translanguaging she felt when teaching this course. Excerpt 4.1: It felt like a battle 1. Angela: I remember students asking 53 2. how how can I use translanguaging in my class 3. if my students are trying to learn English 4. that was the most common question that they were asking 5. that it was contradictory 6. they were concerned about students not having the level of English they need to perform well or to pass exams 7. so how is how is translanguaging going to help students develop their English proficiency 8. so I think it was- it felt like a battle 9. at the beginning 10. there was a lot of a lot of pushback 11. at the beginning 12. and it also took a lot of- it demanded a lot of energy from me 13. to just address those comments 14. this experience was also something new for me 15. I had never had students challenging the course content 16. and I felt that they did to some extent 17. they did some of them did 18. Mingzhu: how do you address that type of questions 19. Angela: yeah I was trying to be in conversation with them 20. but it was a whole process 21. in their assignments 22. we had a column for students to kind of share what concepts they were struggling with 23. or what were their thoughts 54 24. so we were keeping track of their thought process 25. I think that was a space 26. where I mostly answer back to students’ responses 27. because they were reacting to the content that we were giving them 28. they were being told that they had to expose students to the (target) language 29. usually interpreted as only speak in English 30. in you know another college 31. and then in our college or our department 32. they were hearing something different 33. teachers don't need to ban or prohibit students from using their home languages 34. even when they're developing their English 35. so I think that was the major discrepancy across colleges 36. so I think that's definitely definitely an area that needs to be reconciled According to Angela, when introducing translanguaging to her class, the most common question from PSTs was “how can I use translanguaging in my class, if my students are trying to learn English” (lines 2-3). A common concern from PSTs was that if they used translanguaging pedagogy, their students would not develop English proficiency or pass exams (lines 6-8). Through this way of questioning, PSTs positioned translanguaging pedagogy in opposition to developing students’ English proficiency and preparing them to pass standardized tests. Moreover, these questions revealed that English proficiency and tests were considered top priorities that dictated the pedagogical choices of an ESL teacher. In lines 28-34, two different classroom language policies were implied: one requires students to “only speak English”, and the other doesn’t “ban or prohibit students from using their 55 home languages”. Angela claims that this classroom language policy difference is “a major discrepancy across colleges” and for PSTs, this was deemed “contradictory”. As a result, “they were reacting to the content that we were giving them” by pushing back against translanguaging, which for Angela “demanded a lot of energy” to address and “felt like a battle”. Connecting back to PSTs construction of English Proficiency and tests as educational priorities for MLLs, this debate was beyond classroom language policies. Angela closes her story in line 36 by calling for a reconciliation of this discrepancy across the two colleges. Thus, these micro-level interactions between Angela and her students were inevitably connected to meso-level interactions of two colleges/academic disciplines. The excerpt below is a narrative event that centered this “discrepancy across colleges” between Celine and me. Celine was a faculty member in TESOL who was involved in the initial design of this ESL endorsement program. When TE and TESOL came together to develop the program curriculum, the plan was that TESOL courses covered theories and methods of second language teaching, and TE took charge of finding field placement in K-12 ESL classrooms coupled with a Practicum course. Translanguaging pedagogy was not part of the curriculum initially. In what follows, Celine and I contemplate the compatibility/discrepancy between a TE course that drew heavily on translanguaging and a usage-based SLA course. Excerpt 4.2: I don’t know how compatible they are with translanguaging 1. Celine: the other issue which is harder to deal with 2. that I hoped would be part of these conversations with the TE faculty is I do have concerns 3. if there's a little- there's a difference in sort of philosophy or understanding of second language acquisition 56 [Mingzhu: um hmm] 4. the approaches I think are quite different 5. so I think I mentioned this to you last time 6. in some ways 7. I see sort of usage-based theory of acquisition and translanguaging at odds with each other 8. they don't have to be (laugh) 9. I don't know if anybody's written about this 10. I think about it all the time [Mingzhu: um hmm] 11. if you think about sort of the principles that we teach 12. I don't know how compatible they are with translanguaging 13. and I've heard that that's a major focus in the college of ed 14. Mingzhu: would you like to elaborate on that 15. especially the philosophy of your side 16. Celine: well the usage based SLA really the focus is on frequency in the input 17. lots and lots of language input in the target language 18. and also authentic materials in the target language 19. communication in the target language 20. so I mean there is a little bit of a place for the students’ first language 21. but I think it's rather small [Mingzhu: um hm] 22. I don't know much about translanguaging 57 23. but my guess is that they're sort of more focused on identity- learner identity 24. um I don't know 25. um I mean it is important to respect the students’ native language 26. to promote the students’ native language 27. to promote multilingualism 28. that's all very very important certainly especially especially for children 29. we have to figure out a way to reconcile those two views 30. I don't know 31. I mean I could ask you what you think (laugh) 32. Mingzhu: um, I think both are important 33. I think the translanguaging perspective is important 34. because we do know a lot that identity affirmation is important. [Celine: right] [Celine: right right agree] 35. Mingzhu: at the same time 36. we also do need the teachers to know how to actually teach the language 37. Celine: um hm (laugh) exactly exactly yeah 38. Mingzhu: I don't’ know 39. I am trying to find out Celine opened this discussion about a “difference in sort of philosophy or understanding of second language acquisition”, which she considered a concerning issue. In line 3, I used overlapping talk to demonstrate a shared concern. In this co-narrated event, Celine and I represent ESL teacher educators from two different departments, but our awareness of a 58 theoretical disjuncture and our intention to converse are evident throughout. Let me elaborate by focusing on what Fairclough (2003) calls epistemic modality or author’s’ commitment to truth in lines 1-8 for a moment. A range of modality between an Assertion/maximal commitment and a Denial/minimal commitment is employed in Celine’s speech, thereby signifying a reluctance to commit to this “difference” and a search for reconciliation. For example, in line 1 she brought up this issue with evaluation “which is harder to deal with” indicating a maximal commitment; but in line 8, she closes with a Denial “they don’t have to be”. In line 3, she starts with an modalized Assertion “there’s a little” suggesting minimized commitment but switches to an Assertion “there is a difference in”, immediately followed by a downtoning “sort of” that reduces the level of commitment. Similarly in line 4, she uses the modal adverbial “quite” that signifies high commitment to “different”, but then in line 5, she made a speech move to bring me, her interlocutor, into her monologue, followed directly by three downtoners in a row: “in some ways”, “I see”, “sort of” before asserting “usage-based theory of acquisition and translanguaging at odds with each other”. In line 10, I used overlapping talk again to show engagement and in line 14, I encouraged her to fill me in with more information about usage-based SLA theories. In lines 15-20, Celine explains the central principle for usage-based SLA: maximizing target language input, which means the space for students’ “first language” is “rather small”. Comparing lines 15 and 22, she sees a difference in what is focused on between usage-based SLA and translanguaging: input vs learner identity. In lines 21-27, she expresses her attitude toward translanguaging, in particular its focus on learner identity. Respecting students’ “native language”and promoting multilingualism are underscored as key principles of translanguaging. Through this narrative, Celine positions herself as a supporter of these social- and multilingual- orientations. In line 28, she again points to the desire of “a conversation with the TE faculty”, 59 saying that we “have to figure out a way to reconcile those two views”. In lines 29-30, she invites me to a pseudo conversation. In lines 32-36, I assure my interlocutor of my collaborative attitude by asserting both bodies of knowledge are important. And in lines 38-39, I indicate that I share the same concern and the same uncertainty (“I am trying to find out”) about the issue to ally with Celine (e.g, “I think about it all the time”). Here, the issue moves beyond the course level and extends to the department level and disciplinary level. PSTs’ struggle with English-only vs plurilingual classroom language policy speaks to a divergence in “philosophy or understanding of second language acquisition” in the broad scholarship of second language teaching and learning (Auer, 2007; May, 2019). I employed the two stories above to showcase a theoretical disjuncture in this ESL program curriculum that ended up being central to my inquiry. This discrepancy reflected different – and to some extent opposing – theories of second language acquisition that informed PSTs of varied teaching approaches. Angela’s story made plain PSTs’ struggle accepting a plurilingual classroom language policy and teacher educators’ struggle working against English monolingual mindsets. Celine’s narratives highlighted the need for cross-departmental conversations, which was voiced by every participant I interviewed. I continued my inquiry with the intention to 1) better understand this theoretical disjuncture (Chapter 4), and 2) explore ways to reconcile it (Chapter 5). And as noted, I found that this disjuncture took on three facets: a monoglossic vs plurilingual ideological conflict in ESL teacher knowledge base, a cognitive-linguistic vs social epistemological difference in SLA research, and a contextual gap between EFL and K-12 ESL classrooms. 60 4.2 Layering a Theoretical Disjuncture In this section, I will analyze curricular materials and instructor narratives to detail the three layers of this theoretical disjuncture at the programmatic level. The difference in language ideologies, research epistemologies, and educational contexts in different courses meant that programmatically, the curriculum showed ambiguity toward Language Activism. This was because there was curricular space for plurilingualism, social perspectives of language teaching and learning, and K-12 ESL education, but the space was limited. It is important to note that my analysis in this chapter did not take into consideration instructors’ curricular work. There were instructors in this program whose teaching reinforced this disjuncture, and there were those who did curricular work that temporarily bridged the gap to varied degrees. The curricular work of the latter will be my focus in Chapter 5. In the next section I examine the ideological facet of this disjuncture in the curriculum. 4.2.1 Ideological Facet: English Monolingualism and Plurilingualism The curriculum drew on translanguaging pedagogy which challenged L1 and L2 separation and advocated for leveraging students’ home languages in the classroom. Translanguaging content also pushed PSTs to question the dominance of English in the educational system, and to see language competence in multilingual ways. Meanwhile, some course content in the program reiterated the standard vs nonstandard English and the native vs non-native speaker binaries. The former binary positioned White Mainstream English (Baker- Bell, 2020) as ‘correct’, and assumed its legitimacy in ESL spaces; the latter positioned White monolingual speakers as ‘native’ and assumed their superiority to ‘non-native’ speakers (Firth & Wagner, 1997). My analysis will illuminate the raciolinguistic (Flores & Rosa, 2015) nature of both constructs. 61 First, I share Josephine’s story which illustrates an alignment between translanguaging and Language Activism. Josephine was a graduate from this very ESL teacher education program under investigation. When she was in the program, translanguaging was not in the curriculum. When she returned to the TE department as a PhD student, she taught the Practicum course. She played an important role incorporating translanguaging pedagogy into the course. She explained that she “latched onto translanguaging” because of its emphasis on teachers' sociopolitical knowledge and its critical lens toward language teaching and learning, which she viewed as essential to her roles as a K-12 ESL teacher. Excerpt 4.3: I latched onto translanguaging 1. Josephine: those first experiences of teaching meant that I was always thinking about the micro level context of the classroom and my students I was teaching every day 2. the meso level dynamics of my school and district 3. and what I needed to do to be an advocate in that space 4. and then the macro level dimensions of the policies that I had to be aware of 5. and how to design programs around 6. so to that end 7. when I left the classroom 8. to start my PhD program 9. I came in wondering what is it that teachers need to know and be able to do 10. in order to more effectively support language-minoritized students 11. in ways that can be more equitable just and accessible 12. I think though that why I latched onto translanguaging like that was because one it was a language pedagogy that was very new for me 62 13. yeah it was very new for me 14. but it also was the first time I had encountered a language pedagogy that had a more sort of sociopolitical and critical turn 15. than all of the things I had learned previously in my TESOL minor 16. when I was at [university name] 17. as an undergrad 18. and then you know it ended up being the case that 19. like in order to take up translanguaging pedagogy 20. you have to be aware of the sociopolitical dimensions 21. you have to be aware of micro meso and macro level dimensions 22. so I think in some ways 23. like those early experiences as a teacher really shaped how I thought about language education In this story, Josephine tells the impact of her early experience as a K-12 ESL teacher in shaping her scholarly interest in how to prepare teachers for language-minoritized students. This pursuit drew her to translanguaging. In lines 1-5, she recaps her first-hand teaching experience and her thinking in micro, meso, and macro environments: the classroom context and the students, the dynamics of the school and district, and policies. Note the sociopolitical and advocacy foci of an ESL teacher’s thinking in this narrative. In lines 18-21, she reflects an alignment between translanguaging pedagogy and her thinking as an ESL teacher. Moreover, in lines 7-17, she shares a short story about why she “latched onto translanguaging”. After years of K-12 ESL teaching, Josephine left the classroom and started her doctoral study with a wonder. She wondered what qualities a teacher should have to provide 63 “equitable, just and accessible” education for “language-minoritized students”. When she encountered translanguaging, a very new language pedagogy for her, she “latched onto it” because of its “sociopolitical and critical turn”. Josephine’s timeline suggested that before translanguaging was introduced to this ESL program curriculum, content with sociopolitical and critical perspectives was somewhat missing or under emphasized. In this small story, Josephine constructs a close relation of translanguaging pedagogy with equitable and just teaching for MLLs, thus signaling a relation with Language Activism. However, the incorporation of translanguaging into the Practicum course was not without its challenges. Recall that with the initial design, the TESOL courses were for language teaching theories and methods, and the Practicum course was focused on K-12 clinical experiences. Integrating a complex pedagogy like translanguaging into Practicum, a course with little face-to- face instructional time, meant that discussion and modeling for the pedagogy was insufficient in the course. With translanguaging being a relatively new pedagogy, mentor teachers in PSTs’ clinical experience did not always model it either. All Practicum instructors echoed a concern about whether students understood and/or knew how to enact translanguaging pedagogy. Excerpt 4.4: Students do not really know how to enact translanguaging 1. Angela: there's a lot of theory 2. and students do not really know how to enact translanguaging 3. um and sometimes yeah sometimes their own mentor teachers do not engage in translanguaging 4. so in their clinical experience 5. they do not really see translanguaging 6. so there's a big gap there 64 7. between what we try to teach them 8. in the course 9. and then what they actually see 10. in practice 11. so it gives them the idea that it's something difficult to do 12. because other teachers are not really engaging in that 13. and that's part of the modeling that we were talking about before 14. I think our classes were mostly about explaining the assignments 15. rather than discussing the readings 16. yeah and that's a big problem 17. because we need to discuss the readings 18. and we need to provide some opportunities for students to engage in translanguaging 19. another thing is that students sometimes 20. because they don't speak another language 21. they only speak English 22. they feel like they themselves cannot translanguage 23. and I feel like they feel like outsiders 24. you know in a way like 25. what is going on 26. I don't really understand what translanguaging is about 27. because I have not really experienced it myself Angela explains the structural challenges for PSTs to understand and enact translanguaging. First, they did not always see their mentor teachers practice translanguaging; 65 thus, for many PSTs there was a discrepancy between their clinical experiences in K-12 classrooms and what they were taught at the university. In line 11, she posits that this discrepancy makes PSTs think translanguaging is difficult. Second, there was not enough time for the instructors to engage PSTs in extensive discussions or in experiencing translanguaging themselves. Third, in lines 19-27, Angela posits that many PSTs “don’t speak another language” other than English, and “they feel like outsiders” who “don’t really understand what translanguaging is about”. Angela’s observations were echoed by other Practicum course instructors. This course covered a lot more content than translanguaging pedagogy. It also included policies, assessments, standards, and backwards design in relation to K-12 classrooms. What would have helped with PSTs’ understanding and enactment of translanguaging pedagogy was other courses in the program expanding and building upon PSTs’ understanding of plurilingualism or translanguaging. Admittedly, there was some mention of multilingualism in the SLA course and some discussion of using students’ home language to connect with them affectively in the Methods course; but overall, English monolingualism dominated the program course contents. When I spoke with Sophie, the faculty supervisor for the Grammar course, she pointed out a central pedagogical principle of hers was ‘grammaring’ (Larsen-Freeman, 2003), a concept that moves the focus from knowing grammar to using grammar. While this concept of ‘grammaring’ or ‘grammar as a verb’ could open up curricular space to push back against the standard/nonstandard English binary, this concept was often not taken up by instructors of this course. In Luke’s words, judging by the course materials he was given, this course could be summarized as: “here are the rules and here are the mistakes that L2 speaker users will do” 66 (Luke’s Interview). The major knowledge input in this course was its textbook and its course instructor. Let me first analyze an excerpt from the course textbook, Grammar for Teachers (DeCapua, 2017) next. The course schedule below displays the topics and readings of each week, and it is apparent that the textbook was the primary/only reading material for this class. Figure 4.2 Grammar Course Schedule The main body of this textbook was eleven chapters of grammatical rules. In its first chapter, it introduces the idea of “Standard American English” and cautions ESL teachers to steer their students away from ‘nonstandard English’. The book’s distinction between standard and nonstandard English warrants a detailed analysis. For instance, examples a and b below are considered nonstandard: 67 Excerpt 4.5: Standard/nonstandard English (a) _____ Jackie says she don’t know if they can come. (b) _____ I’m not going to do nothing about that missing part. (p. 5) And the author gives the following explanations (emphasis added): 1. For many native speakers of American English, these two sentences represent forms of non-standard English and are considered markers of low socioeconomic and/or marginalized social status. 2. In other words, these are stigmatized (sic) language forms that are recognizable to the general population as “incorrect” American English in both spoken and written forms. 3. This is in contrast to the examples in Discovery Activity 1, where even highly educated speakers produce such sentences, except in the most formal contexts (p. 5). This excerpt reveals that the distinction between standard/nonstandard English constructs a hierarchy among different groups of English speakers based on race and class. In sentence 1, nonstandard English is juxtaposed with speakers from low socioeconomic and/or marginalized social status. What is identified here is class, but what is not said here is even more telling. Based on sentence a and b, it does not take much linguistic knowledge to know that this unnamed “marginalized social status” implies the racial marginalization of the Black and other racially minoritized speakers of English. Note that in sentence 1, English users of “low socioeconomic and/or marginalized social status” are subjected to the judgment of “many native speakers”, denying users of nonstandard English the native speaker identity, even if English is their first and only language. Hence, a discourse analysis of sentence 1 demonstrates that the native/nonnative 68 speaker binary on the basis of L1 vs L2 speaker difference was a myth. This binary is a raciolinguistic construction (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Sentence 2 takes as given that “the general population” is the jury of correctness of American English. It can be inferred that “the general population” is the dominant (White English monolingual) social group and those who identify with this group. Sentence 3 continues to give away the raciolinguistic nature of the standard/nonstandard or correct/incorrect distinction. Examples below are what the author refers to as “casual English” (p. 2): Excerpt 4.6: Casual English (a) _____ She had less problems with the move to a new school than she thought she would. (b) _____ She lays in bed all day whenever she gets a migraine headache. (p. 2) Despite also not conforming to rules, “casual English” were considered cases “in contrast to” “stigmatized language forms” that are not acceptable “in both spoken and written forms” (sentence 2). Because “even highly educated speakers produce such sentences”, they are acceptable with the only exception of “the most formal contexts”. When we consider which variety of English dominates the educational system, the veil of “Standard American English” is lifted and what we find is White Mainstream English (Baker-Bell, 2020). Notably, the textbook author avoided naming it (i.e., White Mainstream English) from sentence 1 to 3 but justified its standard-ness/correctness with reference to authoritative social groups/systems: native speakers/nativeness, the general population/dominance, and highly educated speakers/education. Table 4.1 provides a summary of this standard/nonstandard English distinction. 69 Table 4.1 Standard American English vs Nonstandard English Standard American English Nonstandard English • Native speakers • Non-native speakers, speakers from low socioeconomic and/or marginalized social status • The general population • Users of stigmatized language forms • Highly educated speakers • Less educated speakers • When not conforming to grammar • When not conforming to grammar rules: casual English rules: “incorrect” English The above table makes clear that ideologies reflected in the Grammar course textbook were at odds with a Language Activism agenda which seeks to change the current linguistic hierarchy that privileges the White, middle-upper class speakers of English. That said, instructors of the Grammar course can use the textbook strategically and challenge the idea that 1) there is an only and correct way to use English, and 2) native speakers embody the voice of authority. However, not all instructors took up this curricular reform. Below is a short story from Blake, a former teacher candidate in this program. He shared his criticism of the Grammar course and his instructor. Blake identifies as a white male. He is a simultaneous English-French bilingual speaker, born and raised in the US. This interview happened after he completed all coursework for the ESL endorsement and recently finished his Practicum course. Excerpt 4.7: This course was very black and white 1. Blake: this course (grammar) was very black and white 2. in the sense that it had very strict grammatical rules 3. and I would personally argue that this course definitely was the embodiment of how to speak correct Standard American English 4. there was no- there's nothing really in this course 5. that talked about African American vernacular English or like different dialects 70 6. so you know different emergent bilingual learners 7. in the sense of how to like cultivate a space 8. that was going to be allowing these kinds of learners to learn 9. you know this was a very textbook course 10. a very this is how the English language works 11. it was probably just because my professor 12. she just really like was very hard 13. and would look really deep into sentences 14. that could definitely be used as an example 15. but if you use like one little thing off 16. she would just just mark everything wrong 17. and then I just can remember 18. I remember sending her an email every single week (emphasis added) like 19. hey you mark this question wrong 20. but really this is like a perfect example 21. and sometimes she would give me points for it 22. and sometimes she'd be like 23. nope sorry 24. even though I felt like the examples I gave are perfectly valid In this story, Blake shares his experience with the Grammar course, which he considered “very black and white”, “very textbook” and “had very strict grammar rules”. He argues that this course is “the embodiment of how to speak Standard American English”. In lines 6-8, he claims that this course did not help him with knowing how to “cultivate a space” that would allow 71 emergent bilingual students to learn. In line 11, he starts a short story that illustrates how this was a “very textbook course”. This story focuses on his interactions with his course instructor who “was very hard” and “would just mark everything wrong”. For his weekly assignments where he was asked to write sentences that can be used as examples for grammar forms, he had a lot of disagreements with his instructor. In lines 18-23, he tells of a weekly email exchange where he argued for the correctness of his “perfect example” marked wrong by his instructor. He had varied successes getting points back from time to time. This negotiation is an example of the ongoing tensions between correctness and power. Blake perfectly fits the prototype of a “highly educated native speaker” who supposedly, uses “Standard American English”. Yet, his instructor had the final say of what was grammatically right or wrong as the latter was in a position of power in this interaction. In line 14, Blake ends the story standing by the correctness (“perfectly valid”) of his examples and by sharing this story: he narrates a different stance from the very-black-and-white-ness of his Grammar course and of his instructor. However, one can assume that there were PSTs who walked away from that class with a different stance, one that mimicked their instructor. As I have highlighted through analyzing excerpts from the course textbook and Blake’s narrative story, the curriculum of the Grammar course embodied English monolingualism and reflected two binaries (i.e., native vs nonnative speakers, standard vs nonstandard English). Crucially, these monoglossic and raciolinguistic ideologies conflicted with Language Activism and translanguaging pedagogy. Next, I turn to the epistemological difference underpinning this theoretical disjuncture. 72 4.2.2 Epistemological Facet: Cognitive-linguistic SLA and the Alternatives The curriculum of this program showed a domination of cognitive-linguistic SLA orthodoxy, and the subsequent marginalization of the social perspectives of language teaching and learning. The two narrative stories I discuss in this section demonstrate the misalignment of traditional cognitive-linguistic SLA research as well as the alignment of social perspectives of SLA with Language Activism. Drawing heavily from traditional cognitive-linguistic SLA, some course curricular materials failed to problematize the idea of nativelikeness or the evaluation of language learners against this yardstick. The narrative story below is from Kim, who was an instructor for the SLA course and a PhD student in the field of psycholinguistics, a subfield of cognitive-linguistic SLA. She described a relation between an emerging practice that problematized the use of ‘native-speaker’ as a benchmark in SLA research and a beginning of recognition of multilingualism in the field. Excerpt 4.8: They still use native-speaker as a benchmark 1. Kim: I guess in terms of research approach 2. the cognitive perspective might take a different approach than the sociocultural approach 3. but I don't think they are necessarily against each other 4. I think research from different strands all contribute to the same goal 5. to help people better understand multilingualism 6. and understand the relationship between the multiple languages that a person speaks 7. Mingzhu: yeah I agree 8. so one thing that is at the center kind of disagreement (in SLA) is the use of native- speaker 9. as the benchmark to evaluate L2 learners 73 10. do you think it is still happening in your field 11. Kim: I think it's still happening 12. but people are getting more aware of this issue 13. in a lot of psycholinguistic research 14. when we tried to validate materials that we use in the experiment 15. we use native speakers as a benchmark 16. say for example 17. we want to see if the materials can elicit certain responses from native-speakers 18. and then we compared native-speakers responses with L2 learners' responses 19. um I don't know 20. I guess some people are questioning this practice 21. and I think the field is getting better 22. and more and more people recognize multilingualism 23. and yeah but but I think most people still have this 24. maybe implicitly 25. their approaches show that they still use native-speaker as a benchmark Kim begins with her opinion on the distinction between cognitive-linguistic and sociocultural SLA. She posits that they are different approaches, but they were not “against each other” and share “the same goal”, which is “to help people better understand multilingualism” (line 5). In line 7, I agree with her interpretation but prompted her to comment on the use of ‘native-speaker’ as the benchmark to evaluate ‘nonnative-speaker’ in SLA research. Kim posits that “in a lot of psycholinguistic research”, native-speaker norm is still used “to validate materials” and this practice compares and contrasts “native-speaker responses” with “L2 74 learners’ responses”. Then in line 20, she adds that this practice is questioned by some people (see Cheng et al., 2021). and concedes that “the field is getting better”. “Better” is a value evaluation that posits Kim on the opponent side of this dichotomizing practice. In lines 21-25, she summarizes this stance. The conjunctive word “but” indicates a contrastive semantic relation (Fairclough, 2003) between line 21-22 and lines 23. This contrastive semantic relation constructs a discrepancy between multilingualism and SLA scholarship that uses ‘native-speaker’ as a benchmark. However, Kim’s narrative indicates that this research practice persists and prevails. In line 24, she points out an implicitness of such practices. As observed by Fairclough (2003), something implicit often occupies an assumptive position that is ideological, and thus is deemed unquestionable. I have no intention of dismissing the insights made by cognitive-linguistic SLA research because it is not the concern of this study. Rather, the relevance and appropriateness of different strands of SLA scholarships for developing teachers Language Activism is my primary concern. In the narrative that follows, Luke, an instructor of the Grammar and SLA courses and a PhD student interested in sociocultural SLA, narrated a connection between the social perspectives of SLA with teacher Language Activism. Excerpt 4.9: It would need to radical redesign (Italics for content related to cognitive internal SLA, italics and bold for alternative SLA) 1. Luke: if you have a course taught by a (Ph.D.) student 2. in a program that has traditionally been focused on cognitive internal SLA 3. this (language activism) is not going to naturally come up 4. like the sociocultural effect of language education policy 5. and what it means to students and their families and their communities 75 6. in the context of a particular area 7. all that stuff is probably not going to be acknowledged 8. and so I think in order to like center something like this critical multilingual awareness framework 9. as a core component of of these courses 10. I think it would need like a radical redesign 11. Mingzhu: what might that (redesign) look like for you 12. Luke: we took a course in my master's program on second language acquisition 13. and the main textbooks 14. that we use talked about these nine topics 15. that were all internal cognitive whatever 16. and then the last two weeks of the course 17. we read a book that was called like alternative approaches to second language acquisition 18. it was all about like identity 19. ideologies 20. language socialization 21. complex dynamic systems 22. sociocultural (socio)historical 23. like all of the non-cognitive ways of language development 24. I talked before about the Douglas Fir Group with a transdisciplinary framework for SLA 25. I don't know if you're familiar with that at all 26. Mingzhu: yes 27. Luke: so in a way it's new, an alternative 76 28. but also in a way these people have been doing this research for a long time 29. so it's not new 30. it's just maybe not the norm yet 31. or maybe it isn't the stuff called the norm 32. what I mean to say is updating or expanding the theoretical perspectives 33. that explain the process of language development 34. so that it's not just this is the structure of language 35. and this is how the brain processes it 36. but more this is the social context 37. and all the other maybe nonlinguistic factors 38. that affect somebody's experience as it relates to language use 39. and their experience of being a person in the world Luke articulates a distinction between cognitive-linguistic approaches and sociocultural approaches in SLA. In lines 1-7, he positions “cognitive internal SLA” as being in misalignment with Language Activism which attends to “the sociocultural effect” and sociohistorical context of language education. He offers his evaluation, stating that for courses housed in a program that “has been traditionally focused on cognitive internal SLA”, Language Activism “is not going to naturally come up”. In line 11, I invite him to offer his idea of how to redesign these courses to center teachers’ critical understanding of multilingualism. He responds with a story from his master’s SLA course in lines 12-23. This story reflects the central status of cognitive internal SLA in this course curriculum with a “main textbook” and nine weeks allocated to it in comparison to the “alternative” status of “all of the non-linguistic ways of language development”, collapsed into two weeks at the end of the course. Lines 18-22 displays the range 77 of scholarship introduced in the last two weeks: “identity, ideologies, language socialization, complex dynamic systems, sociocultural (socio)historical”. Note in lines 4-5 and 36-38, the “sociocultural effect” and the “social context” were elaborated by “students and families and their communities”, “somebody’s experience”, “experience of being a person”. These lines constituted a ‘people-centeredness’ to the social approaches to SLA. Then in lines 24-31, Luke challenges the “norm” status of “cognitive internal SLA”. He brings up Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) transdisciplinary framework for SLA8 which he first called “an alternative”. But in line 28-29, he posits that this approach might seem new but “people have been doing this research for a long time”. In lines 32-39, he constructs his solution to the current program curriculum where Language Activism is missing in multiple courses. He asserts that these courses need to expand their theoretical perspectives beyond “the structure of language” and “how the brain processes it”. Luke displays a dissatisfaction with the lack of representation of the “alternative” status of social, cultural, and historical perspectives of language development knowledge in the program curriculum and in his academic field. Kim’s narratives brought to fore the appropriateness of cognitive-linguistic SLA research for teachers of MLLs when native-speaker benchmarks were used in the production of knowledge. Luke’s story offered insights into an epistemological difference in SLA research and positioned the social/alternative perspectives as more relevant for cultivating PSTs’ Language Activism. As noted, Luke’s narratives highlighted the ‘people-centeredness’ of the social perspectives of SLA. In the next section, I address the contextual facet of this theoretical 8 Douglas Fir Group’s transdisciplinary framework for SLA promotes a transdisciplinary and ecological approach to SLA that brings together theories and insights about additional language teaching and learning across micro-, meso-, and macro- levels, thereby consisting of perspectives of sociocultural, educational, ideological socioemotional in addition to neurobiological and cognitive traditions. 78 disjuncture. In what follows in Excerpt 4.9, I invited Luke to discuss the similarities and differences between EFL and K-12 ESL teacher preparation. 4.2.3 Contextual Facet: EFL and K-12 ESL Classrooms A third facet of this theoretical disjuncture concerned the different educational contexts that were reflected in the curriculum. As mentioned, the TESOL department had traditionally focused on preparing teachers to teach in EFL settings, which were the contexts that its faculty and instructors had the most knowledge about. In contrast, faculty and instructors involved in this program from the TE department had scholarly focus or teaching experiences in K-12 classrooms. Arguably, the EFL and the K-12 ESL classrooms have both similarities and differences in many aspects. Also important to remember is how contextual factors, including student population, educational goals, macro environment etc. inform classroom language policies (Duff, 2019). Allow me to briefly review the conversation about usage-based SLA vs translanguaging at the beginning of this chapter where Celine and I discussed a discrepancy in classroom language policy informed by different understandings of second language acquisition. An analysis of the contextual difference of usage-based SLA and translanguaging scholarship should shed light on this conundrum. Celine highlighted three principles of usage-based SLA: • target language input should be maximized; • authentic materials should be incorporated; and • communication-based learning experiences should be created. These three principles make sense when the target language is a ‘foreign’ language that learners had little access to outside of the language classroom. For example, authentic materials refer to texts created for L1 speakers by L1 speakers of the target language (Shrum & Glisan, 2015). It is 79 important for ‘foreign’ language teachers because these materials are not readily accessible in contexts where most materials in the target language are created for L2 learners. However, the situation is different when we consider K-12 ESL classrooms in the US. English is not a ‘foreign’ or minoritized language in the macro and meso environment; the most widely used curricular materials are authentic materials of English. If anything, ‘inauthentic’ materials created for L2 learners might not be easily accessible. Therefore, usage-based SLA informed pedagogical practices are not always relevant for K-12 ESL settings. In the narrative event that follows, Luke and I attempted to problematize the homogeneity of English instruction in EFL and K-12 ESL classrooms. Moreover, Luke’s narratives were interesting in the way he singularized or pluralized “language” for each context. Excerpt 4.10: It’s not as simple as teaching L2 to somebody who speaks an L1 (Italics for content related to EFL context, italics and bold for K-12 ESL context) 1. Mingzhu: one thing that you remind me of is 2. I have been thinking 3. since doing this project 4. TESOL(EFL) and K-12 ESL teacher preparation 5. how do they overlap 6. and how do you think they might contradict each other 7. Luke: if you look at TESOL the organization 8. you look at the different interest sections 9. it is clear that some people are working in second language instruction contexts 10. and some people are working in like bilingual education and multilingual education 11. I think the field has expanded so much now 80 12. and probably acknowledged 13. if students in K-12 classrooms are multilingual 14. then we need to rethink how we go about doing that 15. if you look at different like TESOL master's programs for example 16. in different universities 17. it's clear that some of them have a focus on 18. you're going to be an L2 instructor 19. versus you're going to be a bilingual educator 20. but I think they're not irrelevant at all 21. I think that it's like there is a lot of overlap, right? 22. Mingzhu: mm hm 23. Luke: I think somebody who is teaching math class with linguistically diverse students 24. could inform their practice with a lot of information 25. that has been learned in the field of second language acquisition 26. probably not a direct association 27. but yeah I think we're at the beginning of a reckoning 28. that it's not as simple as like 29. teaching L2 to somebody who speaks an L1 30. humans are more complicated than that 31. the process is more complicated than that 32. so it's messy 33. at least I see kind of a disconnect messy things 34. because I'm asked to teach classes like this 81 35. that I'm like this doesn't really doesn't really fit In lines 1-6, I invite Luke to help me with my query about the relationship between K-12 ESL context and the EFL context, which has historically been a major focus for the broad field of TESOL. By asking this question, I construct a distinction between EFL and K-12 ESL contexts. Luke follows up with a distinction between “second language instruction contexts” and “bilingual and multilingual contexts” (lines 9-10), different terminologies but nevertheless referring to the same distinction. Lines 11-14 reveals a perceived expansion in the broad field of TESOL, which from Luke’s perspective seems to have begun to acknowledge the need to “rethink” how to go about teaching K-12 multilingual learners. In lines 15-21, Luke rephrases this distinction using an example of TESOL master’s programs for future language teaching professionals as “L2 instructor[s]” as opposed to individuals who seek to become “bilingual educator[s]”. Nevertheless, Luke recognizes that “there is a lot of overlap” between the two. In line 22, I agree with him with respect to the relevance of the two teaching and learning contexts; like in the conversation with Celine, I showed my solidarity with my interlocutor. Here I am aware of the high stakes in constructing this distinction as my interlocutor and I are emerging language education scholars who affiliate professionally with different sides of this distinction, I with TE and he with TESOL. In lines 23-26, Luke reiterates the relevance of SLA research for K-12 contexts. Importantly, he describes some degree of interchangeability among “the field of second language acquisition”, “second language instruction contexts”, and “L2 instructor”, indicating a close relation of SLA research with contexts where English is treated as a distinct language that is different from a learner’s L1. In the following, Luke turns to elaborate on a “disconnect” between EFL context and K-12 multilingual classrooms. He views the K-12 context as being 82 “more complicated”, and describes the broader ESL field as being “at the beginning of reckoning”. In lines 33-35, he reiterates his main point by circling back to the SLA course that he taught. He claims that this course “doesn’t really fit” his students pursuing K-12 ESL certification because it was designed for the EFL context. Luke’s terminology choices implied his sensemaking of these two contexts through a monolingual vs multilingual distinction. When referring to the K-12 context, he always refers to language as plural entities using “bilingual and multilingual education”, “bilingual educator”, and “class with linguistically diverse learners” to describe this context. In comparison, a monolingual approach is implied for the EFL context through his word choice of “second language instruction”, “L2 instructor”, and “teaching L2 to someone who speaks an L1”. Hence, his narratives here illuminate a contextual gap between EFL and K-12 ESL classrooms, where the latter is seen as a multilingual-oriented space. This is not to say that knowledge produced in the EFL context is irrelevant to the K-12 ESL context, or that multilingual-oriented instruction was not relevant for EFL classrooms. Rather, from a ‘people- centered’ perspective, learner differences were significant between these two contexts, so were their learning needs. Teacher education curriculum should consider these differences. Thus far I have detailed the ideological, epistemological, and contextual facets of a theoretical disjuncture in this ESL program curriculum. On one hand, some course content, such as an emphasis on translanguaging pedagogy, was aligned with Language Activism and ‘people- centered’ perspectives of language teaching and learning. On the other hand, there were course contents that misaligned with the social- and multilingual-orientations of Language Activism, thereby reflecting a ‘language-centeredness’. As noted, both TE and TESOL were aware of this theoretical disjuncture, but it was left unaddressed also as a consequence of structural 83 constraints. And this was because there was a lack of formalized conversation channels across two colleges. 4.3 Structural Constraints for Reconciling the Theoretical Disjuncture The first two narrative stories in this section highlight the need but absence of conversations across the two departments on the program curriculum and a lack of top-down communication with the instructor about students’ needs and goals up till the time of this study. Ruth, an instructor of the Practicum course, talked about a “barrier” she experienced when teaching this class for the little knowledge she had about what students were learning in all the other courses. The third story provided a silver lining, showing that bottom-up efforts were at times made to bridge this gap. Excerpt 4.11: Our two departments need to work together 1. Ruth: we talked about this before 2. but the other barrier’s maybe being clear about what our students learn in their [TESOL] classes 3. and maybe working closer with that department on how we want to communicate 4. I think our two departments need to work together 5. in order for our students to say 6. okay here's this perspective and then here's this perspective 7. how am I going to develop my own understanding of language learning 8. I think that is another barrier 9. because our students get all like flustered by how we tell them 10. everything they learned in all of their (TESOL) classes in their entire minor is wrong 11. in one class 84 12. where we only meet one hour a week Ruth echoes Angela’s story (review Excerpt 4.1) in lines 9-10. She tells that her students “get all flustered” in the Practicum course when they were told that “everything they learned” in their previous courses “is wrong”. She utilizes dramatization by intensively employing quantifiers. For example, “everything”, “all”, and “entire”, all signifying high quantity, are used one after another in line 10. Lines 9-10 and lines 11-12 contribute to the dramatization further with the use of contrasting quantifying phrases: “one class”, “one hour a week”. Angela’s usage of this speech strategy constructs a difficult situation she and her students were in because the demands of the curriculum were high, but she had limited time to address them. Certainly, she did not tell her students everything they learned in the other ESL minor classes were wrong. She is again touching on the issue of plurilingual vs English-only classroom language policy. Her Practicum class, like Angela’s, introduced translanguaging pedagogy and posited it was “wrong” to ban students from using their home languages 9 in K-12 classrooms. In lines 6-7, she uses hypothetical speech to express her ideal that PSTs will develop their own understanding of language learning after engaging with different perspectives. Importantly, line 7 imitates an agentive individual: a teacher who is questioning, seeking development and one’s own understanding. For this to happen, Ruth points out in lines 2-4 that the two departments “need to work together” and from her perspective of a TE instructor, be clear about what PSTs learn in their TESOL courses. Ruth highlighted a limited space (“in one class where we only meet one hour a week”) in this ESL program curriculum for content like translanguaging pedagogy that challenged English- 9 I use home language to refer to the language(s) used in students’ home environment, especially the heritage language of the family. I acknowledge that labels like home and school language are limiting by potentially creating a dichotomy of home versus school language practices that does not reflect the dynamic language use of multilingual students. 85 only approaches. She pointed out an information gap that she had as an instructor in TE and a desire to know the content of TESOL courses, which would afford her a better understanding of the curriculum at the program level. In addition, she noted an absence of communication and collaboration between the two departments. In her narrative, this absence needed to be filled for PSTs to have a more holistic understanding of varied theoretical perspectives of language teaching and develop agency for individual decision-making. Luke, an instructor for TESOL courses, also pointed out an information gap from his end about his students’ backgrounds. Excerpt 4.12: What? Nobody told me that 1. Luke: Leo made a comment to me last year 2. and he said 3. are you going to make any changes for the blah blah blah certification standards 4. and I said like 5. certification? 6. what do you mean? 7. and he was like 8. yeah you know a lot of the students in teacher education take this course for part of their certification 9. and I was just like 10. what? nobody told me that 11. I had no idea 12. and if that's the case 13. how am I qualified to teach this course 14. because I don't have any of that certification 86 15. because my background is not in K-12 16. I grew up in a K-12 environment 17. but all of my graduate schools to my TESOL program was not K-12 at all 18. I have zero knowledge of what that is supposed to be 19. so I just immediately saw this like policy gap 20. institutional like- I don't know what you want to call it 21. but I'm like 22. so there are students over there who need these courses 23. and you're going to give them these courses over here 24. probably should be more dialogue between these two programs sure 25. but there's not right now 26. and this is like seems really problematic Luke opens this story with a conversation between him and Leo, another instructor from TESOL. Leo was going to teach the Methods course, and he was making changes to the course to better align it with Michigan ESL teacher standards. Leo brought this matter to Luke’s attention and to latter’s surprise two facts: a lot of the students in the TESOL courses were from TE, and that they were taking these courses to meet the requirement for K-12 ESL teacher certification. In lines 5-6, Luke uses voicing to show his initial confusion with this information; after Leo’s further explanation about the certification, in lines 10-13, he acknowledges this is important information but that it was not communicated to him. He then begins to question his qualifications to teach these courses. In the rest of the story, Luke constructs two issues with the current program: the first is that instructors with “zero knowledge” of K-12 education are teaching in the K-12 ESL program. And the second issue is the need but absence of dialogue 87 between the TESOL program that offers multiple courses for the certification and the TE program whose students largely populate these courses. Luke ends this story with an evaluation: this (“policy gap”: absence of dialogue) “seems really problematic”. Luke taught SLA first in summer 2021 when this ESL endorsement program had been running for nearly twenty years. It dawned on him that it was important for the TESOL instructors to know that the majority of their students were K-12 elementary or secondary preservice teachers seeking an ESL endorsement. Luke questioned his own qualification for teaching a course for K-12 ESL certification because he didn't have any teaching experience in K-12, and he represented the majority of TESOL course instructors. Leo mentioned in his interview that as far as people he knew of, he was the only instructor with K-12 teaching experience in his program, and others came from college level language teaching or international EFL contexts. This knowledge gap warranted dialogue across colleges, which at the time of the study had yet to be established. Nonetheless, some conversation had been informally initiated when instructors from both departments found out that they were teaching in the same program. Josephine, for example, shared her collaborations with an instructor for the Methods course. Excerpt 4.13: It was all happenstance 1. Josephine: one of the biggest challenges with all of this 2. and it's sort of just matter of fact is that the connection and collaboration between [TE] and [TESOL] has not been super well established 3. at least in my perspective 4. when I was a student in the program 5. a decade over a decade ago 6. it seemed like it was two different worlds 88 7. now teaching in the program 8. I recognize that there are not sort of practices in place 9. for instructors who are teaching something like [Methods course] 10. for those instructors to connect and talk to people over in the college of ed 11. and vice versa 12. with the exception of it kind of just happening naturally 13. so [instructor name] she and I just randomly got connected at AAAL 14. a couple years ago 15. and found out that she was teaching [Methods course] 16. I was teaching [Practicum course] 17. we were like 18. ma'am we need to talk 19. so she and I have talked about wanting to do more to bridge that communication 20. we should be bridging what we're doing 21. across these spaces 22. And that was why [instructor name] ended up doing that PD I did around SIOP 23. you know it was all happenstance 24. my understanding is that previously some of these conversations were happening more 25. and then as people cycle in and out of positions 26. as faculty shifts positions and responsibilities 27. as grad students move forward and graduate you know 28. some of these practices just kind of die out 29. because it's not like an institutional practice 89 30. there's no like established protocol for talking between both departments Josephine embeds two small stories in this narrative event in lines 4-12 and 13-23. In lines 4-12, Josephine’s experiences in this ESL teacher education program first as a student over a decade earlier and then more recently as an instructor both highlights the discrepancy between the two departments. When she was a student, these two departments seemed like “two different worlds”, and when she became an instructor in the program, she realized that there were no well- established practices for instructors from both sides “to connect and to talk”. In line 12, she closes story one with a commentary that there were exceptions to this disconnection. She follows up with a small story in which she and an instructor of the Methods course in TESOL connected at a conference by “happenstance”. Their dialogue benefited the program when the Methods course instructor participated in Josephine’s SIOP training, which contributed to the formalization of SIOP as an integral part of the Methods curriculum. In lines 17-21, Josephine identifies two instructors who are aware of a conversation gap across courses and are “wanting to do more to bridge that communication”. In lines 24-30, Josephine comments on the limitations of cross department dialogue that are informal and happenstance when faced with a lack of “institutional practice” or “established protocol”. Structurally, instructors were thus challenged by an information gap. Ruth wanted to better understand the curriculum at the program level so she could better help her students with the different perspectives of language teaching and learning taught to them. Luke needed to know that all his students were being prepared for K-12 ESL certificate, not EFL contexts which was what he designed the curriculum for. Josephine showcased micro-level interactions between instructors across departments which was not supported by meso-level institutional practices. 90 These structural constraints limited instructors’ agency to reconcile the theoretical disjuncture I have elaborated on thus far. To conclude this chapter, an analysis of the integration of CMLA into this ESL teacher education program curriculum shed light on a three-faceted theoretical disjuncture that existed programmatically. This program benefited from joint course offerings between the K-12 education department and the TESOL department and addressed all four tenets of CMLA. Nonetheless, cross-departmental curriculum deliberation dialogues were absent which meant that the four courses didn’t share a vision on what kind of ESL teachers were being prepared to teach in what context. The three facets of this theoretical disjuncture in the program curriculum echoed a silo between K-12 and traditional TESOL (focusing on EFL) education research. My participants and I while discussing this silo did not believe that disciplinary difference was a problem per se. As was posited by Kim, all strands of SLA research can contribute to our understanding of multilingualism albeit in different ways and problematic research practices were getting challenged. That said, as a group of ESL teacher educators, we contemplated on the relevance and appropriateness of different strands of knowledge drawn in this program curriculum. From this lens, this theoretical disjuncture emerged as a major issue. As a result of ideological, epistemological, and contextual discrepancies reflected in different knowledge, Language Activism appeared compromised programmatically and overshadowed by monolingual-oriented perspectives in some courses. One consequence of this was that students struggled with multilingual- and social-oriented translanguaging pedagogy, but instructors had limited curricular and instructional spaces to address PSTs’ struggles. Faculty and instructors from both departments realized the need for further conversation in order to address this issue, but such 91 communication stalled after the initial collaboration on developing this program. There was subsequently a loud call for establishing meso-level practices for curricular dialogues. 92 Chapter 5 Reconciling the Theoretical Disjuncture: Instructor Curricular Work In this chapter, I will highlight the curricular work of individual instructors that temporarily reconciled discrepancies in the program curriculum, which also pushed their courses in closer alignment with Language Activism. Despite the structural constraints and the theoretical disjuncture in the curriculum, which were elaborated on in Chapter 4, some instructors found curricular spaces for small or big changes. A small change could be replacing “native speaker” on the PowerPoint slides and a big change could be redesigning the entire course to center sociopolitical and sociocultural knowledge for the K-12 ESL context. These instructors come from both colleges (i.e., the College of Education and the College of Arts & Letters) and had varied scholarly interests, but what they shared was commitments to multilingualism and linguistic equity. Their agentive work underscored curriculum as a negotiation process. They negotiated between the space of curricular materials passed onto them and their commitments as scholars of language education. Importantly, their agency was supported by their language teaching professional knowledge working with multilingual learners, and by their scholarly knowledge of language theories and pedagogies within broader critical, social, and multilingual ‘turns’. These instructors’ curricular work that aligned their courses to varied degrees with Language Activism was itself manifestations of language activism. An analysis of their agentive practices brought to light an “in-betweenness” of activist work, which helped extend my understanding of Language Activism. This in-betweenness meant that instructors and teachers alike were constantly negotiating the disjuncture between reality and a futurity (Rios & Longoria, 2021). The three aspects of Language Activism (multilingual citizenship, impositions and struggles against colonialism and imperialism, reproduction, and changeability of linguistic 93 hierarchy) indicate a space between a hierarchical sociolinguistic reality and a plurilingual, democratic futurity. And it is within this space that teachers negotiate their agency for change. Importantly, these instructors negotiated the same reality vs futurity space and created dialogues in their curriculum about this in-betweenness of teacher language activist work. 5.1 In-between Ideologies: Monolingual Mindsets and Teacher Advocacy The ideological facet of the theoretical disjuncture in this program curriculum echoed a societal ideological conflict between beliefs that English should be the only language in the US and beliefs that all languages have a place in this country. Hillary was an instructor of the Practicum course. In the excerpt below, she pointed out an ideological discrepancy between her teacher education course and practices at schools. Excerpt 5.1: There’s still a lot of that in schools 1. Hillary: I think that their (mentor) teachers think that students are misbehaving 2. if they're speaking in other languages 3. and when I talked about it with them 4. and sometimes my preservice teachers are worried about classroom management 5. if their students speak other languages 6. and I tell them I'm like 7. you're sitting in the back of the room 8. you're speaking in English 9. but I can't tell if you're you know 10. I don't know what you're saying 11. so I'm like I follow your body cues 12. I follow you know 94 13. are you talking behind your hand and pointing and laughing at somebody 14. then you're probably not being respectful 15. that's when I'll say something 16. or like has your volume increased dramatically 17. like maybe you're off task 18. but you're in English 19. and I don't know what you're saying 20. so it's no different 21. if you let them speak in Spanish or Vietnamese or anything 22. and I feel like that's where a lot of the advocacy comes in 23. is still just really fostering and trying to work against the monolingual mindsets 24. in schools 25. and that home languages are a value 26. they're not a detriment 27. it doesn't get in the way 28. because there's still a lot of that in schools too 29. where it's like 30. oh they're not learning English fast enough 31. because they speak other languages 32. where it's that deficit view still Hillary speaks to her curricular work “trying to work against the monolingual mindset in schools” and fostering advocacy for home languages. Her work focused on two things: first, she sought to debunk the association of speaking home languages with ‘misbehaving’; and second, 95 she wanted to debunk that home languages were detrimental to English language development. She opens the story in lines 1-5 saying that some mentor teachers in PSTs’ K-12 field placement “think that students are misbehaving if they’re speaking in other languages.” PSTs internalize this message by sharing their worries about “classroom management” when students speak a language that they do not know themselves. These narratives of mentor teachers and PSTs equate students speaking their home language with ill-intentions (e.g., not wanting to behave, not conforming to management). These monolingual mindsets legitimize English-only policies in schools and demonize learners for their bi/multilingualism. In lines 6-21, Hillary recounts how she addressed PSTs’ worries by de-linking ‘misbehaving’ with speaking the home languages of MLLs. She complicates the scenario by pointing out that teachers can never know every conversation happening in the classroom whatever languages students speak. Therefore, speaking English doesn’t mean students are ‘behaving’ and speaking other languages doesn't mean they’re ‘misbehaving’. In lines 25-32, she points out another deficit view of multilingualism in schools which echoes Angela's story in Excerpt 4.1 at the beginning of chapter 4 in which the PSTs describe translanguaging as existing in opposition to developing English proficiency. Hillary claims that with her PSTs, she tries to work against the belief that home languages are a detriment that gets in the way of English learning. These monolingual mindsets and English-only practices were commonly found in PSTs’ field placement schools where they fulfill 30 hours of clinical experience mandated by state ESL teacher standards. Hillary represented instructors who were aware of a space between English monolingualism prevailing in K-12 schools and her curricular goal to prepare teachers who advocate for the home languages of MLLs. This dialogue showcased her negotiation of this in- 96 betweenness of reality vs futurity, pushing her students toward alignment with Language Activism. 5.2 In-between Epistemologies: Grammar as Rules and as Histories “If variation is the norm, why do we focus so much on rules?”. A student of Luke’s from the Grammar course asked what he called “the big question” (see Excerpt 5.2). Introducing the idea that diversity and variation are normal (rather than the exception) in a course focused on grammar rules provoked Luke’s student to ask this question. Luke was caught in an in- betweenness where he was teaching a curriculum that reflected monoglossic and raciolinguistic ideologies, struggled to align it with his commitment to multilingualism. “In small ways”, he negotiated with this in-betweenness. Excerpt 5.2: I need to never forget this question this semester 1. Luke: the [Grammar] course 2. there was one unit or one part about prescriptive and descriptive grammar 3. I think language variation was talked about there 4. elsewhere in the course 5. it was just absent 6. I think I think as much as possible 7. I tried to go back to that idea 8. there was a comment a student made early in the course 9. a question that that the student asked on their initial survey 10. that really stuck with me 11. she said 12. if variation is the norm 97 13. why are we focusing so much on rules 14. I was like- I wrote that question down on a post it note 15. stuck it right on my desk 16. and I was like 17. I need to never forget this question this semester 18. because this is the big question 19. I guess what I came down to 20. in the videos that I made was 21. one way we process language 22. is by maybe looking for patterns or trying to know rules 23. so for some people trying to learn language 24. it can be helpful to know what the rule is 25. the danger is when you codify that rule 26. and you say that rule is the law 27. then it starts to stratify and divide duh duh duh 28. and I would say in small ways I would come back to that idea 29. grammar social construct you know what I mean 30. so it was really hard to stay true to my value of diversity is the outcome 31. variation is the outcome In lines 1-5, Luke surmises that little space was given to language variation in the Grammar curriculum. Then he moves to a short story (lines 8-27) that tells ways in which he “tried to go back to that idea” of language variation. His student’s question in lines 12-13 showcases a discrepancy in the curriculum when Luke introduced “variation is the norm” to a 98 course that was “focusing so much on rules”. Luke validates this question in lines 14-18 as we see how his action (“wrote that question down”, “stuck it right on my desk”) and thoughts (“I need to never forget this question”) reflect the significant impact this question had on him. In lines 19-27, he explains that he followed up with this question by distinguishing between using grammar as a helpful tool for language processing and treating it as law. He posits that treating grammar as codified law stratifies and divides speakers into a hierarchy. In the end, he voices a dissatisfaction with the “small ways” he brought language diversity into this course. I invited Luke to radically reimagine this course assuming that all the structural constraints were lifted. His response, I believe, was of critical implication for language teacher educators and teachers to rethink the teaching of grammar. Also see Figure 5.1, a screenshot from the Jamboard page where Luke and I co-constructed topics for a course on grammar that would create spaces for Language Activism. In the story that follows, he elaborated on the “history of English in relation to its grammar system”. Figure 5.1 Reimagining the Grammar Course 99 Excerpt 5.3: Why is English the way it is 1. Luke: [Grammar] is a grammar course 2. grammar as an ongoing process dynamic not static (writing on Jamboard) 3. so like the history of English would be fascinating 4. well I used to teach this first year seminar 5. was my favorite course to teach 6. for first year students 7. at my old university 8. and it was called language and linguistics in the real world 9. one of my favorite topics was like all the irregularities of English 10. these are students who grew up 11. in the United States who learned English as a first language 12. they were always like 13. well why is English the way it is 14. I was like 15. you want to know the truth to that question 16. yeah how many countries are there in the world 17. they're like 18. oh 146 (rhetorical, not actual number) 19. and I'm like 20. yeah I think maybe 20 of those countries have not been invaded by England 21. Mingzhu: (laugh) 22. Luke: and so England has like colonized the planet 100 23. Mingzhu: yeah 24. Luke: the result of that is why English is the way it is 25. there's many results 26. there's many side effects of that and many consequences of that 27. but one of them is like this language is influenced and shaped 28. by all these other linguistic systems 29. so that's why there's all these different rules 30. yeah so it was just like a great (teaching moment) 31. like immediate you want to know why 32. let's acknowledge this is the reality 33. the history of our world and our country and whatever This short story details an interaction between Luke and his former students around the question: “why is English the way it is”. This was a question that his students “always” asked when learning about “all the irregularities of English”. In lines 13-20, he replays and recasts the exchange in which he connected this question to the colonial expansion of England in history. This way, Luke extended a topic on grammatical structures beyond linguistics to also consider the sociohistorical perspectives of the English language system. Luke explains that “this language is influenced and shaped by all these other linguistic systems”, thereby historicizing traces of other linguistic systems in English grammar. Connecting grammar to colonialism created curricular space for Language Activism which, in turn, reflected that a teacher’s awareness of colonial and imperial oppression imposed on multilingual communities was important. 101 Although Luke did not find curricular space in the Grammar course to historicize grammar, this small story shows that he had the knowledge repertoire to do so. I want to point out that in both stories above, Luke’s curricular work that aligned his course with Language Activism had to do with a ‘teaching moment’ initiated by questions from his students. In fact, the student’s question (review Excerpt 5.2) that pointed out an in-betweenness between valuing language diversity and grammar as rules prompted Luke and me to negotiate this in-betweenness in the curriculum. 5.3 In-between Micro and Macro Spaces: Classroom and its Social Context As noted, Leo was an instructor of the Methods course. He made substantial changes to the course (see Figure 5.2.), for which he began working in the summer, months before his teaching appointment in August. He posited that the changes filled in a knowledge “gap” in the course curriculum that he identified, based on his experience working with MLLs in K-12 schools. His curricular work focused on adding ‘social’ knowledge of K-12 ESL classrooms, such as learner diversity in socioeconomic factors, abilities, and immigration status. In Figure 5.2, Leo mapped the CMLA framework, juxtaposing his new iteration of the Methods course with the previous one. 102 Figure 5.2 Leo’s Mapping of the Original and New Methods Course with the CMLA Framework The yellow sticker indicating “Original” refers to the original Methods course curriculum, and the pink stickers indicating “New” highlights his new iteration of the curriculum. Based on his interpretation, the original curriculum addressed only “Knowledge and Skills for Integrating Content and Language Instruction”. The original course contents could be divided into two categories: one was the SIOP model, and the other focused on teaching listening/speaking/reading/writing/vocabulary. There was little coverage of the ‘social’ perspectives of language teaching. Leo’s revision incorporated sociopolitical, sociocultural, and sociohistorical perspectives into the curriculum, knowledge key to cultivating teacher’s Language Activism. When asked about the rationale behind his curricular work, Leo reasoned 103 that teachers had to know the environments beyond their micro classroom in order to advocate for their students. Excerpt 5.4: You need to be aware of the political environment 1. Leo: we talked about Native American boarding schools 2. the ideology behind that 3. we talked about the different periods 4. where we went from a more openly acceptance of multilingual education 5. pre World War One and World War Two 6. we talked about how World War Two and subsequent kind of enacted that it almost like imperialistic view of the US 7. where we started to then see a low limited appreciation of of multilingual education 8. the persecution of Japanese Americans German Americans during World War Two 9. you know stuff like that 10. then we go into more of the civil rights movement 11. Lao versus Nichols 12. all those different you know very important legal proceedings 13. and then we go into more recently the implication of No Child Left Behind 14. and its focus on English only instruction 15. Obama you know keeping some tenants of No Child Left Behind 16. but in the new iteration of it 17. Every Student Succeed Act 18. kind of what has changed with that 19. and then you need to be aware of the political climate moving forward 104 20. because what goes on in the society is what's going to happen in your classroom 21. and stuff like that 22. you need to know what the policy is 23. you need to know what the policy of your school is 24. how can you advocate for resources for your students 25. if you don't even know what supposed to be allocated for them 26. how can you push for change 27. if you don't even know what systems are in place 28. or what policy is in place 29. you know just kind of getting them to think beyond the classroom itself Leo viewed teachers' knowledge of the political environment as a prerequisite of their ability to advocate for change. In lines 1-19 he gives a list of educational policies and legal proceedings concerning the education of MLLs historically and currently, beginning from Native American boarding schools to Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Through these sociohistorical and sociopolitical focus, he drew PSTs attention to 1) the decreased acceptance of multilingual education over different time periods in history, 2) to the implications of English- only instruction, and 3) to the “political climate moving forward”. His rationale for incorporating these contents into this course was that “what goes on in the society” influenced what happens in K-12 classrooms. In lines 22-28, he constructs a relation between teacher’s knowledge of “what policy is in place” to teachers’ ability to “advocate for resources” and “push for change”. In our conversation, Leo pointed out that his agency for making these changes was afforded by his knowledge as a former K-12 teacher in a multilingual classroom and his scholarship focusing on promoting multilingualism in K-12 education and wider society. He 105 revised the curriculum in a way that would get PSTs to “think beyond the classroom itself”, which was aligned with Josephine’s narratives (review Excerpt 4.3), thereby underscoring teachers’ sociopolitical knowledge of the meso and macro environment. I find it important to highlight that Leo and Josephine’s intention was not merely for teachers to know the political environment, but to navigate it. To do so, teachers need to navigate an in-betweenness of structural affordances/constraints and their agency. In the excerpt below, Leo shares his intention to make PSTs be aware of this in-between space. Excerpt 5.5: We have them think critically and realistically 1. Leo: we talked about the concept of who decides what proficient means 2. the example that we we really dive into is the Read by Grade Three Law 3. that just came out in Michigan 4. and we talk about that 5. using that as the example to say 6. most of these proficiency models are arbitrary 7. who's to say that if a student gets 300 8. they are any different than a student that gets 299 ability wise 9. but depending on what score they get 10. it has drastic impacts 11. so we just talk about like perceptions of proficiency 12. we don't want them to think that these are objective measures 13. you know it's these subjective binary idea of proficiency 14. you're proficient 15. you're not proficient 106 16. it's subjective 17. if I can describe somebody proficient 18. and somebody else can describe that same person is not proficient 19. so we talked about that 20. and how that impacts the classroom 21. I think we have them think critically and realistically 22. to say that here we are talking about multilingualism in a positive light 23. you know I always be forthcoming and say 24. I am somebody that has a very strong belief in multilingual and multiculturalism 25. this is something that I find great value in 26. but my view isn't something that everyone shares or every context shares 27. we talk about the benefits of being multilingual and appreciating our students culture 28. yet what is the mode of instruction 29. what do we test them predominantly 30. what is the measurement of success 31. and that is their English language ability 32. or what is you know important to it 33. I think we make them aware of it Leo shares in this story his curricular work focusing on developing PSTs critical awareness of monolingualism in the macro environment and the appreciation of multilingualism in the teacher education space. In lines 1-18, he tells a small story about how he used the Read by Grade Three Law in Michigan as an example to complicate proficiency models prescribed by top-down policy. He highlights the construction of a proficient versus not-proficient binary 107 through proficiency models, and he cautions PSTs to question its objectivity. Then he points out a reality that connects the macro to the micro: the arbitrary cutting score mandated by a state educational policy does have drastic impact on students in the classroom positioned at either side of the proficiency binary (lines 7-10). Line 21 is Leo’s metatalk that conditions how he approaches interrogation of current sociolinguistic order. “Critically” and “realistically” narrates an in-betweenness that he wants his PSTs to be aware of. In lines 23-32, he puts himself and this course in this in-between space. “Critically”, he “has a very strong belief in multilingualism and multiculturalism”, but “realistically”, he is aware that this is not a view “that everyone shares or every context shares”. In his iteration of the Methods class, multilingualism is talked about positively but with respect to the macro educational system, where English monolingualism dominates. Leo negotiated curricular space for content aligning with Language Activism, and like Luke, engaged students in dialogue about an in-betweenness teachers of MLLs were always situated. To sum up and thread together the instructors’ curricular work, in Excerpt 5.6, I present Luke’s insightful summary of the principles and methods of curriculum remaking toward Language Activism. Excerpt 5.6: Disrupt, decenter, and expand 1. Luke: disrupt dissenter and expand 2. It’s like disrupt systems of oppression 3. and disrupt linguistic hierarchies 4. decenter privileged perspectives 5. like white cis heteronormative perspectives 6. decentering that 7. and centering and bringing in traditionally marginalized and excluded perspectives 108 8. in terms of whatever materials you use 9. who you have guest speakers in the class 10. who is the source of knowledge 11. whose perspectives whose counter narratives do you share 12. that challenge dominant discourses et cetera et cetera 13. so disrupt decenter and recenter and then expand In lines 2-3, Luke narrates the purpose of this curriculum remaking work, which is to “disrupt systems of oppression” and “disrupt linguistic hierarchies”. In lines 4-7, he discusses the guiding principles for this work: decentering privileged perspectives and centering/bringing in marginalized perspectives. In lines 8-12, he offers the methods for this work. That is, guided by the purpose and principles, instructors consider their choices of course “materials”, “guest speakers”, and “source of knowledge” and offer counter narratives to dominant discourses. He summarizes this work in line 13 in four verbs: disrupt, decenter, recenter, and expand. These four verbs are useful for considering how to negotiate curricular and dialogical spaces in teacher education curriculum for Language Activism. This negotiation engages with the current sociolinguistic hierarchy and aim toward a future where this hierarchy is disrupted through considerations of curricular narratives, voices, and knowledges. It engages with the dominant discourses that privileges “white cis heteronormative perspectives” and aim toward a future where such oppressive perspectives are decentered through expanding curricular spaces for marginalized narratives, voices, and knowledges. Hillary, Luke, and Leo’s narratives illustrated a meta-awareness of a hierarchical sociolinguistic reality and a plurilingual, democratic futurity. They created curricular change and/or dialogical spaces to develop PSTs’ awareness of the in-betweenness situating their 109 language classrooms. Thus, an understanding of the where and how of their agency for language activist work is key. They did this curricular work because they were committed to promoting multilingualism through their teaching and scholarship. Their agency was buttressed by their teacher-selves who taught multilingual learners in varied contexts and by their scholar-selves informed by social, critical, and multilingual ‘turns’ in scholarship related to language teaching and learning. In what follows, I detail three instructors’ teacher and scholar identities as manifested in and through their narratives in order to present a group portrait of these instructors who did curricular work to better align their curriculum with Language Activism. 5.4 An Instructor Group Portrait Throughout their narratives, I found instructors drew from their identities as teachers and scholars for their agentive acts as course instructors. These seven instructors came from a variety of personal professional backgrounds, as is illustrated in Chapter 3. What I will focus on in this section is their shared aspirations for linguistic equity and justice. I share three stories from Josephine, Ruth, and Leo, in which they shared their reasons for pursuing a doctorate and their scholarly commitments. Josephine: I wanted to figure out what’s the disconnect 1. Mingzhu: how did your experience as an ESL teacher impact your thinking as a scholar 2. Josephine: I think I have language now to talk about it now 3. in ways that I couldn't 4. six years ago seven years ago whatever 5. but you know really thinking about how teachers position students as being other than 6. and we see it with regard to race 7. we see it with class 110 8. we see it with language 9. we see it with citizenship status 10. and looking back on that 11. I understood then 12. whether I could articulate it or not 13. I understood then that there was a perceived hierarchy 14. obviously of teacher to student 15. but also of different types of students 16. and when I heard my colleagues (general education teachers) saying- 17. when they said that they (EL-classified students) were my students and not their students 18. was that my students which really were our students were less than the other students (Non-EL-classified students) that they would say then were their students 19. and it just pissed me off 20. it broke my heart 21. you know when you have students come to you (in an ESL classroom) having had experiences 22. in their classrooms (general education classrooms) throughout the day 23. where they just feel downright rejected by teachers who are supposed to be their teachers 24. I get like big mother bear instincts and just want to fight [laugh] 25. but have to do it strategically 26. I came in believing that my colleagues weren't really trying to do harm 27. I came in believing that all teachers fundamentally want to do right by kids 28. so where was- I wanted to figure out what's the disconnect 111 29. like I I don't think teachers by and large go into the field wanting to be racist 30. and wanting to reinforce white supremacist practices 31. but they can't see 32. we can't see what we can't see right 33. and that's by design a lot of the time 34. like these ideologies function 35. because they're trying to perpetuate systems of power that are not going to continue on 36. once we start seeing them and critiquing them 37. once you start seeing I mean 38. how can you look at them and be okay with it This story weaves together Josephine’s teacher-self, scholar-self, and her teacher- educator-self. After her ESL teaching career in a K-12 school, where she witnessed a “perceived hierarchy” in which her EL-classified students were perceived as “other” and as “less”, she started a doctoral program. She wanted to “figure out what’s the disconnect”: if all teachers “want to do right by kids”, why did her general education teachers reject her EL-classified students? Josephine did find an answer to her query. She said in lines 1-3 that unlike when she was an ESL teacher, as a scholar she now has the “language” to talk about why her EL-classified students were othered. In lines 28-37, she connects her ESL classroom (micro-level) and her K- 12 school (meso-level) to the macro-level “systems of power” and the “ideologies” that “reinforce white supremacist”. She is invested in working with White, English-dominant preservice teachers to cultivate their metaphorical eyes to see and their language to critique the system upholding white supremacist ideologies. 112 Embedded in this story is another story (lines 16-25) which highlights the tensions and struggles that Josephine navigated as an ESL teacher. The pronouns in lines 17-18 reflect the different ways EL-classified students were positioned by Josephine and her general education colleagues. While she considered students receiving her ESL service as shared (our) students with her colleagues, they thought otherwise, even though these students spent most of their school day in their classrooms. In lines 19-20, Josephine talks about her difficult emotions (“it just pissed me off”; “it broke my heart”) when hearing her colleagues position EL-classified students as not only being “other than” but also being “less than” students who her colleagues considered as theirs. The way her colleagues positioned the EL-classified students was then reflected in these students’ experiences (“feel downright rejected by teachers who are supposed to be their teachers”). Josephine felt a strong sense of advocacy (“I just want to fight”) because of the unfair treatment that her students received, but she was also aware that she had to navigate it strategically. I would like to foreground the ideological spaces present in this story. Josephine shared how teachers divided and ranked students in schools. Students who inhabit marginalized identities due to race, class, language, citizenship status are put on the other side of invisible borders that they can hardly cross. Josephine’s teacher-self “understood” that these borders existed. Becoming a scholar, she gained the language to “articulate” these ideological borders and to critique the systems that perpetuate them. She believes in a future where teachers cannot “be okay with it” once teacher education makes them “start seeing” systemic oppressions invisiblized “by design”. Ruth: But they were also using the Black Language 1. Mingzhu: So what experiences of yourself 113 2. personally and professionally 3. drew you to this type of work scholarly (antiracist and social justice work) 4. Ruth: um well I feel like this work is related to almost everything I've done 5. in my past 6. like when I moved to Honduras 7. that's when I learned my second language 8. and that changed my world 9. everything about it 10. so I think that's when I started really thinking about getting my masters in TESOL or something similar 11. and then I think just working in the communities 12. where I've worked 13. and yeah I just I kind of just have a passion for this this work 14. because I'm so interested in equity work 15. um the reason I came to [university name] is because I was working 16. in an 99% all Black school 17. and I was starting to notice that the White teachers were correcting or policing students’ Black Language 18. but they were also using the Black Language 19. for their own benefit 20. to interact with parents and kids 21. so they were allowed to use it 22. but then they police the students 114 23. that got me really interested 24. even more so than I was (in equity work) 25. because I don't think I expected that to happen 26. at a Black school 27. I expected it to happen 28. at one of the bilingual schools that I have worked at (with primarily Latinx and Black students) Ruth identifies as a white, English-dominant speaker. Central to her teacher, community- organizer, and scholar identities is equity work. Her experiences learning Spanish as a second language, master’s education in TESOL, career organizing adult ESL language programs in urban communities, and her career teaching in Latinx and Black dominant schools (“almost everything I’ve done”) all pointed her to the direction of language (in)equity. In lines 15-28, she tells the story of why she decided to join the PhD program. She observed that her White colleagues in an all-Black school correct and police students’ Black Language (BL), but they themselves ironically used BL “for their own benefit”. In a previous conversation, she shared with me that her instincts told her that something was wrong with her White colleagues’ practices, but she could not articulate what it was until she came across scholarship embedded in raciolinguistic perspectives, which in turn prompted her to pursue doctoral study to further engage with these perspectives. Like Josephine, Ruth’s decision to pursue a doctorate was directly impacted by witnessing inequalities experienced by language-minoritized students (i.e., EL-classified students, non-EL-identified MLLs, Black students) in K-12 schools. Lines 15-28 is an embedded story in which Ruth was an observer. At the center of this observation is her White colleagues who interacted with Black students and Black parents. She 115 mainly observed their language practices, and how they treated their students’ language practices. She noticed that the White teachers used BL to interact with Black parents and kids with the purpose of narrowing the social distance between them, but at the same time they did not allow their Black students to use BL. In line 25-28, through comparison, Ruth brought teachers and students at a bilingual school she worked at into the picture. Her White colleagues in this urban bilingual school, which enrolled primarily Latinx and Black students, also policed BL; but she “expected it to happen” because the majority of the students were considered English L2 speakers. But she did not expect this to happen at a Black school where 99% of the students were English L1 speakers. But raciolinguistic perspectives helped Ruth connect the proverbial dots as she attempted to make sense of the inequitable phenomenon at school. In short, Ruth’s teacher-self inspired her scholar-self. Upon reflection, Ruth realized that her White colleagues, in language sense, lived in a linguistic borderland where they allowed themselves and were allowed to cross borders freely. However, they were pushing the borderline of the White Mainstream English further toward the BL, and expanding its terrain by correcting Black students’ BL practices. Ruth saw her colleagues’ border-crossing and border-expanding practices incompatible with her beliefs in equity. To some extent, Ruth’s trajectory was different from Josephine in the sense that she began searching for an answer to her query about her White colleagues' using and policing of BL when she was still a teacher, and she found the language to talk about it. Her scholar-self continued inquiry into raciolinguistic perspectives. Her interest in equity work in education stems from her teacher years, stretches into her doctoral study period, and continues into her future. 116 Leo: I got into graduate school with the intention of plugging those gaps 1. Leo: I had a couple of students who were those language learners with disabilities 2. and I saw that you know the system or at least my educational system wasn't structured to really address both that student's needs 3. and I saw the impact where those students were struggling 4. because we saw them as one or the other 5. when I got into graduate school 6. with the intention of plugging in those gaps 7. and that being one of those gaps 8. I realized as a field 9. there really was not that much focus on this 10. this seemed like a pretty big gap 11. at least in our side 12. in applied linguistics 13. the language learning with disabilities 14. like this was like a huge gap 15. not to say that nobody touched on it 16. but it wasn't something that was a very main focus of the field 17. in general 18. which propelled me to continue into PhD 19. in order to hopefully somewhat plug that gap 20. as much as possible 117 Leo identifies as a Hispanic, English-Spanish bilingual speaker. He was an elementary school teacher in a state with a high concentration of MLLs in K-12 schools. Like Josephine and Ruth, he decided to pursue his doctoral education because of issues that he observed and contemplated in K-12 schools as a teacher. For Leo, the issue was that the educational system he was in failed to meet the needs of his students who were “language learners with disabilities”, and he “saw the impact where those students were struggling”. Unlike Josephine and Ruth who found scholarships that speak to their query, what Leo found was “a pretty big gap” in his field of Applied Linguistics concerning this group of learners. Hence, he is committed to “plug[ing] that gap” as a scholar. He intends to bridge the silo (“because we saw them as one another”) between his field, which is concerned with language learning, and the special education field which addresses the special needs aspect of education. Leo’s teacher-self is closely tied to his scholar-self and teacher-educator-self. He brought into his ESL teacher preparation course topics on language learners with a variety of special needs. Being the teacher of these students, Leo was a participant and an observer of their educational experiences. He was the general education teacher with an ESL certificate, and he experienced a lack of collaboration from the special education specialists responsible for these students. He also observed his students struggling. In lines 5-10, Leo reports his realization that this gap in K-12 schools between ESL teachers and special education teachers parallels a knowledge gap in Applied Linguistics. For him, the futurity is seeing this knowledge gap bridged “as much as possible” with his work. I have used Josephine, Ruth, and Leo’s stories to portray a group of instructors whose scholar-selves aspired for linguistic equity and justice because their teacher-selves observed inequity and injustice imposed on their language-minoritized learners. For Josephine, it was 118 witnessing her general education colleagues othering their ESL students; for Ruth, it was noticing her White colleagues appropriating Black Language, while policing Black students from using it; and for Leo, it was seeing siloed school practices failing language learners with special needs. Consequently, their scholar-selves were drawn to social- and multilingual-oriented theories and pedagogies in their fields. In closing this chapter, I must clarify that the curricular work highlighted in the chapter was not institutionalized. In other words, new instructors may or may not duplicate this work, which again speaks to the agency of individual instructors. However, much can be learned from how and why these instructors negotiated curricular space for cultivating teacher Language Activism. Their awareness of a reality-futurity in-betweenness and their subsequent navigation of this space extended the meaning of Language Activism, a point to which I will return in my concluding chapter. 119 Chapter 6 Discussion and Conclusion 6.1 Revisiting Findings In this ethnographic case study, I explored two research questions: 1) To what extent is CMLA integrated into course contents in a university-based English as a second language (ESL) teacher preparation program? and 2) How do instructors negotiate space in the curriculum for Language Activism? The first research question focuses on the programmatic curriculum while the second is concerned with instructor curricular work within the context of the programmatic curriculum. Following García (2015), I define critical multilingual awareness (CMLA) as a dimension of knowledge for teachers of multilingual learners (MLLs) with four tenets. The first three tenets are from traditional teacher language awareness for second/foreign language/language arts teachers: • Knowledge of Language (User) • Knowledge about Language (Analyst) • Pedagogical Practices of Language Teaching (Teacher) The fourth tenet, Language Activism (Activist), is central to my query and consists of three additional components that distinguish CMLA from traditional language awareness. The three components of Language Activism are teacher’s awareness of: • “plurilingualism and its merits for democratic citizenship,” • “histories of colonial and imperialistic oppression,” and that • “language is socially created, and thus socially changeable” (García, 2015, p. 6). The multilingual- and social-orientations of Language Activism are apparent and, I argue, central to CMLA, in comparison to traditional understandings of teacher language awareness. Thus, I hypothesize in light of my pilot study that all four tenets of CMLA are addressed in this 120 ESL teacher preparation program curriculum; however, programmatically, there were theoretical discrepancies due to the fact that this curriculum drew its knowledge of language teaching and learning from multiple disciplines and multiple strands within disciplines. Crucially, my findings were aligned with my hypothesis, and, more importantly, suggested that addressing all tenets of CMLA did not necessarily mean integrating CMLA in the programmatic curriculum. This inter-college and inter-discipline curriculum showed a triple- faceted theoretical disjuncture programmatically. First, there was an ideological conflict between course contents underpinned with plurilingualism and English monolingualism. Second, an epistemic discrepancy was evident programmatically (i.e., second language acquisition (SLA) knowledge of cognitive orientations overshadowed social approaches to SLA). Last, a contextual difference between English as a foreign language classroom (EFL) and K-12 English as a second language (ESL) classrooms was identified. Moreover, Curricular materials and instructor expertise for the three TESOL courses were more aligned with the EFL context. Structurally, during this study, formalized channels for cross-department dialogues on curriculum had not been established, which meant the triple-faceted theoretical disjuncture had yet to be addressed programmatically. Ruth and Luke felt constrained by information gaps about the program curriculum and about the students partly due to this curricular silo. The theoretical disjuncture, in turn, contributed to limited curricular space for Language Activism. One consequence was that PSTs struggled to wrap their minds around plurilingual classroom language policies, and it was difficult for the Practicum course instructors to challenge their monolingual mindsets. I further analyzed the curricular work of a group of instructors who, to varying degrees, reconciled the theoretical disjuncture in the programmatic curriculum and extended curricular 121 spaces for Language Activism. I focused on instructors who were doctoral students and whose scholarly interests were aligned with the multilingual- and social-orientations of language teaching and learning. Their narratives connected their scholarly identities to their teacher-selves who witnessed the inequalities and injustices experienced by their language-minoritized students. Negotiating with the curriculum they were provided; their agentive curricular remaking might take the forms of: • creating spaces for dialogues about monolingual biases in K-12 schools; • pushing back against standard/nonstandard and native/nonnative speaker binaries; or • connecting K-12 multilingual classrooms to their sociopolitical, sociocultural, and sociohistorical contexts. The narrative of Luke, one of my focal instructors, made it evident that if perceived constraints were removed, he had the knowledge to better align his Grammar course with Language Activism. Like Luke, the narratives of other instructors demonstrate how their curricular remaking showcased their Activist work and afforded new insights of Language Activism. They negotiated between their scholarly commitment to a plurilingual democratic futurity and a hierarchical sociolinguistic reality across educational and societal spaces. Notably, their narratives displayed their meta-awareness of this in-betweenness that educators often encounter. For example. another focal instructor, Leo, intentionally created dialogues for his students to engage with this in-betweenness. In summary, this study illuminated the multiple facets of a theoretical disjuncture in a K- 12 ESL teacher preparation programmatic curriculum, and ways in which a group of instructors negotiated the ideological, epistemological, and contextual clash in the curriculum to create space for multilingual- and social-oriented perspectives. I contend that their agentive curricular 122 work as instructors of future ESL teachers extended the concept of Language Activism by bringing into focus educators’ awareness of an in-betweenness that teaching and activism are always situated within. In the following section, I discuss some ways in which teacher education can shift from preparing “ESL teachers” toward preparing “teachers of multilingual learners”. 6.2 Toward Preparing Teachers of Multilingual Learners Informed by the triple-faceted theoretical disjuncture, I began with a critique of ‘language-centered’ ESL teacher education curricula that aligns with monolingual biases that are persistent in some disciplines related to language teaching and learning. Next, I discuss a ‘people-centered’ approach that abandons the notions of monolingualism and nativeness superiority, and instead centers MLLs’ multilingual and social ways of being. I argue that a ‘people-centered’ curriculum by drawing from equity-oriented teaching, critical and translingual theories and pedagogies, as well as social knowledge of learners and language learning all of which, when taken together, can scaffold teachers’ development and enactment of Language Activism. Further, I delve into the issue of reconciling the theoretical disjuncture through disciplinary and structural considerations. In particular, I highlight developing teachers’ critical understanding of different perspectives in language education and their agentive activist and pedagogical decision making. In addition, I discuss the significance of teachers’ awareness of and ability to negotiate with the in-betweenness of a hierarchical sociolinguistic reality and a plurilingual democratic futurity when enacting Language Activism. I wrap up this section with a call for preparing “teachers of MLLs”, a shift that foregrounds learners. 6.2.1 Curriculum Toward ‘People-Centeredness’ I argue that programs preparing teachers for K-12 multilingual classrooms should carefully attend to the ideological, epistemological, and contextual appropriateness of all course 123 contents. A central concern of this curriculum deliberation and the measurement of appropriateness should be the learners, who should be constructed as multilingual, social beings. I call this a ‘people-centered’, as opposed to a ‘language-centered’ approach, which is aligned with the multilingual- and social-orientation of Language Activism. It might appear that I am stating the need for the obvious, but my data suggests otherwise. When the students of a focal instructor, Angela, questioned the compatibility of translanguaging with developing English proficiency and test-taking ability, their narratives positioned these institutionalized educational priorities before their multilingual learners (review analysis of Excerpt 4.1). As was observed in Barros et al. (2021), even when preservice teachers are genuinely sympathetic to multilingualism, they are skeptical of the practicality of translanguaging pedagogy, given the structural normalization of monolingual conduct in mainstream schools “through instruments of accountability such as monolingual tests and the very language of the curriculum” (p. 249). With Language Activism, the teacher is aware of the unequal sociolinguistic order created and sustained by the educational system and seeks to change the status quo through their activism (García, 2015) and through transformative education (García et al., 2017). Alternatively, a ‘language-centered’ approach is when teacher preparation curriculum aligns with these monolingual-oriented structures and goals ingrained in the schooling system. ‘Language-centered’ Curriculum. Put differently, a ‘language-centered’ approach to preparing teachers of MLLs foregrounds achieving English monolingualism and satisfying the testing regime, while backgrounding the multilingual and social lived experiences of the learners and their communities. ‘Language-centeredness’ manifested in two ways in the researched program curriculum. First, curricular materials appeared to justify monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies through references to structural norms and/or disciplinary knowledge (i.e., 124 legitimization; Fairclough, 2003). For instance, the analyzed excerpts from the Grammar course textbook textured into existence a “Standard American English” with reference to authority and hegemony that took the form of several binaries: native speakers/nativeness, the general population/dominance, and highly educated speakers/education. Correspondingly, native-speaker and the nativeness of their language practice is disciplinary knowledge that dominates Chomskyan linguistics and SLA research (Ortega, 2013); a reference to the general population employs the social dominance of the White, middle- to upper-class (i.e., universalization; Faircough, 2003); and a reference to highly educated speakers draws on the authority of the educational system in society (Apple, 1982). By taking as given the rightfulness of these constructs, this textbook appeared to adopt the standard/nonstandard English binary instrumental to the marginalization of linguistically, racially, and socioeconomically minoritized communities and their ways of languaging (Anzadúa, 1987). These course contents are misaligned with Language Activism, which calls to develop teachers’ awareness of the colonial and imperial oppression imposed on multilingual communities, often justified through the deemed rightfulness of the White’s language and knowledge (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Quijano, 2000; 2007; Rosa & Flores, 2017). In addition, a ‘language-centeredness’ approach was manifested in the curriculum as an absence or minimal attention to the ideological and social perspectives of language teaching and learning. The K-12 multilingual classroom in no way resembles a controlled experimental language learning laboratory; rather, it is nested within an ideological and social ecology (DFG, 2016). The matter of educating children and youth of multilingual, immigrant communities has long been a site of ideological and social struggle (García & Sung, 2018; Ovando, 2003) in the US. Assimilationist and pluralist orientations toward diversity are diametrically opposed to one 125 another, with the former assuming continuous dominance (de Jong, 2013). The assimilationist orientation, framing cultural and linguistic diversity as a hindrance to national unity and promoting English monolingualism as the educational ideal, makes it difficult for teachers to enact a pluralist orientation (de Jong, 2019). I contend that given the dominance of monolingual- oriented policies, practices, and beliefs in the schooling system, treating language teachers, and learning as being ideologically and value free is complicit with the assimilationist framework. By contrast, with Language Activism, a teacher is aware of the co-construction of nation-state and monolingualism (Spolsky, 2021), and sees the possibility of a democratic society that values multilingual citizenship (García, 2015). Contrasting internal SLA with social approaches, Luke pointed out the silence of the social, cultural, and historical perspectives of language learning in the former and its decentering of the learner and their experiences. Firth and Wagner’s (1997) seminal piece critiqued cognitive-oriented SLA research for treating learners’ social identities as an irrelevant issue and focusing instead on “the foreign learner’s linguistic deficiencies and communicative problems” (p. 288). In other words, they posited that cognitive-oriented SLA inquiries not only neglect the social dimensions of additional language learning but also perpetuate monolingual biases. This observation is aligned with Luke’s positioning of cognitive internal SLA approaches in opposition to multilingual- and social-oriented Language Activism. I posit that in comparison to the first, this second manifestation of ‘language-centeredness’ in the curriculum is more difficult to address because of its implicitness (unsaid, unacknowledged ideological underpinning; Faircloug, 2003). ‘People-Centered’ Curriculum. A ‘people-centered’ approach to curriculum deliberation for ESL teacher education should consider the appropriateness of disciplinary 126 knowledge, based on whether or not they take interest inthe multilingual and social being of learners. Students are multilingual and social in the sense that their linguistic and cultural being does not fit into monoglossic worldviews (Anzaldúa, 1987). Translanguaging theory (García & Li Wei, 2014) affords insights into the constant border-crossing language practices of multilingual learners; researching “how young people live race, ethnicity, language” (Paris & Alim, 2014, p. 90), scholars have shown that Black and Brown youth mobilize their linguistic and cultural identities in flexible ways that transcend deterministic and singular understandings (Paris, 2011; Alim, 2009; 2011). Relatedly, Kwon (2019) reports that Third Culture Kids, whose lived experiences transcends nation-state borders, make sense of and live in the world through multiple cultures; for them, border-crossing nomadic lives is the norm. Dyrness and Sepúlveda (2020) documented a third space afforded by a pedagogy of “accompañamiento” where a group of undocumented Mexican youth spoke and wrote from their subaltern lives in the borderlands crossing legal, racial, linguistic, and cultural borders. Collectively, the living, knowing, and languaging of these learners challenge modernist construction of language, culture, and nation- state (Cervantes- Soon, 2018; Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020; Makoni & Pennycook, 2005; Mignolo, 2012;) head on. Building on these developments, and in keeping with the activist stance I have proposed, ‘people-centered’ thinking should prepare teachers to, as Josephine put it, “see” and not “be okay with” oppressive systems in education perpetuating the dominant White, singular knowledge and lifeway. Through Reclaiming Education for Equity. Certainly, it is no easy task to educate teachers of MLLs who will challenge the monolingual- and monocultural-orientations ingrained into the design of the current K-12 schooling system (Paris & Alim, 2014). As was shown in my findings, it is rather telling that even before entering the classrooms, this generation of preservice 127 teachers has been conditioned to be concerned about the standardized testing and accountability regime, thereby reflecting the sociopolitical context of teacher education following decades of neoliberal reforms (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Mahony & Textall, 2000). Neoliberal, or market ideology in education defines “good teaching” by high student test scores and equates student learning to test performance, holds education hostage to producing human capital serving the nation’s competitiveness in the global economy (Lipman, 2011). Relatedly, language teachers and teacher preparation are subjected to the same narrowly defined ‘success’ and outcome-based accountability (De Costa & Norton, 2017), making understandable PSTs’ concerns with their students’ English proficiency and exams. Put simply, neoliberalism is incompatible with the equity-orientation of Language Activism. For these reasons, teacher education curriculum and pedagogy need to push back against this dominant accountability paradigm that assumes assimilation into and with the ‘standard’ English monolinguals/monoculturals is the educational goal for minoritized students (Cochran- Smith et al., 2018). Toward this ‘people-centered’ and equity purpose, ESL teacher education curriculum can make use of multilingual- and social-oriented theories and pedagogies in language education. Josephine, a teacher who worked primarily with language-minoritized students, suggested that critical, sociopolitical knowledge about language education world had been useful for her when she navigated the sociopolitical contexts of her classroom, her school and district, as well as the macro-policy environment. Because the critical and social perspectives afforded by a pedagogy like translanguaging were missing from her teacher preparation, she did not have the language to articulate the wrongs when witnessing her EL- classified students othered by her colleagues. Josephine, Ruth, and Leo’s stories made evident that teachers might search for the language and knowledge to understand linguistic inequalities 128 on their own. The fact that they decided to pursue doctoral study for their query is inspiring, and the presence of teacher educators and new scholars like them who are committed to multilingualism and linguistic equity is much needed. That said, every teacher should have access to the language to articulate and navigate inequality without having to pursue advanced graduate education. Through Critical, Translingual Pedagogy. It is not my contention that all teacher education programs or all teacher educators are failing to provide such language and knowledge. I have demonstrated that the group of instructors who were central to my research incorporated into their courses – albeit in varied ways and to varied degrees – contents and dialogues that brought to light monolingual biases in disciplinary knowledge, proficiency tests, and school spaces. Despite the theoretical disjuncture, this researched ESL teacher education program has solidified a curricular space for translanguaging pedagogy. In the broad field of ESL/TESOL education, scholars have begun to research the effect and potential of critical language pedagogy like translanguaging in teacher education (Tian et al., 2020). By engaging with translanguaging theory and pedagogy in ESL certificate courses, preservice teachers could develop critical understandings of macro- to micro-level power structures and the harmful effects of English hegemony in the educational system on language-minoritized students (Robinson et al., 2020). Cultivating teachers’ translanguaging stance and understandings of monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies also has the potential to help teachers think critically of educational discourses about English proficiency and testing. For example, Seltzer’s (2023) participants pushed back against the “real world” discourse10 that prescribed “the language of power: a standard version of the 10 The “real-world” discourse is informed by monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies that perpetuate the rhetoric that racialized bi/multilingual students must use “standard” “academic” language in order to gain access to advanced education, to employment, etc. This ideological/imagined “real world” is unforgiving and ungenerous toward the heteroglossia of language. 129 dominant language of a nation-state” (p. 2) to racialized bi/multilingual students. Hence, translanguaging and Language Activism are aligned with a shared goal to challenge the monolingual practices of schooling. García and Kleyn (2016) shares that “when we first introduce translanguaging, educators who have a child-centered educational philosophy get it. Many say they have been doing it for years but have not had a name for it nor had been given permission to do so” (p.15). There have also been challenges, like when Angela was met with strong pushback from her students (echoed by Andrei et al., 2020), after introducing translanguaging in the Practicum course, coupled with the struggle to help her students enact translanguaging in their teaching. The epistemological shift from language as autonomous systems and as nation-state languages to translanguaging is not easy for many (García & Kleyn, 2016). Angela suggested the importance of creating ample space for dialogues about translanguaging as language practices, especially for English monolingual PSTs who might consider themselves outsiders to bilingualism and translingual practices. In addition, she suggested the need for teacher educators to model the implementation of translanguaging in classrooms, as echoed by Robinson et al. (2020). Through (a) Social Learner and Learning. In addition to critical, translingual approaches, there is a growing body of scholarship that opens windows into the social world of language learners and their learning, such as social approaches in SLA (e.g., Block, 2003; Duff, 2019), sociocultural theory (e.g., Vygotsky, 1986; Walqui, 2006; 2022), and social-interaction perspectives (e.g., Lave & Wagner, 1991), to name a few. These social perspectives mark a departure from a ‘language-centered’ view that assumes that behaving monolingually in the additional language is the goal of language learning (Ortega, 2017); instead, these perspectives view language development as a dynamic, interactional, social, and open-ended process (DFG, 130 2016). Moreover, they can be useful in directing the focus of ESL teacher education curriculum to who learners are, and how they live in the world with more than one language (DFG, 2016). Taking the social context seriously, Leo revised the Methods course to foreground the sociopolitical, sociohistorical, and socioeconomic environment of K-12 multilingual classrooms, which aligned with Language Activism by illuminating the oppressions imposed on multilingual communities. He emphasized the interactional relations between learners and their learning with a network of social factors for his PSTs to underscore the importance of how teachers can meet the varied needs of different learners. Informed by a social approach to SLA, Luke introduced the idea that variation is the norm (Larsen-Freeman, 2012; 2020) into the Grammar course, and he imagined the possibility for this course curriculum to bridge the rule system of English with the colonial history of the British empire. Importantly, Leo and Luke’s class dialogues about the historical and current political context of ESL education brought to light the social construction of the term ‘proficiency’ and the notion of grammar as law, debunking the commonsensical belief in their objectivity. To sum up, a ‘people-centered’ approach for ESL teacher education curriculum aims to prepare teachers of MLLs who think critically about the English-only and assimilationist orientations in the K-12 educational system materialized by the testing and accountability regime. This goal could be supported by knowledge from critical, translingual approaches in language education, such as the translanguaging pedagogy that afford ideological and pedagogical alternatives to monolingualism and English-only practices (García et al., 2017; Selzer, 2023; Tian et al., 2020). Social-oriented as well as translingual informed theories and pedagogies can assist teachers’ understandings of multilingual learners as users of named languages and modalities (García & Li Wei, 2014; Flores, 2020; Li Wei, 2020; Rincon-Mendoza 131 & Canagarajah, 2020) rather than passive and inherently deficient vessels for linguistic forms. In sum, critical, translingual approaches in tandem with social perspectives of language teaching and learning have the potential to inform teachers of language activist praxis (Freire, 1970; 1993) that interrogate oppressive elements of reality toward center emancipation of learners and their multilingual ways of living, languaging, and knowing. 6.2.2 Reconciling the Theoretical Disjuncture The analyzed curriculum reflected the difficulty for ESL teacher education to do away with the entrenched monolingual bias (May, 2013) and essentialist view of language 11 (Ortega, 2019) in many areas of applied linguistics; this challenge was epitomized by the triple-faceted theoretical disjuncture in this researched ESL programmatic curriculum (Chapter 4). An ESL teacher preparation curriculum inevitably needs to draw knowledge from a range of disciplines studying the nature of language, of additional language learning, and of language teaching. A glance at national and state ESL teacher preparation standards indicates the broad range of knowledge and skills that is required of a teacher candidate (MDE, 2017; TESOL, 2003; 2010; 2019). The Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs that I synthesized in the literature review reflects scholarship from a multitude of disciplines that teacher education relies on for curriculum development. As suggested by my data, scholarship that theorizes bi/multilingualism and informs language teaching are not immune to language ideologies. But the picture is not all bleak. On one hand, the detailed theoretical disjuncture illustrates the persistent influence of monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies; on the other hand, it evidences a diversity of theories and 11 The essentialist view of language refers to the notion that language is a bounded and fixed object and can be learned to completeness. Language essentialism informed SLA research considers ‘nativelikeness’ the finish line of additional language learning. 132 methodologies in related areas. A silver lining is that scholarships informed by multilingual, social, critical, and racial orientations are growing (Block, 2003; De Costa, 2020; DFG, 2016; May, 2019; Motha, 2020; Flores & Rosa, 2019; etc.). I have discussed above how a ‘people- centered’ approach is informative of curriculum development and deliberation for ESL teacher education curriculum. I argue that sufficient curricular space should be allocated to multilingual- and social-oriented perspectives of language teaching and learning, the purpose of which is for teachers to prioritize their learners over monolingualism-informed English proficiency and exams. Instructors from the researched program attested to the need for substantive dialogue about plurilingual versus English-only classroom language policies across ESL teacher education courses. It is unrealistic to think that cultivating PSTs’ Language Activism is achievable in one course, given their preoccupied concerns of the testing regime and the prevalence of monolingualism at their K-12 field placement. While teacher education has no control over what knowledge is being produced in disciplines related to language teaching and learning, it enjoys some freedom in deciding what perspectives to emphasize. Therefore, greater emphasis on multilingual- and social-oriented theories and pedagogies can be negotiated in curricula. Usage-based and cognitive-perspectives can also inform teachers of MLLs with the notable exception that monolingualism bias and nativeness must be abandoned. The key is that teacher education must scaffold teachers’ critical understandings of different perspectives (review Ruth’s narratives from Excerpt 4.11) and their ability to make agentive pedagogical decisions from moment to moment in their classrooms. To illustrate what this dynamic process might look like, I will discuss a classroom scenario that was provoked by my conversation with Celine (in Excerpt 4.2). 133 Celine and I discussed the discrepancy between usage-based SLA and translanguaging. She pointed out that the principle of usage-based SLA is maximizing target language input, incorporating authentic materials, and creating communication-based learning experiences. I discussed (in section 4.2.3) that the principle of authentic materials is less relevant to K-12 multilingual classrooms in the US, which is an English-dominant language environment. That said, considering the language- and content-learning integrated nature of a K-12 multilingual classroom (CCSS, 2010; WIDA, 2020), be it a self-contained ESL classroom or mainstream classroom with MLLs, I contend that usage-based strategies are relevant when the teacher judges that a focus on language form is necessary at moments. For example, when the teacher observes that a group of students is developing fluency in describing the life cycles of insects and animals in English after they are already proficient in the content knowledge with the support of translanguaging, this teacher might pull these students aside and create a learning experience where they get lots of input in linguistic resources used to describe a life cycle and practice with communication-based output activities. In these micro spaces, the teacher and learners might have a social contract to maximize English use. What I am envisioning is a classroom where plurilingual language policy is the norm, but flexibility is allowed for moment-to-moment micro language policymaking. Admittedly, this would require a teacher who has developed nuanced understandings of different theories, pedagogies, and of their classroom ecology. What I attempt to show here is that usage-based SLA and translanguaging are not inherently incompatible to each other but can both inform the work of teachers of MLLs. In fact, usage-based linguistics differs from language essentialism ontologically and views language as an emergent process rather than something that exists autonomously; the interest of usage-based SLA is input affordances of the additional language in the environment instead of nativelikeness 134 (Ortega, 2013). The discrepancy, as Luke perceived, is contextual. The priority of usage-based researchers is conditions of sufficient additional language exposure, which makes sense when language development is the only concern. However, MLLs are not in school to just learn English; rather, and more importantly, they attend school to develop their abilities to effectively participate in the society (Walqui, 2022). In reality, some educators’ conception that learning the English language and the American culture is ‘enough’ for MLLs to make it to adulthood puts these students at a perpetual disadvantage (Callahan & Shifrer, 2016). Furthermore, multilingualism is not all equal (De Costa, 2019). The context of learning English as an additional language for MLLs is one known as folk or circumstance multilingualism, vastly different from the context of elite multilingualism where the learning of an additional language is by choice without threat to one’s home languages (Ortega, 2019). Elite multilinguals enjoy substantiating support and are praised for their emerging multilingualism whereas circumstantial multilinguals are stigmatized and face erasure of their multilingualism (De Costa, 2019; Ortega, 2019). This is why the principal of maximizing target language input should be carefully considered in the context of K-12 multilingual classrooms. An overall classroom language policy that treats English as the only target language and leaves little to no space for MLLs’ home languages is essentially an approach to subtractive bilingualism (Lambert, 1981). The preparation of teachers with a nuanced understanding of different theoretical and pedagogical perspectives should begin with curricular dialogues across disciplines, and, as evident in the case of this researched program, across colleges and departments. My data did not offer much insight into what this dialogue might be like, but it did reveal that it is needed. Ruth posited that knowing what the PSTs were learning in other courses outside of TE would have been helpful for her to scaffold her students’ agentive pedagogical decision making. Luke realized that his 135 SLA course content was not the best fit for his students when he learned that they were being prepared to teach in K-12 classrooms. To sum up, ESL teacher education curriculum developers should be aware of the monoglossic and raciolinguistic ideologies of certain disciplinary knowledge and provide sufficient space for multilingual- and social-oriented perspectives of language teaching and learning. PSTs are inevitably exposed to different perspectives because of the range of knowledge and skills they need to work with MLLs, but teacher education should develop their agentive thinking to guide their moment-to-moment pedagogical decision making. For example, a teacher who adopts a plurilingual classroom language policy may also create a micro-space for English language-focused experiences based on the students’ learning needs. The curricular work that is required to develop teachers’ agentive thinking starts with dialogues across the courses, or colleges/departments. The proposed Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs, with teacher CMLA at the core, can be used as a conceptual scaffolding for these dialogues. Moreover, the curricular work of individual instructors and their sense-making of their work that I accounted for in Chapter 5, expanded the meaning of the fourth tenet of CMLA, Language Activism. 6.2.3 Teacher Language Activism: Negotiating the In-Betweenness I have discussed a ‘people-centered’ approach to curriculum development and deliberation that centers multilingual- and social-orientations in ESL teacher education, as a means to develop teachers’ Language Activism. This approach intends to move the focus of language teaching away from the dominant variety of English language, and toward the multilingual learners and their languaging, knowing, and living through plural languages, cultures, and nation-states. Inasmuch as my discussion of the curriculum has been from the lens 136 of disciplinary knowledge, it might connote teacher Language Activism as a repertoire of knowledge, which is not my contention. Instead, in the above section where I focused on reconciling the theoretical disjuncture, to some extent I emphasized the need for teacher educators and teachers to have agentive thinking because this theoretical disjuncture is part of the context and condition for ESL teacher education. In the following section, I extend the discussion about agentive thinking and argue for the significance of the teacher's awareness of and ability to negotiate the reality-futurity in-betweenness when enacting Language Activism. García’s (2015) Language Activism envisions a futurity (Muñoz, 2009) of education and of societies. Borrowed from Queer studies, futurity is “a tethering of our current realities to the futures we imagine and seek to effect” (Rios & Longoria, 2021). The reality that the work of teachers of MLLs is situated within is a hierarchical sociolinguistic order where English monolingualism and White mainstream English hold the high ground. This ideological reality is materialized through educational curricula and standardized tests that value English monolingualism and hold teachers and teacher education accountable for it (Cenoz & Gorter, 2015; Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Shohamy, 2011). Equity discourse is pushed aside by discourse of excellence following the recent few decades of neoliberal educational reforms and policy (Cochran-Smith, 2023; Horsford et al., 2019). In contrast, García (2015) envisions a plurilingual democratic futurity where education brings social change, and the society values multilingual citizenship. This futurity is equal and just for language-minoritized students and their communities. Needless to say, between this reality and futurity, gaps exist. Educators negotiate with this reality-futurity in-betweenness through “tethering” of the hierarchical sociolinguistic realities “to” the plurilingual democratic futures. 137 I posit that the awareness of and the ability to negotiate the reality-futurity in- betweenness is crucial to teacher’s Language Activism, based on the curricular work of the individual instructors and their narratives about remaking curriculum. They revised the course(s) they taught in different ways and to varying degrees, but what they shared was a critical understanding of the unequal reality and a commitment to a more equitable future. Hillary challenged her students’ monolingual mindsets. She was aware of the conflictive language ideologies between her students’ school placement and her teacher education class. Negotiating this ideological in-betweenness, she created curricular space to dialogue about English-only beliefs and practices. Luke, in contrast, brought the notion of variation into his Grammar course, met with a student’s question that underscored a discrepancy between the emphasis of grammar rules and of variation. In this micro-interaction, Luke’s student initiated a dialogue, prompted by Luke’s curricular remaking. Luke was aware of the epistemic discrepancy between the course contents and his multilingual orientation, but nonetheless he introduced variation to the curriculum. This unintended (by Luke) dialogue was invaluable in the sense that this student was then able to negotiate an in-betweenness of grammar as rule and as choice. Furthermore, the exchange showcases the potential for fruitful dialogues when different theoretical perspectives are strategically presented and negotiated in teacher education curricular spaces. Meanwhile, Leo was the most intentional with his curriculum remaking. He narrated that his rationale for incorporating social perspectives into his Methods course was that teachers’ advocacy work needed to be informed by their critical and realistic understandings of the sociopolitical context of their classrooms. He explicitly discussed with his students the in-betweenness of multilingual orientations and monolingual realities. 138 Hillary, Luke, and Leo’s curricular remaking and rethinking illustrate their negotiations with the reality-futurity in-betweenness. I use the word “negotiation” because this work 1) acknowledges both the realities and the futures, and 2) is an active process. Plurilingual democratic futures will not arrive through compliance with the realities or indulgence in imagination without engaging with the realities; rather, such futures can only be realized through changes, ranging from incremental to radical (Rio & Longoria, 2021). It shall be helpful to bring the concept of agency into the discussion of the in-betweenness. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) argue that agency is a “temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past, but also oriented toward the future, and toward the present” (p. 98). In their opinion, agency is constituted by: ● repertoires of “past patterns of thought and behavior”— iteration ● “imagining possible future trajectories of action that are relevant to the actor’s hopes, fears, and desires for the future”— projectivity ● and “the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgements” based on contexts and circumstances — practical evaluation (Liddicoat & Taylor-Leech, 2020, pp. 5-6). To illustrate, the curricular materials that had been passed down to instructors in the researched program reflected iteration accumulated over time and space; the instructors’ desire to prepare teachers committed to linguistic diversity and equity displayed projectivity; while practical evaluation was demonstrated by the instructors’ varied curricular work given their circumstances. Importantly, projectivity is a future-oriented component of agency that involves problematizing existing thoughts and behaviors against unsettled or unresolved problems (Liddicoat & Taylor-Leech, 2020). Teacher’s enactment of Language Activism requires future- 139 oriented and problem-oriented agency upon developing critical awareness of the sociolinguistic hierarchy that existing English monolingualism and English-only practices cannot resolve (García, 2015; Seltzer, 2023). Furthermore, the notion of practical evaluation is illuminative of the process of negotiating the in-betweenness. The actor makes judgements and decisions about courses of action mediating the social world they are situated to bring about the desired outcome (Liddicoat & Taylor-Leech, 2020). Negotiating the affordances and constraints within the sociolinguistic, sociocultural, and sociopolitical context, a teacher of MLLs makes activist and pedagogical decisions for the best of the interest of their students. For instance, if a teacher becomes aware that the school’s EL program focuses on English acquisition at the expense of academic learning (Callahan & Shifrer, 2016), and perceives this acquisition as being antithetical to educational equality, they might negotiate for incremental to radical changes (Rio & Longoria, 2021). They might realize that the school was merely unaware of the issue, so they bring the problem to the school faculty’s attention; they might find a deficit view toward EL-classified students, so they ask their college professor to provide a professional development series that is based on a translanguaging stance (e.g, Seltzer, 2023) for the school faculty. They might organize a group of like-minded teachers, students, and community members to advocate in juntos/together (see García et al., 2017). My point is that there is no one way to enact Language Activism because teachers’ negotiation with the in-betweenness is contextual and conditioned. This notion of negotiating an in-betweenness is aligned with the view of teacher’s agency as achieved “through the interplay of personal capacities and the resources, affordances and constraints of the environment by means of which individuals act” (Preistley et al., 2015. p. 19). Then, the issue is how ESL teacher 140 education can foster this agentive thinking and acting. Cochran-Smith et al. (2022) posits that teacher education courses and fieldwork alone is unlikely to enhance teacher agency, which requires contextualized experiences where teachers develop understandings of the structural and cultural affordances and constraints of the schools and communities. How this is done is beyond the scope of this study. Still, while I agree with their contention, I posit that teachers’ knowledge afforded by a ‘people-centered’ curriculum is useful foundational knowledge for these experiences. In summary, I have discussed some of the ways in which teacher education can move away from the idea of preparing “ESL teachers” which directs teachers’ focus toward the standard English and testing regime alongside perpetuating monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies in their classrooms and beyond. Instead, preparing “teachers of MLLs” shifts teachers’ focus toward their learners and their lifeways (Kamhi-Stein & Osipova, 2019; Teemant, 2018). This vision prepares the teachers to “see” and “articulate” the linguistic inequalities in the educational system and “not be okay with it” (Josephine, interview). Teachers of MLLs think about the sociolinguistic hierarchies critically, engage with these realities, and negotiate different futures through enacting Language Activism. Admittedly, what I have laid out herein is incomplete against the backdrop of a challenging task, and my thinking has greatly benefited from scholars before me. Nonetheless, I hasten to advocate a shift toward preparing “teachers of MLLs” in hope of offering some heuristics for further inquiry. 6.3 Implications I propose a five-dimensional Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs that synthesized and updated current knowledge frameworks. Given the wide range of 141 knowledge required of teachers of MLLs, my framework puts CMLA at the core to pull together the other four dimensions (Figure 6.1 reproduced below). Figure 6.1 A Knowledge Framework for Preparing Teachers of MLLs Based on the above figure, I argue that when a discrepancy in the curriculum occurs, the CMLA dimension serves as a compass for decision making and dialogues. The focus of this study is limited to researching the integration of the CMLA dimension into an ESL teacher education program curriculum, and the analysis showed a triple-faceted theoretical disjuncture. This means that curriculum alignment is not only much needed work, but also challenges whether K-12 teacher education and TESOL teacher education should be housed in the same or separate colleges. The theoretical disjuncture also exists in the micro(?) and macro systems, including disciplinary research, educational policies, and societal beliefs. Curriculum alignment work requires a shared vision of what kind of teachers the program is aiming to prepare. I suggest a ‘people-centered’ approach to curriculum deliberation toward preparing “teachers of MLLs”, as opposed to one that is “focused too narrowly on preparing language specialists from a language perspective at the expense of preparing every teacher to address interrelated aspects of human difference” (Teemant, 2018, p. 353). This is a shift that 142 engages but unconforms with educational policies and practices informed by monolingual biases. However, teacher educators and teachers must negotiate the existing educational systems toward a more linguistically just future, which requires agentive thinking and acting. Equity- and justice- oriented scholars have long valued the vitality of teaching to transgress (hooks, 1994) and to transform (Banks, 2017; García, 2020). They argue that it is important to develop learners’ critical awareness of the social and political situatedness of themselves and their communities, to understand the inequalities and injustice and ways to change the status quo (Ladson-Billings, 1997; García et al., 2017). In the same vein, to foster agentive learners, their teachers and their teachers’ teachers should also be agentive actors, which indicates the importance of teacher educator preparation (Brisk & Kaveh, 2019; Goodwin et al., 2014). My participants’ group portrait demonstrated that their scholar-selves identified with equity-oriented education and resisted monolingual bias. Hence, I recommend that teacher educator preparation proverbially walk the talk by cultivating equity-minded teacher educators who teach to transgress and transform. Structurally, dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders of the programmatic curriculum is essential. Establishing channels for communication will assist programmatically accumulated knowledge about the curriculum. Recall that Leo revised his Methods course curriculum substantially by taking advantage of his knowledge and expertise as a former K-12 teacher, which was uncommon among the instructors in the TESOL program. However, incoming instructors might not take into consideration these social and K-12 perspectives. A formal channel for instructor conversations within and across programs might help incoming instructors make more informed decisions about how they would construct their curriculum. These dialogical spaces will allow mutual mentorship among the instructors. For instructors with 143 little K-12 teaching experience, those who have taught in K-12 classrooms can offer mentorship to their curricular work; those with K-12 but no language teaching experiences can benefit from dialogue with TESOL instructors whose expertise in additional language instruction is strong. Instructors whose scholarship draws from different perspectives can, for instance, explore ways in which the epistemic discrepancy in the curriculum can be addressed. Solano-Campos et al. (2020) argues that researchers should inquire about the integration of sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects into teacher preparation for MLLs. They hypothesized that critical and social justice perspectives might be in disjuncture with cognitive-oriented knowledge. My study corroborates their speculation and affords insights into the integration and disjuncture programmatically. This study also adds empirical insights of how teacher education programs do teacher preparation for K-12 multilingual classrooms. A programmatic approach has proven informative of the where and why of misalignments across courses and shed some light on PSTs’ resistance to untraditional ways of theorizing language and teaching. The complex nature of programmatic curriculum analysis requires researchers to develop both deep and wide knowledge about the teacher education program; therefore, the step of “casing the joint” (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) where researchers openly and indiscriminately take in information about the teacher education program is critical for defining the case and data analysis later. Without rich contextual knowledge about the case, the researcher might reach partial conclusions or find it difficult to triangulate data. When teacher educators research their own courses, they often have the advantage of knowing the course and themselves thoroughly. However, studying a program requires more expansive knowledge than single-course research, and researchers should avoid making judgmental calls based on partial knowledge about the whole program gained from their areas of expertise. To illuminate the nuances and complexities of a program curriculum, methods 144 of narrative analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) are useful because they can be utilized to both zoom in and zoom out of the research site. Zooming in and out bridges individual narratives with programmatic discourses, and societal ideologies, bringing to light the ecological system of teacher education, a socially situated phenomenon. Additionally, when researching a social phenomenon about which collective knowledge is thin, methods of narrative analysis are advantageous in illuminating meaning-making/knowledge construction in interaction. Evidently, my analysis focusing on the grassroot agentive work of individual instructors afforded an extended understanding of the concept of Language Activism. My pilot study with its policy component shows that the program under investigation was in alignment with the state ESL teacher preparation standards but took a stronger teacher advocacy stance, illuminating a policy-teacher education gap (Cohen et al., 2009). As reflected in my study findings, teacher educators often draw from their individual scholarly knowledge when constructing courses. Additionally, translanguaging theory and pedagogy have gained much momentum in education and in research in the past decade (García & Kleyn, 2016; Leung & Valdés, 2019). And, more recently, SLA has witnessed a social and multilingual turn in its research agenda (Block, 2003; DFG, 2016; May, 2013), whereas a stronger focus on equity is being advocated in teacher education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Valdés, 2016). In a nutshell, the trend in adjacent areas of language education is translingual, social, and critical theories and pedagogies; and this trend is reflected in the detailed theoretical disjuncture and instructors’ curricular work of this study. The state standards so far are not reflective of this trend, however. Therefore, for future standards revision, it is important for the committee to contemplate its fundamental goal for the ESL teacher preparation standards: Is the goal ‘language-centered’ or ‘people-centered’? Relatedly, do programs want to prepare “ESL teachers” or “teachers of 145 MLLs”? The ‘people-centered’ approach to curriculum deliberation discussed in this chapter is supportive of this latter envision. However, a teacher education program curriculum enjoys more freedom than a state policy of teacher preparation because a state policy is subjected to wider scrutiny from personas and groups across the state, which requires more negotiation with varied interests and ideologies. This is where the notion of negotiating the in-betweenness comes into play. Policy changes require cautious negotiation with the structural and cultural contexts of the state. For, as Mitra (2017, p. 71) explains, “policy making is the craft of assessing what others need and how to negotiate compromise.” 6.4 Future Directions Considering the scarcity of programmatic level research, I call for further study that considers curricular and pedagogical mis/alignment in teacher education programs. My research showcases the richness of knowledge that bottom-up curricular work had to offer. Further investigation of these agentive spaces and individuals will shed more light on this matter. And as shown in this study, my investigation entailed the rather complex issue of curriculum deliberation. In addition to further study of teacher education courses, because clinical experiences are an integral part of teacher education, it would be beneficial to study the mis/alignment across university teacher education spaces and PSTs’ K-12 field placement spaces. My data suggests that, for instance, PSTs’ might not observe translanguaging pedagogy enacted at their mentor teachers’ classrooms, and hence might witness English monolingual mindsets. As I have mentioned, a case study must draw lines around its case (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). As a result, a limitation of my study is that it only focused on the curriculum and instructors of the studied program. For future research along this line, I recommend a focus on the impact of teacher preparation on teachers’ enacted classroom language policy. It is 146 reasonable to assume that this English-only versus plurilingual classroom language policy debate goes on in schools. For example, how a teacher navigates their local context and enacts a plurilingual policy will afford valuable insights into teacher Language Activism in action. Second, the reconciliation of this theoretical disjuncture cannot be fully achieved by curriculum deliberation at individual teacher education programs alone because language teaching and learning is a multilayered ecological system (DFG, 2016). Of critical significance to this study is the interrelation of ESL teacher education and knowledge production in related disciplines. That is, teacher education programs, such as the one researched, work within the affordances and constraints of related disciplinary areas where knowledge is drawn, especially in areas in applied linguistics. I contend that these fields should move away from language essentialism-informed monolingualism and nativeness (see a discussion about SLA in Ortega, 2013) and instead research bilingualism as legitimate language use in and of itself. Regarding the contextual difference between K-12 ESL and EFL classrooms, interdisciplinary research is much needed for understanding the unique and often more complex environment of K-12 multilingual classrooms. 6.5 Conclusion This dissertation highlighted the affordances and constraints of curriculum making for preparing teachers with critical awareness of the current sociolinguistic inequalities and an activist stance toward a different futurity. This work proved challenging with perpetual monolingual biases in schools and in research practices but is also progressing with more scholars and teacher educators become interested in equitable multilingualism (Ortega, 2018; 2019) and transgressive teaching practices (García et al., 2012). 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Cross-cultural immersion in China: Preparing pre- service elementary teachers to work with diverse student populations in the United States. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 37(3), 295–317. 161 APPENDIX A: Pilot Study Interview Protocols #1 Participants of 2017 Michigan ESL Teacher Standards Development Interview 1. Greetings, Gratitude and self-introduction. 2. Explain the project: The purpose of the study is to investigate the development of the Michigan Standards for the Preparation of ESL teachers, and the implementation of the standards at teacher preparation programs. In this interview with you today, I hope to find out more information about the history, the incentives and the rationales, and related educational policies for the textualization of the standards. 3. Pre-interview question: Before we start the actual interview, I would like to ask you one question to help me better contextualize our conversation. So Could you please talk about your role at Michigan Department of Education? 4. Forecast the format of the interview: I have prepared several questions in advance, and during our conversation, I might ask clarification questions or come up with new questions based on what you will say. I hope this format is ok with you? 5. Start recording:Do I have your permission to record? Interview questions: 1. Could you please talk about your role and responsibilities during the development of each version of the ESL teacher preparation standards? 2. When were the ESL teacher preparation standards firstly developed and why? 3. What were the incentives for the re-make of the standards in 2016? 4. What was the development process of the standards like? 1. How was it decided who should be involved in the process? 2. What were the main issues at discussion during the process? 162 3. How are these issues resolved (or not)? 5. The standards end up having 6 sections and 40 items. How did the committee decide that these elements were the essential for ESL teachers to have? 6. Could you please point me to some documentation, policies, news reports that are relevant to the ESL teacher preparation standards? 7. What impact do you think the standards have on teacher preparation programs? 1. How does it help advance ESL teacher preparation? 2. What challenges might teacher preparation programs face? 8. What impact do you think these standards will have at school and classroom level? 1. How are they going to affect teachers? 2. How are they going to affect EL students? Post interview: Would you like me to send you the transcription of the interview so you could review it? After I review the transcription, if there are questions coming up, would you mind if I mail you? #2 Course Faculty Supervisor Interview Interviewer: Explain the purpose of this interview. “This interview is designed to help us learn more about the standards implementation of the Michigan Standards for the Preparation of Teachers for ESL at the university level.” 1. Greetings, Gratitude. 2. Explain the project: The purpose of the study is to investigate the development of the Michigan Standards for the Preparation of ESL teachers, and the implementation of the standards at teacher preparation programs. In this interview with you today, I hope to find 163 out more about the process, the advantages and challenges when TE restructured the ESL endorsement program to meet the standards. 3. Start recording: Do I have your permission to record? Interview questions: 1. Could you please describe the ESL endorsement program at TE? 2. What was your role during the restructure of the ESL endorsement program? 3. What was the restructuring process like? 1. What major changes were made? 2. Who were involved? 3. What were the main issues at discussion during the process? 4. How are these issues resolved (or not)? 4. There are 6 sections and 40 items in the standards. How are local resources utilized to meet the requirements of the standards? 1. What advantages did we have at MSU? 2. What challenges did we have at MSU? 5. What impact do you think the standards have on the ESL endorsement program at TE? 6. What recommendations would you make to the revision of the standards? 7. Who do you think should be involved in the standards-making process of the standards? #3 5th Teacher Candidate with ESL Endorsement Interview (Fall 2019 or Spring 2020 TE494 students, will be interns in Academic year 2020-2021) 1. Greetings, gratitude and self-introduction. 2. Explain the project: The purpose of the study is to investigate the development of the Michigan Standards for the Preparation of ESL teachers, and the implementation of the 164 standards at teacher preparation programs. In this interview with you today, I hope to find out more about your overall experience getting an ESL endorsement. 3. Forecast the format of the interview: I have prepared several questions in advance, and during our conversation, I might ask clarification questions or come up with new questions based on what you will say. I hope this format is ok with you? 4. Start recording: Do I have your permission to record? Interview Questions: 1. What is your major and your focused subject area? 2. How did you decide to get an ESL endorsement? 3. What courses did you take for your ESL endorsement? 1. What was each course about? 2. How helpful do you find each course is? 3. How much did it cost you to get the ESL endorsement? 4. How confident do you feel after taking all the ESL endorsement courses to teach emergent bilingual students? 5. What do you think are the useful knowledge/skill/pedagogy from your courses? 6. What do you think is missing from your preparation? 7. How do you feel you are the same or different when it comes to teaching emergent bilinguals in comparison to your peers who did not get an ESL endorsement? 165 APPENDIX B: Main Study Interview Protocols #1 Course Instructor Interview Section 1. Personal and professional background 1. What are your scholarly interests and commitment? 2. What experiences drew you to your scholarly interests and commitment? 3. How did you get involved in teaching LLT ###/TE###? 4. How did you prepare yourself for teaching this course? 1. Who did you talk to and what did you learn from talking with them? 2. Who supported you and in what ways? 3. What materials were handed to you? What materials did you create yourself? 5. What are the course goals for your students identified in your syllabus? What are your own goals as a teacher educator teaching this course? 6. What changes, if any, did you make to this course? Why did you make those changes? /Why did you not make any changes? Section 2 General sense of CMLA Mingzhu: You have read my conceptual framework section in preparation for this interview. Let’s take several minutes to look at this figure or the document I sent you to refresh your memory. 7. a. Please comment on this framework. b. Do you have any questions about it? b. Do you have recommendations (things to add/change) for this framework? Please make notes on this Jamboard (page #1) first and then we will discuss. You can play with color-coding to distinguish different thoughts. 166 Section 3 CMLA and the course Mingzhu: Let’s move on to mapping the relationship between CMLA and LLT###/TE###. d. While you’re thinking about LLT###/TE### in relation to the CMLA framework, please use this Jamboard (page #2) for notes. 1. What dimensions of the framework does LLT### address in the general sense (not instructor-dependent), and to what extent? Can you think of some examples? 2. In what ways did you tinker with the generic curriculum as an instructor? How did these tinkering impact the relationship between the course and this CMLA framework? d. If you were to redesign this course in relation to this CMLA framework, what would the course look like? Please give some specific examples. d. What are some obstacles you might encounter? Wrap up. • Would you like me to email a copy of this interview transcript to you so you can see if you want to clarify or restate some ideas? • Can you please send me the CMLA framework document if you made notes on it? • Can you write a short bio of yourself for me to include in the paper? • What pseudonym would you like me to use in the paper? #2 Standards Realignment Workgroup Interview (Hillary and Josephine) Section 1. Personal and professional background 1. What are your scholarly interests and commitments? 2. What experiences drew you to your scholarly interests and commitments? 167 3. How did you get involved in the ESL program application/reauthorization process at MSU in 2017? What was your role? 4. What changes did you make to the program and why? How were they implemented? 5. What support did you receive during this process? 6. What were some difficulties you encountered doing the process? How did you overcome them? Section 2 General sense of CMLA Mingzhu: You have read my conceptual framework section in preparation for this interview. Let’s take several minutes to look at this figure or the document I sent you to refresh your memory. 7. What are some of your general comments, questions, or suggestions (things to add/change) about this framework? Please make notes on this Jamboard (page #1) first and then we will discuss. You can play with color-coding to distinguish different thoughts. Section 3 CMLA and Michigan ESL teacher preparation standards 8. While you’re thinking about the 2017 Michigan ESL teacher preparation standards in relation to the CMLA framework, please use this Jamboard (page #2) for notes. 1. What dimensions do the standards address, and to what extent? Can you think about some examples? 2. In what ways do these standards help with the incorporation of CMLA into this ESL program curriculum? 3. In what ways do these standards hamper the incorporation of CMLA into this ESL program course curriculum? 168 Section 4 CMLA and the ESL teacher preparation program curriculum 9. While you’re thinking about this ESL teacher preparation program curriculum in relation to the CMLA framework, please use this Jamboard (page #3) for notes. 1. What dimensions does this program curriculum address, to what extent? Can you think about some examples? 2. What dimensions are not or obliquely addressed? What could have been done? 10. How did you negotiate the discrepancies between the state standards and your scholarly commitment when redesigning this ESL teacher preparation program curriculum? Wrap up. • Would you like me to email a copy of this interview transcript to you so you can see if you want to clarify or restate some ideas? • Can you please send me the CMLA framework document if you made notes on it? • Can you write a short bio of yourself for me to include in the paper? • What pseudonym would you like me to use in the paper? 169