Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education: Principles, Policies and Practices 9781800414150

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Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education

LANGUAGE, EDUCATION AND DIVERSITY Series Editors: Stephen May, University of Auckland, New Zealand, Teresa L. McCarty, University of California, USA, Constant Leung, King’s College London, UK and Serafín M. Coronel-Molina, Indiana University Bloomington, USA The Language, Education and Diversity series aims to publish work at the intersections of language policy, language teaching and bilingualism/ multilingualism, with a particular focus on critical, socially-just alternatives for minoritised students and communities. The series is interdisciplinary, drawing on scholarship from language policy, language education, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology and the sociology of language, including work in raciolinguistics and translingualism. We welcome a variety of methodological approaches, although critical ethnographic accounts are of particular interest. Topics covered by the series include: •  Bilingual and Multilingual Models of Education •  Indigenous Language Education •  Multicultural Education •  Community-based Education All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www​.multilingual​-matters​.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK.

LANGUAGE, EDUCATION AND DIVERSITY: 3

Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education Principles, Policies and Practices

Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Katie Brubacher, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Jennifer Burton, Wales Wong, Yiran Zhang, Elizabeth Jean Larson, Antoinette Gagné and Julie Kerekes MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/BALE4143 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Bale, Jeff, author. | Rajendram, Shakina, author. | Brubacher, Katie, author. | Nii, Mama Adobea Owoo, author. | Burton, Jennifer, author. | Wong, Wales, author. | Zhang, Yiran, author. | Larson, Elizabeth Jean, author. | Gagné, Antoinette, author. | Kerekes, Julie, author. Title: Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education: Principles, Policies and Practices/Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Katie Brubacher, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Jennifer Burton, Wales Wong, Yiran Zhang, Elizabeth Jean Larson, Antoinette Gagné, Julie Kerekes. Description: Bristol; Jackson: Multilingual Matters, [2023] | Series: Language, Education and Diversity: 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book details a study of teacher education programs that prepare teachers to work with multilingual learners. The book examines how racism and linguicism shape the conditions under which teacher candidates learn how to teach, and offers guiding principles and a suite of teacher education practices to disrupt the interplay of language and race”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023010460 (print) | LCCN 2023010461 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800414136 (paperback) | ISBN 9781800414143 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800414167 (epub) | ISBN 9781800414150 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Multilingual education. | Teachers—Training of. | Racism in language. Classification: LCC LC3715 .B37 2023 (print) | LCC LC3715 (ebook) | DDC 370.117—dc23/eng/20230407 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010460 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010461 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-414-3 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-413-6 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www​.multilingual​-matters​.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www​.facebook​.com​/multilingualmatters Blog: www​.cha​nnel​view​publ​ications​.wordpress​.com Copyright © 2023 Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Katie Brubacher, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Jennifer Burton, Wales Wong, Yiran Zhang, Elizabeth Jean Larson, Antoinette Gagné and Julie Kerekes. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Adiah Laelynn Nadarajah and Adrial Luka Nadarajah, my brave warriors. You fought so hard for your lives when you entered this world. Now fight for your right to use and learn your languages. Your mum, Shakina To Isaac, may life take you past infinite rainbows, going faster than the speed of light through all its black holes. Katie To Nii Adjei Ezra and all multilingual learners, ‘Wiemɔ ni akɛ bɔ jeŋ’ language created the world: embrace all your languages. Mama To Dale Vesuvia Larson-Roberts (‘V’) and Edward Ignatius Larson-Roberts (‘Iggy’), you already have English and your unique twin language and are working on your French. Your love of reading and learning new words in these and other languages is amazing – keep expanding and growing your languages. With love and excitement, your mum Jeannie

Contents

Figures and Tables xi Acronyms xiii Acknowledgments xv About the Authors xvii 1 Contradictions of Stability and Change 1 Jeff Bale and Antoinette Gagné Vignette: Lived Experiences with Multilingualism 1 Overview of the Book 4 The Political Regulation of Multilingualism in Ontario 9 The Shifting Policy Contexts Shaping Teacher Education in Ontario 20 Conclusion 26 2 The Research Design and the People Behind It 28 Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Katie Brubacher and Wales Wong Critical Ethnography and Language Policy Analysis 28 Who This Study is About 39 Conclusion 52 3 Framing the Study Jeff Bale Comparative Perspectives A Stable Research Area Coheres Disciplinary Silos Race/Racism, Language and Teacher Education

54 54 56 61 66

4 Who are Multilingual Learners in Ontario Imagined to Be? 82 Shakina Rajendram, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Katie Brubacher, Wales Wong, Jennifer Burton and Jeff Bale Introduction 82 Ministry of Education Perspectives 84 Teacher and Teacher-Educator Perspectives 92

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Teacher-Candidate Perspectives 98 Conclusion 107 5 Preparing Teacher Candidates to Support Multilingual Learners: Insights from the Field 110 Shakina Rajendram, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Yiran Zhang, Julie Kerekes and Jeff Bale Introduction 110 Overview of the Teacher-Education Programs, Participants and Data Sources 111 Supporting English Language Learners: Programmatic Responses to the Policy 114 Teacher and Teacher-Educator Perspectives on Supporting Multilingual Learners 115 Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Mapping Linguistic Difference 127 Conclusion 135 6 STEPing into Deficit Thinking 137 Jeff Bale, Katie Brubacher, Elizabeth Jean Larson and Yiran Zhang Vignette: Engaging with STEP as a Teacher and Researcher 138 STEPing in the Supporting English Language Learners Course 141 STEPing in the PeCK-LIT Test 144 STEPing with Teacher Candidates 151 Conclusion 161 7 (Un)Learning Translanguaging Pedagogies Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Katie Brubacher, Jennifer Burton and Wales Wong Vignette: Making Sense of Translanguaging Connecting Translanguaging to Our Project Translanguaging and Candidates’ Shifting Subjectivities

163 163 167 171

8 Practices and Principles of Change 186 Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Antoinette Gagné, Katie Brubacher, Wales Wong and Jennifer Burton Introduction 186 Principles of Change 189 Practices of Change 194 Conclusion 220 Appendix: Overview of the PeCK-LIT Test and Additional Analyses 222 Elizabeth Jean Larson

Contents 

Test Design Test Administration Test Scoring Additional Analyses of PeCK-LIT Data Sample Tasks and Items

ix

222 223 226 228 231

References 234 Index 248

Figures and Tables

Figures

Figure 0.1 Picture of the author team xvii Figure 1.1 The place of language in Ontario’s English-medium schools 11 Figure 1.2 The place of language in Ontario’s French-medium schools 15 Figure 2.1 Overview of the research design 30 Figure 2.2 Screenshots from Adela’s (left) and Amelia’s (right) Me Maps 42 Figure 2.3 Screenshots from Malik’s Me Map 43 Figure 2.4 Screenshots from Ali’s (left) and Malik’s (right) Me Maps 43 Figure 3.1 Theoretical framework 67 Figure 4.1 An expanded view on ‘English language learners’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015: 7) 86 Figure 4.2 Title page of STEP: Steps to English Proficiency (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015) 91 Figure 5.1 Teacher participants in our study 112 Figure 5.2 Teacher-educator participants in our study 113 Figure 6.1 Profile of Mohammed 143 Figure 6.2 Grade 11 biology Task 1 from Version A of the PeCK-LIT test 146 Figure 6.3 Grade 10 history Task 3 from Version B of the PeCK-LIT test 149 Figure 6.4 Isabella’s multilingual word wall 153 Figure 6.5 Profiles of Sasha and Jaspreet 154 Figure 6.6 Placing Sasha and Jaspreet on the STEP levels for reading 155 Figure 6.7 Luciana’s plurilingual journey 158 Figure 6.8 STEP excerpt for oral language behaviors continua (Grades 4–6) 159

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Figure 7.1 Grade 8 history Task 2 from Version A of the PeCKLIT test Figure 7.2 Grade 6 English language arts Task 4 from Version A of the PeCK-LIT test Figure 7.3 Grade 5 mathematics Task 1 from Version B of the PeCK-LIT test Figure 7.4 Middle-grade English language arts Task 4 from Version B of the PeCK-LIT test Figure 8.1 Teacher candidates’ plurilingual teacher portraits Figure 8.2 Identity text created by Preena’s group Figure 8.3 Translanguaging strategies incorporated into Preena’s unit plan

172 176 179 181 195 201 203

Tables

Table 1.1 Language-education funding allocations for Ontario’s English and French schools (school year 2021–2022) 16 Table 2.1 Overview of teacher candidates’ multilingualism, including focal participants 45 Table 2.2 Participating teacher educators and their previous professional and academic experiences 49 Table 5.1 Institutions in Ontario with OCT-accredited teacher-education programs 112 Table 6.1 Overview of the PeCK-LIT test administration 144 Table 7.1 A framework for analyzing teacher-candidate orientations to and practice of translanguaging pedagogy 170 Table 7.2 Comparison of Year 1 and combined Year 2 responses to selected PeCK-LIT test tasks 172 Table 8.1 Brenda’s graphic organizer incorporating multimodal translanguaging strategies 200 Table 8.2 Curriculum expectations and modifications versus translanguaging in/as assessment 210 Table A.1 Dimensions, sub-dimensions and facets of PeCK-LIT 223 Table A.2 PeCK-LIT Test A task and item information 224 Table A.3 PeCK-LIT Test B task and item information 225 Table A.4 PeCK-LIT Test A rubric information for Item 1.1 227 Table A.5 Teacher-candidate background information: Years 1 and 2 228 Table A.6 Relationship of background variables to PeCK-LIT Test A scores 230 Table A.7 Relationship of background variables to PeCK-LIT Test B scores 232

Acronyms

ALF ASL AT CUNY-NYSIEB DaZ-Kom EFL ELD ELL EQAO ESL FSL IBE IEP IHP IL I/S J/I L1 LINC LPP LRT LSQ MT MTB-MLE MTRIC OCT OISE P/J PANA PeCK-LIT SIOP

Actualisation linguistique en français American sign language Associate teacher City University of New York–New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals Deutsch als Zweitsprache-Kompetenzen English as a foreign language English literacy development English language learner Education Quality and Accountability Office English as a second language French as a second language Intercultural bilingual education Individual education plan Infant hearing program International language Intermediate/senior (Grades 7–12) Junior/intermediate (Grades 4–10) First language Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada Language planning and policy Linguistically responsive teaching Langue des signes québécoise Master of teaching Mother tongue-based multilingual education Master of Teaching Racial Inclusion Committee Ontario College of Teachers Ontario Institute of Studies in Education Primary/junior (Grades K–6) Programme d’appui aux nouveaux arrivants Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Language-Inclusive Teaching Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol xiii

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STEP TC TDSB TESOL

Steps to English Proficiency Teacher candidate Toronto District School Board Teaching English to speakers of other languages

Acknowledgments

Our decision to author this book collectively is already an acknowledgment that this text and the project behind it are the products of a significant and rewarding group effort. Still, there are many other people who made important contributions to this work. The bulk of this manuscript was written between June 2021 and June 2022. During this time, Jeff had the great fortune of being a Humboldt Fellow at the Universität Bremen in Germany. While the pandemic had a significant impact on his ability to be in Bremen, the relationships he built with colleagues in the Arbeitsbereich Interkulturelle Bildung continue to shape his thinking about several core ideas in this book. He wishes to thank Professor Dr Yasemin Karakaşoğlu, Professor Dr Alisha Heinemann, Dr Dita Vogel, Dr Deniz Barasi, Dr Johanna Funck, Professor Dr Andrea Daase, Katja Baginksi, Dr Christoph Fantini, Pedro di Luca and Britta von Schaper for their hospitality, collegiality, good humor and, above all, for the inspiring exchange of ideas. Sein herzlichster Dank gilt Frank: Du hast alles verändert. We also wish to acknowledge and thank a number of colleagues at OISE who supported this project. Many colleagues in the master of teaching program made time in their sections of the Education Research course for us to administer the PeCK-LIT test. Our thanks go to Dr Victorina Baxan, Dr Sarah Cashmore, Dr Andrew Campbell, Dr Sameena Eidoo, Dr David Hayes (may he rest in peace), Dr Hilary Inwood, Dr Joanne Pattinson-Meeks, Dr Cristina Phillips and Dr Angela Vemic. With respect to developing the test instrument itself, Olesya Falenchuk, research systems analyst at OISE, offered valuable guidance as we got started. Our collective thinking about preparing teachers to work with multilingual learners has been greatly enriched through our participation in and interactions with the entire instructional team for the Supporting English Language Learners course featured in this project. Our thanks go to Nancy Bell, Dr Carol Doyle-Jones, Dr Christie Fraser, Dr Mira Gambhir, Dr Thursica Kovinthan Levi, Dr Miao Li, Paula Markus, Dr Mara Reich, Dr Clea Schmidt, Jennifer Shields and Dr Dania Wattar. xv

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We also wish to thank Paula Markus for featuring our project in two iterations of the Celebrating Linguistic Diversity Conference. This conference, co-sponsored by the Toronto District School Board and OISE, convenes ESL teachers from across Ontario and Canada. The space Paula created for our work helped us meet a number of participants in this study, and get professional feedback from teachers on specific PeCK-LIT items. OISE is lucky to have an expert team of research officers and other staff who supported Jeff, Antoinette and Julie in winning the grant that funded this research. Our thanks go to Madeleine Taylor and Lara Cartmale for their support with the grant process, and to Linn Clark for her sharp editing of the application itself. The Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning is equally lucky to have wonderful staff support for research projects such as ours. Some of the individuals named here have moved on to other work – or, more importantly, to retirement! But our special thanks go to Lisa Juan, Andrea Cuellar, Lynnette Lobo, Shena Neermul, Phillippa Pothemont and Ann Trakosas. Three further doctoral students supported the project at various points along the way. Our thanks go to Yulia Smirnova for her support during the pilot phase of the project, to Daniella Collura for assistance with an early literature review, and to Ümit Aydoğmus for his help with interview transcription. This research was made possible by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Project # 4352017-0216 (PI Jeff Bale, co-PI Antoinette Gagné, co-PI Julie Kerekes). A version of Chapter  3 appears in Bale and Lackner (2022). The authors retained copyright of that text, and it is used here with permission from Springer Nature (Lic. # 5440971508434). The King’s Printer for Ontario holds copyright for Figures 4.1 and 4.2. They are used here with permission (Lic. # C/N 0099/23/M). The analysis of these figures presented in this book should not be construed to represent the position of the Government of Ontario.

About the Authors

In lieu of more typical ‘author bios’, and consistent with the theoretical orientation of this book, we introduce ourselves here in terms of who we are as people, how we came to this research, how our social positioning shaped our approach to the study, and what we have learned or how we have changed through doing this work. Throughout the book, we remind the reader of these opening statements as different members of the author team take the lead in telling the story of this project. Figure 0.1 is a picture of the author team just before we submitted the final version of the book. The writing of this book was so deeply impacted by the COVID pandemic and shifting our lives online that a collection of thumbnail pictures seemed the most appropriate way to show you who we are.

Figure 0.1  Picture of the author team

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Jeff Bale These author statements are the last thing we wrote for the book. As I drafted mine, it occurred to me that the ideas I wanted to convey reflect the main critiques made in this book. For example, in Chapter  3 we discuss the extent to which scholarship about teacher education, multilingualism and (anti-)racism remains siloed by disciplinary divisions. My personal, professional and academic experiences mirror these divisions. I have been teaching (about) language since January 1995, when I started teaching German as a graduate student of Germanistik. Between 1997 and 2007, I was a teacher of ESL (and of German for three years), working mostly with newcomers and mostly in secondary schools in the United States. My work in teacher education began during a second stint in grad school in 2006. Since then, I have worked with future language teachers, and with general classroom teachers as they learn to support multilingual learners. I cannot provide a starting date to my life as a queer person, although I came out in 1989 when I was 17 years old. This timing means that my entire life has been profoundly shaped by the AIDS crisis – not only through the loss I have experienced, but also in shaping my political self. When the United States launched its war in the Gulf in January 1991, I was among the tens of thousands who shut down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago in protest. At that event, I encountered Lori Cannon passing out flyers that listed the number of People living with AIDS who could be supported by the money used to bomb Kuwait into oblivion. Meeting Lori literally changed my life, introducing me to ideas, movements and organizations I would be involved with for the next 25-plus years. It was not formal study of applied linguistics, but rather these political experiences that helped me make sense of how language and racism structured the schools I worked in. I could write a bunch of stories about those years; in fact, Chapter 2 has one such story. But what became clear to me through this research is that I rarely connected that political analysis to my own life, or to the lives of the people I worked with at school. My starting point was The Analysis, not my own lived experiences, let alone those of my students, their families, my co-workers and so on. In a word, my political perspectives have long shaped what I have taught, but less so how. This limitation in my thinking is also present in the research design of the study presented in this book. Yet, as we detail in this book, it was the doing of this research – interacting with so many participants, discussing and debating with such an engaged, talented research team, responding to the world around us as the study unfolded – that shifted the theoretical perspectives we used to make sense of the data. It also helped me to begin breaking down the siloed divisions as I have experienced them personally and professionally for so long.

About the Authors  xix

Shakina Rajendram My involvement in this project began when I was pursuing a PhD in language and literacies education at OISE. I had immigrated to Canada from Malaysia not long before joining the project. Growing up in Malaysia, I was proud to live in a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual country, but had also witnessed and experienced first-hand the racial, religious and linguistic discrimination historically embedded in Malaysia’s colonial social, economic and educational policies. When I became an elementary school and ESL teacher in a minoritized ethnic and linguistic community in Malaysia, I saw my colleagues enforce English-only policies in the hope that this would help their students become more proficient in English and thereby have better academic and socioeconomic opportunities. I spoke to students who told me that these English-only policies were making them feel anxious, constrained, too afraid to speak in class and like they were linguistically deficient. These experiences had such a profound impact on me that they began to shape my approach to language teaching, and subsequently the focus of my PhD research. I became passionate about using a translanguaging pedagogy to counter raciolinguistic ideologies in language teaching, and the stigmatization of the languages of racialized multilingual learners in Malaysia. When I first heard about the project, I was excited about the prospect of being able to extend my work in the Malaysian context to multilingual learners in Canada and the teacher candidates preparing to teach them. Throughout my five years in the project, I took on different roles including volunteer, research assistant, project manager, researcher and research participant. Across the different research, writing, teaching and administrative tasks I engaged in for each of these roles, I was informed by three main interconnected facets: (1) my positionality as a Malaysian of Indian ethnicity, immigrant to Canada, racialized individual, multilingual learner of English, teacher and teacher educator; (2) my theoretical alignment with critical sociocultural theory, translanguaging, raciolinguistics and multiliteracies; and (3) my methodological experience in classroom research, action research, case studies, observations, interviews and focus groups. As I moved through the various phases and strands of the project such as the case study of the Supporting English Language Learners course, the PeCK-LIT test, Me Mapping, interviews with ESL teachers in Toronto and the survey of teacher education programs in Ontario, I became more cognizant of the systemic, ideological and pragmatic constraints in developing an inclusive, anti-racist and multilingual approach to supporting multilingual learners. At the same time, seeing the linguistic and cultural knowledge and resilience of the learners we worked with in schools, and the innovative pedagogical initiatives of teacher candidates who took translanguaging to heart, has

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filled me with hope for a more equitable future for our learners, and for my own children. Katie Brubacher Being of a white, English background myself, one might wonder what brought me to this work. Although I grew up in a small farming community, my ancestors who had been in North America for almost 300 years managed to preserve their language until the 1940s. Also, some of my own friends and even extended family come from a refugee background. This is because the Mennonite community where I was raised had gone through its own struggle with language rights in Ontario and was very involved in the refugee sponsorship program. Having neighbors, colleagues and students who spoke different languages and had immigrated to Canada was something that I wanted to have as central to my own life and hoped to find these idealized spaces in Toronto. On becoming a teacher, I was surprised by how marginalized new immigrants were in schools, and I have worked to make schools more inclusive spaces with rigorous and challenging programming that is culturally sustaining ever since. As almost all my students were racialized, it became clear to me first-hand how important it is to have teachers and staff who speak the children’s languages and look the same as the children. Early on in my career in Ontario schools, I taught in spaces where an almost entirely white staff taught a majority of racialized children. After transferring to schools in Malton, Ontario, where over half of my colleagues were racialized themselves, my eyes were opened to the importance of antiracist and multilingual perspectives on teaching. Having worked for many years as an ESL teacher supporting classroom teachers in my middle school, I started to feel disillusioned by the lack of understanding or even concern that many new teachers had for multilingual students. Feeling like I was always hitting a wall, I decided to return to graduate school to complete my PhD. I was excited to learn that OISE was adding a required course on Supporting English Language Learners and that there was a possibility we could research within that course. Preparing teachers before they entered the classroom seemed like an important step forward. It filled me with hope that teachers would no longer stare at me in confusion when I suggested they find ways to bring students’ languages into their teaching, that real collaboration around creating multilingual spaces in mainstream classrooms was possible and not just the work of the ESL teacher off in some corner of the classroom or school. It is with this objective that I entered my work as a research assistant to this project. Starting with the pilot phase and ethics in 2016 before the research was funded, to observing and interviewing in classrooms to spending hours organizing, coding and analyzing data and so on, I have learned much as a researcher. This was not really my original

About the Authors  xxi

goal; I thought I would learn more as a teacher and teacher educator. I am now continuing my work as an academic as an assistant professor at the University of Alberta where I plan to bring my knowledge of teaching multilingual students to teacher candidates. Mama Adobea Nii Owoo I grew up in Accra, Ghana, where both teachers and students fit the profiles of many of the multilingual English learners in this study. But the contexts are considerably different. In Canada, the experiences of teacher candidates, teachers and teacher educators in working with multilingual learners are influenced by institutionalized racism, sociolinguistic integration and the framing of English education policy and practice. In Ghana, by contrast, the differentiating factor, when you peel back the layer of race, is that educators and learners are looking-glass selves. Educators must strike a delicate balance between teaching English, a colonially imposed official language as a tool for socioeconomic mobility, while preserving the learner’s African identity and rich ethnolinguistic history which, while often minimized by a Eurocentric schooling agenda, must absolutely be leveraged in instruction. It is in language policy interpretation and pedagogy where this challenge is at its greatest. In 2016, when I joined this study as a PhD student at OISE, I erroneously believed that the research we were doing would deal with one type of English learner, the racialized newcomer to Canada who resembled me or another non-white minority speaking English as a second language. What I did not realize was that my positionality as a multilingual Black African woman in an English-dominant country would be critical to exploring the experiences that teachers brought to supporting all English learners, as well as visibly racialized learners. I read the literature, observed pre-service teachers in the Supporting English Language Learners course, interviewed Ontario teachers and teacher educators alike, collected data on the Me Maps of immigrant and refugee students, and analyzed the multiple approaches to teacher education for English learners in the province’s other education faculties. However, I realized that we were dealing with a stereotyping of the Canadian English learner that was mediated by raciolinguistic ideologies, colonial logics of English teaching and several systemic issues that hardly acknowledged the rich plurilingual and multicultural knowledge and experiences English learners afforded Canadian classrooms. I think these experiences eventually influenced my approach to analyzing and writing up the data in this project. This study also radically changed my epistemological and methodological approach to researching my PhD topic. It exposed me to the personal side of language policy and practice, and pushed me to conceptualize the framing of medium of instruction in Ghana’s policy history

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differently. Where previous studies had applied a Eurocentric lens to studying language planning in Southern zones, I no longer saw the need to. For me, the histories and knowledge of the Global South became decolonial pathways for exploring how Black African teachers in multilingual contexts make sense of policy for English learners. Jennifer Burton My paternal and maternal grandparents were white English-speaking European settlers whose parents had immigrated to the Prairie province of Saskatchewan to farm the ‘unoccupied’ land. For many of my younger years, I lived and worked in predominantly white monolingual spaces. There were only a handful of racialized students at my elementary school, and I took the mandatory French language classes in Grades  7 and 8, vividly remembering my struggle to conjugate verbs and memorize the gender of nouns. I attended university in the same city in which I grew up. My world was small. In 2005, I flew to Seoul, South Korea, to teach English as a foreign language for one year. I ended up teaching in Korea for five years, and during my tenure I studied Korean in a university language program. Korea offered me a vastly different way of understanding myself and others in the world. When I returned to Canada in 2010, I spent the next seven years teaching English as a second language to immigrants, international, exchange and refugee-background students, while simultaneously completing my master’s thesis in the field of critical applied linguistics. When I moved to Toronto, Ontario, to begin my PhD studies in 2017, I was perplexed that the linguistic diversity that was so prevalent in the streets of Toronto was not reflected in school language practices and policies. What’s more, it is in most cases illegal to teach content in a language other than English or French in Ontario schools. To say that these experiences and my positionality did not impact how I understood and interpreted teacher candidates’ responses to the PeCK-LIT data that I analyzed for this project would be to undermine both the essence and strength of qualitative research. To account for such subjectivity, we spent numerous hours discussing and comparing our analysis and interpretations. As this project evolved, so too did I. I have come to understand the ways in which I contribute to the reproduction of raciolinguistic ideologies and have consciously worked to undo and bring awareness to dominating language practices that permeate educational institutions. There were times throughout this project where I felt overwhelmed with the ideological, systematic and pragmatic overhaul needed to create more equitable pedagogies and practices for multilingual learners. During the last three years of my PhD studies, I mentored teacher candidates in their practicum placements in my role as a teaching

About the Authors  xxiii

assistant in the master of arts in child study & education program at OISE. During these observational visits, I witnessed the marginalization and devaluing of multilingual learners’ language practices and identities in schools with English-dominant policies and practices. It was these observations and my experience analyzing the PeCK-LIT responses from teacher candidates that served as a catalyst to co-develop pedagogical materials that intentionally center multilingual learners’ diverse linguistic and cultural resources in mainstream curriculum with Shakina and Wales, two members of this research team. I continue to stive to create linguistically and culturally inclusive spaces where multilingual students’ lives and languages are at the epicenter of critical and creative (language) learning in and beyond the classroom. I have carried forward these same pedagogical principles to my dissertation research. By engaging in such endeavors, I have hope that these efforts and this scholarship will make a difference to at least one person – and for me, that matters. Wales Wong American-Chinese-Canadian. In an attempt to describe my identity, it would be both too complex and too simple of a hyphenation to capture who I am. I was born and raised in California. My parents and I lived in a predominantly Asian community. I remember going to the local video store to rent episodes of 中文電視劇 (Chinese soap operas) on VHS and going for 點心 (dim sum) on the weekends. I spoke English at school, but when I was with my parents, I spoke Cantonese and Chinglish (a mix of Chinese and English). These experiences fostered my ability to communicate in Cantonese, which served me well when I moved to Hong Kong with my parents when I was 10 years old. My parents were adamant that I maintain my fluency in English, so they enrolled me in an international school. My classmates were mostly Chinese so I got to practice my Cantonese every day. However, my school had a strict ‘English-only’ policy, so many of my friends would receive detention for not speaking in English. At the time, Hong Kong was a British colony, so knowing English was seen as an asset. I am grateful that I was surrounded by opportunities to nurture and maintain my knowledge in Cantonese. Yet, I also grew up thinking that English was the key to success in education and work. I came to Ontario, Canada, to attend university. This new journey would lead me to become a secondary school teacher in Toronto and then, a few years later, take the oath to become a Canadian citizen. I realized that I was able to find a career and settle in this country because I knew English, and so I believed that my students needed to know the language if they were to succeed in going to university/college. That is, I too firmly implemented the ‘English-only’ rule in my classes. After a couple of years of teaching, I realized that the over-valuing of English was doing more harm than good in preserving multilingual learners’

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cultural identity and linguistic abilities. It was only when I started my masters in language and literacies that I could finally articulate why the long-established rule of ‘English-only’ in classrooms was problematic. I joined this research team in 2017 when I was accepted into the PhD program. I collected and analyzed data from the teacher candidates such as interviews, classroom observations and assignments. Observing the Supporting English Language Learners course inspired me to make significant changes in my pedagogical practices. During my PhD program, I continued to work as an ESL teacher in an adult continuing-education program, so I now bring into my classroom the knowledge I gained from this study on how to support multilingual learners. It has been a great honor to be a part of this research because I have seen the significant shift in how I approach language teaching compared to when I first started as a teacher 15 years ago. Elizabeth Jean Larson I was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, in a white, Englishspeaking household and studied Spanish from first until tenth grade. My mother’s family consisted of some pretty strict grammarians (all English literature teachers), so I was constantly corrected on my English usage from a young age. I was an early reader and had many, many questions about the meanings of words. Rather than tell me these meanings, my father would give me a long-drawn-out history of each word and its roots. While this was sometimes annoying (especially to my five-yearold self), it made me a lover of languages. I studied English literature in university, and as soon as I was done, I put my love of languages to use by working as an ESL teacher in Tokyo. This was the start of a decade’s worth of ESL/EFL teaching in Tokyo and Hamburg, Germany. In all of my teaching experiences, my employers always demanded a strict English-only policy. I did not interrogate this at the time, as I knew of people getting fired for translating for students and I wanted to keep living and working in these cities. When I became a graduate student in language and literacies education, my perspective took a severe and positive shift. From my colleagues and professors, I learned the ways in which language can be used as a powerful tool to dominate and control marginalized individuals and cultures. As an ESL/EFL instructor, I had a lot of experience supporting students in their English language tests, particularly the TOEFL, IELTS and TOEIC tests. My more critical graduate-school orientation highlighted for me the ways in which these instruments can be tools of oppression, and I focused much of my graduate work on assessment practices and psychometrics in language testing and language policy. I did not know about the PeCK-LIT test when I first joined this project. I joined the project quite late, when all data had been collected and

About the Authors  xxv

the team was preparing for data analyses. I was invited to join based mostly on my experience using qual/quant analytical software. When I joined the group, I was immediately impressed by the breadth and depth of the team’s language teaching and learning experiences and their dedication to the important topic of supporting multilingual learners. When I found out that some members of this team had designed an instrument to measure teacher candidates’ abilities to support multilingual learners (i.e. the PeCK-LIT test), I wanted to learn as much about the instrument and its design as possible. I was fortunate enough to be able to take this interest and shape it into my dissertation work, which fuses test validation practices with concepts from complexity theory to make validity arguments about the PeCK-LIT. Throughout my time on this project, I have learned innumerable things regarding language policy and multilingual learners and I am immensely grateful to all of the authors of this book for letting me participate in the work. Yiran Zhang I first came to Canada at the age of 18 as an international student. I have since become a permanent resident and have spent over a decade pursuing higher education in Canada. My research interests primarily involve teaching English to adult newcomer learners. I was introduced to this project as a research assistant during the first year of my PhD studies in early 2019. Despite the time I have been living in Canada, I had no experience with and very little knowledge about the K-12 school systems and the teacher training programs in this country until I worked on this project, which was both a limitation and an advantage to my ability to contribute to the project. Although I often needed to be filled in on the contextual information and catch up on relevant literature, I was able to approach the project with an open perspective. As an emerging scholar, I have been primarily trained in qualitative research in applied linguistics. I am fascinated by human experiences and follow interpretivism and social constructivism in data collection and analyses. My recent training as a PhD student has allowed me to bring a critical component into my work using the intersectionality framework. Working on this project allowed me to experiment with new knowledge and ideas and receive feedback from my colleagues and professors. I analyzed data from participants I do not work with for my own research and expanded my understanding of K-12 and teacher education. Notably, this project challenged my beliefs about English language education and prompted me to question and examine the impact schools and teachers can make on multilingual students. As an immigrant of color who speaks English as a second language, the experiences of many participants resonated with me. The influence of one’s schooling extends beyond the four walls of a classroom and shapes one’s present and future

xxvi  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

experiences in this world. Similarly, my learning while working on this project has profoundly shaped who I am as a researcher and educator. I am excited to apply what I have learned to my research context of adult newcomer English teaching. This experience has helped pave the way for future studies I may undertake and how I conduct myself among fellow human beings. Antoinette Gagné My family has a long history in Canada. My father’s ancestors fled poverty in France, arrived by ship in the mid-1600s and settled in the region which is now the Island of Orleans not far from Quebec City, while my mother’s family came to Ontario in the late 1700s as Loyalists fleeing the newly independent country known as the United States today. I was raised at the intersection of English and French, Catholicism, Protestantism and Atheist, conservative, liberal and independentist politics. Growing up in Quebec and often being othered, I did not have a deep sense of belonging with any of the multiple communities where I spent significant time. Becoming a language teacher and then a language teacher educator, where I prepared English and French teachers, seemed like the ‘natural’ outcome of a life spent navigating the English and French languages and cultures of Canada. However, I felt like an imposter when I worked with future teachers of French because I never felt French Canadian enough to be allowed to do this. On the other hand, I felt more comfortable and passionate about preparing teachers to teach English as an additional language or support newcomers in learning through the medium of English. This passion has translated into 40  years of advocacy for multilingual learners (MLs) and their teachers. Since 2000, I have actively promoted the ‘infusion’ of issues and teaching strategies to support MLs across our teacher education program at OISE. Initially, this involved developing Ontario-based resources including the ESL Infusion and Diversity in Teaching websites as well as the ESL Infusion and Growing New Roots multimedia resources. I also engaged my colleagues in workshops and developed new courses for teacher candidates in the bachelor of education (BEd) programs. These included ESL Across the Curriculum, an elective course in the consecutive BEd program, and Inclusive Education, a required course in the concurrent BEd program. Then, in 2013, when the province mandated the inclusion of a course related to supporting English language learners (ELLs) in teacher education programs, I worked together with Jeff Bale and Julie Kerekes to create the course which is the subject of the book. In addition to teaching the initial version of the course in 2016, I have been the course and curriculum development lead (CCLD) for the Supporting English Language

About the Authors  xxvii

Learners course. This role involves working with other CCLDs across the master of teaching (MT) program to consider course sequence and assignments in relation to the structure of the year, and work to align courses more directly with MT program expectations keeping in mind student workload, assessment of learning and professionalism. In addition, my responsibilities as a CCLD include meeting with the team of six to eight instructors teaching the 13–15 sections of the Supporting English Language Learners course four times each year to ensure onboarding and alignments with changes to the course. In the last couple of years, as a CCLD I have also been asked to provide and support professional learning with a​ focus on equity and justice. My multiple roles as a long-time advocate for MLs and their teachers, course developer, instructor, CCDL and researcher have allowed me to consider the multiple strands of our research through a wide-angle lens and with an historical perspective. Although there remain challenges in preparing teacher candidates to work inclusively with diverse K-12 students, I am heartened by the widening gyre in terms of how we now understand educational practices that are truly inclusive of MLs. Julie Kerekes I was born to refugees/immigrants whose mother tongue kept me in the dark. I grew up speaking only English, with incredible parents who had perfected their English L2 so much that I could not hear their accent and whose English vocabulary far exceeded mine. I loved the sound of Hungarian, the yummy foods with exotic names, pretty handembroidered doilies garnishing our home, and my wonderful grandmother. But, for me, Hungarian was the language of mystery, of secrets, of power. I had to learn it! As a young adult, I immersed myself in language studies and, subsequently, lived in Germany, Hungary and Israel, absorbing and embracing my newly plurilingual life. I observed and experienced the complicated relationship between language and power: Why did being a ‘native speaker’ of English get me the EFL teaching job, instead of my more experienced L2-speaking teacher friends? Why could the words coming out of my mouth be ignored by some of my students, but the same words coming out of the mouth of my older, male colleague be heard? Why did some parents want their children to learn ‘proper English’, while others wanted their children to retain and continue their parents’ mother tongue? These are the questions that have guided my applied linguistics studies and subsequent research and teaching. I am an associate professor in language and literacies education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. My work focuses on language and power in intercultural institutional settings, particularly workplaces, and on additional

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language learning and teaching in and beyond academia. My current projects examine the acquisition of academic English skills by non-English-dominant students; the employment trajectories of internationally educated professionals; interlanguage pragmatics; and supporting English learners in Ontario through teacher education. A proponent of action research, I strive to apply my research findings to real-world problems related to English language learning and teaching. In this project, I have had the great fortune to work with a rich and varied team of faculty and students, focusing particularly on data from interviews with educators and administrators, and a survey of Ontario’s teacher education institutions. This project has enabled me to understand and articulate the joy of plurilingualism.

1 Contradictions of Stability and Change Jeff Bale and Antoinette Gagné

Vignette: Lived Experiences with Multilingualism Jeff Bale It was 9am in early January, and another term was about to begin. This was my second time teaching Supporting English Language Learners, a fairly new course required of all teacher candidates in the master of teaching (MT) program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. The 29 teacher candidates in this cohort, future teachers of Grades 7–12, straggled into the room, some rushing from yet another delay on the subway. The room was difficult to manage for all of us. I struggled to sync my computer to the pricey new monitor hanging on the wall, and they struggled to find enough space for themselves, their bookbags and winter gear in a room built for 15 people. I had asked candidates to read several texts in advance of our first meeting. These included recent reports on the educational experiences of racialized and Indigenous students in Toronto schools (Brown et al., 2015; James & Turner, 2017), and a research article about the contradictions of multilingual schools in officially bilingual Canada (Krasny & Sachar, 2017). As the syllabus explained, we would use these readings in class that day to consider:

• What role does language play in mediating academic success in Ontario schools? • How do implicit and explicit language policies affect student success in Ontario schools? • How do your personal experiences as a former high school student and your professional experiences as a novice teacher connect to this topic? What these candidates told me – about themselves, about their upbringing and their experiences at school – had a profound impact on how I would think about ‘supporting English language 1

2  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

learners’, how I would change my teaching about this topic and how I would understand the research we share in this book. Kaylie and Andrea described the consequences of their parents’ decisions about language at home, insisting on English only instead of also using Tagalog or Italian. (Like most names in this book, Kaylie and Andrea are pseudonyms.) In Andrea’s case, she told us her parents wanted to shield her from the discrimination they had experienced as Italian immigrants. Uba connected with this story. One of two Black women in this cohort, and one of three who represented their Muslim faith with a hijab, Uba said her parents made the opposite decision. They wanted her and her siblings to use Somali at home, because, as Uba described it, the language provided access to their culture and extended family. She told us her parents had ‘lost a lot’ by migrating to Canada, so they didn’t want their children to lose their language and culture, too. But Uba also described the negative messages she received about using Somali at school, especially when she was in high school. Ryan, who was born in Hong Kong but went to school mostly in Ontario, told us that he didn’t have anyone at school to talk with in Cantonese, so he quickly shifted to English. In telling his story, Ryan shifted the conversation, too. He asked, politely but also pointedly, whether it was such a bad thing for people to replace their other languages with a dominant one. For him, this might be a question of social efficiency, academic success or gaining access to university. Anna concurred. Born and raised in Russia, she lived in Germany for a time before migrating to Canada as an adult. Anna had learned some German in school in Russia, and described the benefits of ‘being forced’ to use German when living there. She clarified that an English-only classroom policy might be a positive and effective way to get students to use the language. Several candidates pushed back. One reported how attending English-only schools meant that they quickly lost their home language. Another recounted how they struggled with English in grade school, yet received no support in learning it. So, they sought out other speakers of their language to find some refuge during the school day. Another candidate, one of four in this cohort who came to Canada as adults, told us the schools they attended forbade them from using what they called their family’s dialect; they described this experience as ‘language oppression’. Adaline, born in Toronto to parents from Sudan, remembered vividly how her Grade  1 teacher told her and her peers to stop using Arabic in the classroom and to speak English only.

Contradictions of Stability and Change  3

And this was just the first hour of class. Our conversation felt serious and professional. The collective ambivalence these teacher candidates expressed about language shift and loss, language maintenance and school and family language policies also felt familiar. I’d been a teacher educator for a decade by this point, and was well versed in the doubts teacher candidates often have about multilingualism at school. I had also been an English as a second language (ESL) teacher for the decade before that, working mostly with newcomer adolescents. I was used to parents soliciting my advice about which language choices they should make with their children at home. What was new for me was having this conversation with teacher candidates who themselves had walked through the very terrain we were discussing. Well over half of the candidates in this cohort were multilingual, and many used their multiple languages regularly with family and friends, for enjoying music, books and TV, for worship, for social media and so on. This cohort was typical of our program in that its multilingualism was tied to migration, not to languages indigenous to what is now Canada. Similarly, no one in this cohort reported sign language as part of their multilingual practices, and, to my knowledge, the only hard-of-hearing person in the room was me. Nevertheless, whether they migrated as children or as adults, whether they were raised by migrant parents or in families with migrant grandparents, for most candidates in this cohort, multilingualism was a regular, if perhaps also unexplored, part of their life. This class session foreshadowed the doubts and debates we would revisit over the next 12 weeks. As I reflected on our conversation that first day, I was struck by the contradictions it revealed. On the one hand, there was the normalcy of the linguistic and racial diversity present in this cohort – this is, after all, Toronto. As the research we share in this book will show, over half of the roughly 800  teacher candidates in OISE’s teacher-education program are multilingual. Moreover, a recent analysis of racial diversity among teacher candidates in this program found that just under half (48%) of the candidates identified as racialized – although Indigenous (2%) and Black (6%) candidates continue to be under-enrolled in the program (Kempf et al., 2020). On the other hand, the linguistic diversity in this cohort was rarely ever talked about. I met this group in the last of five semesters that comprise OISE’s teacher-education program, and for most of the program teacher candidates are cohorted with the same 30 or so people. Yet, these candidates reported to me that this was the first time they had been asked to reflect on their lived experiences with language. More revealing still, no one had

4  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

extended the conversation that day to the connection between language and racial identity, let alone racism. Perhaps they didn’t see it – its normalcy rendered this connection invisible. Maybe it was too uncomfortable a topic to discuss, or maybe candidates were not yet sure where to begin – even among peers with whom they had spent the last year-and-a-half in the same cohort. Yet, it is precisely these connections between language, racism and learning how to teach that this book explores. Overview of the Book

This book details a three-year, multi-stranded study of teachereducation programs that prepare future teachers to work with multilingual learners. The analysis we present here addresses these guiding questions: • How do teacher candidates make sense of new knowledge about supporting multilingual learners in relation to the racial and linguistic ordering in school that they experienced as students themselves and again now as novice teachers? • What are the possibilities and limits of requiring teacher candidates to learn about linguistic diversity and supporting multilingual learners in pre-service programs? • What are the possibilities and limits of new research on translanguaging in changing teacher candidates’ thinking and practice about this racial and linguistic ordering of school? Based on critical analysis of the racial and linguistic ordering of Ontario schools, this book examines how racism and linguicism collaborate to shape the conditions under which teacher candidates learn how to teach. Our goal here is not to identify which kinds of teacher-candidate learning and practice are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’. Nor do we intend to portray the ideas and practices of participants in this study as fixed or static. Rather, our analysis traces dynamic shifts in thinking and practice as participants drew on their personal, professional and academic experiences to interpret what it means to work with multilingual learners in the classroom. As we detail in this opening chapter, our research is situated in a jurisdiction that since 2015 requires all teacher candidates to learn about linguistic diversity and to support ‘English language learners’, and within a teacher-education program with explicit commitments in policy and in curriculum to challenging racism and other forms of oppression. Moreover, as noted above, just over half of the teacher candidates in the program studied here are themselves multilingual, while just under half identify as racialized. This constellation of policy, curricular and demographic features helps explain the generally positive disposition the vast majority of

Contradictions of Stability and Change  5

teacher candidates in our study held toward multilingualism and supporting their future multilingual learners. However, as we document in this book, this positive disposition was often disrupted by candidates’ shifting ideas about multilingualism in the classroom and emergent teaching practices that continued to reproduce racialized hierarchies of languages. We do not read these contradictions as individual teacher candidates having failed to learn the right things, or as individual teacher educators having failed to teach the right things. Rather, we focus instead on shifts in participants’ ideas and practice as they reflected on their own lived experiences with multilingualism and racism; engaged with formal curriculum and policy documents designed to support ‘English language learners’; interacted with real multilingual learners, whether in practicum placements or through video profiles called Me Maps, which were initiated through this project; and reflected on their practical experiences in Toronto-area schools. By tracing participant interactions with these people and resources, we reveal how candidates’ thinking and practice changed with respect to ‘supporting English language learners’. In many instances, these shifts provide compelling evidence of how teacher education can function as a form of white institutional listening (Daniels & Varghese, 2020), and how multilingual and racialized teacher candidates themselves learn how to function as white listening subjects (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Despite the preponderance of this evidence, however, our primary investment in this research is in understanding how and under what conditions positive change is possible. Not only does the concluding chapter focus specifically on the change we argue is required to center multilingual learners and challenge racism in teacher education, but also, throughout the main data chapters, even when we find ourselves raising sharp critiques of the ideas and practices we analyzed, we attend to the dynamism and fluidity in our participants’ thinking and actions. At times, we do this by analyzing raciolinguistic contradictions in the data, and then seeking to identify ‘ways out’ of them. At other times, we situate our analysis of participants’ work in relation to formal policy and curriculum documents and trace the connection between these documents and their words or actions. At other times still, we include brief profiles of focal participants in an effort to connect their thinking and doing to who they told they are as entire people, and not just as (future) teachers. Equally as important, we have woven throughout the book a reflective stance on our own work in this project. Similar to the teacher candidates Jeff described in the opening vignette, we also did not begin this study by focusing on the relationship between racism and language, or by asking how that relationship shapes teacher-candidate learning about their future multilingual students. In part, it was the doing of this research that led our analysis in this direction. Throughout the book, we highlight specific instances in which our thinking about teacher education and multilingualism has changed in this respect.

6  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

It was also the incredible shifts in the world around us as the research unfolded that informed our analysis. For example, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) and its 94 Calls to Action to redress the legacy of residential schools and to foster reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the Canadian state appeared in December 2015. The MT program at OISE began to seriously consider these calls to action and make structural and content changes to its curriculum in response in 2016 (see Purton et al., 2020), just as the pilot stage of this study got started. A new wave of activism against anti-Black racism was resurging at about the same time in response to the police murders of Abdirahman Abdi, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, D’Andre Campbell and others across Ontario, as well as the systemic racism in Ontario schools (see Cole, 2020; Maynard, 2017). This resurgence visited itself on the MT program, as Black teacher candidates reported the extent of the racism they experienced within the program and in school settings where they completed practicum placements. Their advocacy led the program to establish the Master of Teaching Racial Inclusion Committee (MTRIC) (see Kempf et al., 2020), whose work we discuss in further chapters. A white supremacist, terrorist attack on a Quebec City masjid on 29  January 2017 brought renewed attention to the sustained violence and surveillance that Muslims, and those perceived as Muslim, experience in Canada (see Zine, 2022). As Eidoo (2021) so beautifully documents, Muslim youth continue to respond to this racist violence with their own specific visions of liberation. To be clear, in no way do we claim that this study was designed in response to these seismic shifts in society, or to ‘assess’ their impact on our program or on teacher-candidate learning. We refer to them here to underscore that these movements in society animated considerable change in OISE’s teacher-education program – no matter how uneven or contested – as we conducted this study. Finally, just as Jeff wondered in the opening vignette whether candidates felt too uncomfortable in that initial class session to address the connections between language and racism, we note as well the discomfort of the research team that was present at times as we conducted the study. As a team, we paused briefly from data collection in summer 2019 to think collectively about new empirical research on teacher education and multilingualism, and to consider various theoretical frameworks for guiding our work. This conversation was inspired by thoughtful comments provided by Professor Kara Mitchell Viesca in her role as discussant for a symposium on this project we held at the 2019 meeting of the American Association of Educational Research. It was during this round of reading that we began to ask more explicit questions about the relationship between racism and teacher education. Moreover, the groundbreaking work of Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa on raciolinguistic ideologies first appeared in 2015, and again in 2017, and quickly became the touchstone for renewed thinking in applied linguistics about how race

Contradictions of Stability and Change  7

and language collaborate to shape the world in which we live and teach. Their work also became an important reference point for this project, even if as a research team we each hold different perspectives on how racism, language education and teacher education are connected. These differences led, at times, to difficult or uncomfortable conversations. However, we argue that it is in this discomfort that important learning and change have taken place. To address the guiding questions listed earlier, we have organized this book into eight chapters. The first three chapters work in tandem to establish what, and more importantly, whom this book is about. In the remainder of this opening chapter, we analyze the linguistic, policy and institutional context for this study. Chapter 2 opens with an overview of the study’s research design, describing each of the four strands of work that inform the analysis presented in this book. The chapter continues by introducing the people who made this study possible, namely multilingual youth, teacher candidates, teacher educators and the research team. We introduce one member of each group with a short profile, and then discuss each group as a collective. In the first three cases, this analysis is based on our data; in the last case, it is based on our own reflections as a research team. Chapter 3 situates the current study in relation to recent literature on preparing teacher candidates to support multilingual learners, and introduces the theoretical framework that guides the book’s analysis. In placing our book in conversation with other literature, we strove to include research from a variety of national and social contexts; however, the reality remains that the overwhelming balance of current studies on this topic is happening in North America (the United States in particular) and Europe (Germany in particular). Moreover, we pause throughout the discussion of our theoretical framework to make connections to the four participant profiles we introduced in Chapter  2. Our intent here is not only to keep the people in this study central in our analysis, but we also aim to humanize what might otherwise feel like overly abstract ideas about how race and language collaborate in organizing the conditions under which teacher candidates learn how to teach. While each of the first three chapters presents original analysis (i.e. they are more than just ‘background’ to the study), our primary findings are presented in Chapters  4–7. Chapter  4 examines how multilingual learners are imagined to be in Ontario. We start by discussing our own thinking about multilingual learners, how it changed by doing this research and how we arrived at using the term multilingual learners. The chapter then turns to consider how relevant policy and curriculum documents, teachers and teacher educators, and teacher candidates understood this group of students. In Chapter 5, we focus on the strand of the study that explored the perspectives of ESL teachers, as well as those of teacher educators in Ontario’s 16 programs on how best to prepare candidates to support multilingual learners. Because the teacher-education

8  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

policy animating this study is a province-wide initiative, we were interested in understanding from a broader perspective how other teachers, teacher-leaders and teacher educators have made sense of and appropriated this policy shift. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on findings from the case study of OISE’s teacher-education program specifically. In Chapter 6, we explore the contradiction between teacher candidates’ generally positive dispositions toward multilingualism and their future multilingual learners, and the reprisal of deficit orientations toward actual multilingual learners. Chapter 7 explores teacher-candidate practice, with a particular focus on how they took up ideas and pedagogical strategies related to translanguaging. Our analysis traces the relationship between shifts in candidates’ subject position from ‘student of teaching’ to ‘novice teacher’ and a shift in their practice away from translanguaging to English-only strategies for supporting multilingual learners. The concluding chapter focuses on the implications of this study. We introduce specific practices and principles of change that can support teacher educators centering multilingual learners and challenging racism as they prepare future teachers. Before returning to the analysis in this chapter, we offer a word about authorship. It is not yet common in applied linguistic scholarship to have a book co-authored by a large research team. In our case, it was the only reasonable choice. For Jeff as the principal investigator of this study, or for Jeff, Antoinette and Julie as the faculty researchers who led the study, to claim this research as our own or based solely on our own work would be both inaccurate and unethical. Whatever role we played as faculty in securing the grant that funded the research we share here, or in leading the four strands of the study we introduce in Chapter 2, none of this work would have been possible without a large research team. We are not just talking about the actual labor that made this study possible; it was a big project and, of course, required many hands to bring it to life. Rather, we are talking about the intellectual and conceptual work behind this book. For example, the video profiles of multilingual learners that came to be known as Me Maps are the product of significant conceptual contributions – and hundreds of hours of work, collectively – from Shakina, Katie, Mama and Wales. Moreover, Wales and Katie were not simply the research assistants who collected data for the case-study portion of this project. Instead, their doing of the work helped shape and change subsequent data collection, and how we established data analysis procedures. The same is true for the pedagogical content-knowledge test we designed. None of us on the original research team were experts in such tests – we still aren’t. Without the collective efforts of Jeff, Julie, Shakina, Wales, Mama and Katie to design the instrument, without Jennifer and Yiran’s work to make sense of candidates’ responses and without the contributions of Jeannie, who joined the team later and is an expert on

Contradictions of Stability and Change  9

such instruments (see Larson, 2023), this part of the project would have been fruitless. We will not pretend to ascribe this approach to co-authorship to some big theory of anti-racist this or decolonial that, as much as these theories matter. We simply insert this note here to stress that the most appropriate – and most ethical – way to honor the collective work upon which this study depended was to involve everyone in writing this book. It did make the writing more complicated, and the reader will likely note unevenness in ‘voice’ at times throughout the book. However, besides honoring the ethical imperative, we think this approach made the analysis stronger. For each chapter, we list the specific author teams; where there are personal reflections that comprise a single section of a chapter, such as the vignette above, we list the author of that section separately. When we refer to ourselves in the book as researchers, we use our real names; in the few instances in which some of us were also research participants, the text uses pseudonyms. Finally, Lisa Lackner, Mingyi Li and Christopher Gradin joined the project after we had already begun drafting this book. As such, they are not listed as authors. However, we must also thank them for their careful work in its production (e.g. reference lists, formatting, indexing and proof-reading). To return to the analysis, the remainder of this opening chapter explores the linguistic, policy and institutional context in which we conducted our study. The Political Regulation of Multilingualism in Ontario

In 2015, the Canadian province of Ontario implemented a new policy governing its teacher-education programs. This policy included important structural changes, above all, doubling the minimum time required for licensure from one to two years. To ‘fill up’ that new time, the policy also mandated specific content that teacher-education providers must address in their curriculum. One such topic is Supporting English Language Learners, making Ontario the only Canadian jurisdiction to require all teacher candidates to learn about linguistic diversity and supporting multilingual learners during their initial teacher-education program. The policy also requires content about ‘supporting French Language Learners’ in those teacher-education programs that prepare teachers for the province’s French-medium school boards. However, this study focused on Ontario’s English-medium schools and related teacher-education programs. To begin, we situate this policy in its linguistic and political context in Ontario by introducing the suite of language-education policies that regulate and structure the social reality of Ontario’s schools. In the last section of this chapter, we provide a closer read of this policy and the texts related to it, and discuss how it was taken up in OISE’s teachereducation program.

10  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

The novelty and uniqueness of this mandate to address ‘supporting English Language learners’ in teacher-education programs contrast with the reality that Ontario is – and has long been – one of the most linguistically diverse spaces on earth. Central to this diversity are Indigenous languages. Most Indigenous languages spoken in Ontario belong to Algonquian, Athabaskan, Iroquoian or Inuit language families, with Ojibway, Cree, Oji-Cree, Mohawk and Inuktitut the most widely spoken at home (Statistics Canada, 2018; the names of languages used here are as given on the census). Moreover, Ontario is home to just under half of all Canadians whose first or home languages are what the government calls immigrant languages (Statistics Canada, 2017). According to the 2016 census, 14 languages are reported as a first language by more than 100,000 people: Arabic, Cantonese, Farsi, German, Italian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil and Urdu. Statistics on sign-language users in Canada are exceptionally difficult to come by (see Canadian Association of the Deaf, 2015). American sign language (ASL), Langue des signes québécoise (LSQ) and Indigenous sign languages are used in Ontario, although how these languages are recognized by the government is complicated (see Snoddon & Wilkinson, 2019). ASL is used in three bilingual provincial schools for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, while LSQ is used in one school for the deaf that is part of a consortium of French language school boards in eastern Ontario. Finally, Ontario is home to the largest Francophone population in Canada outside of Quebec, and this population is growing. In the 2016 census, newcomers (i.e. defined by Statistics Canada as those who arrived after 2011) comprised a larger share of the total Francophone immigrant population (17.4%) than did newcomers among the total Anglophone immigrant population (12.3%). Beyond this rate of growth, Ontario’s Francophone population is increasingly racialized. While one’s continent of origin cannot be conflated with racial identity, the 2016 census documented that among Ontario’s Francophones born outside Canada, fully 64% migrated from Africa, Asia or the Caribbean (Ministry of Francophone Affairs, 2019). The previous paragraph gives some sense of the richness of multilingualism in Ontario. However, describing language diversity as a question of demographics is misleading insofar as multilingualism in Ontario (as in Canada more broadly) exists in a structural and ideological context dominated by two white-settler languages, namely English and French. This status obtains as a result not only of federal policies for official bilingualism and provincial policies to protect Ontario’s Francophone minority, but also Ontario’s Education Act, which governs publicly funded schools, explicitly restricts teaching the curriculum to English or French, with few exceptions (such as sign language use in Ontario’s provincial schools for the deaf; see Education Act, 1990). This linguistic duality dominates school life in Ontario’s publicly funded schools, and it

Contradictions of Stability and Change  11

dominates how many of us think about, research and advocate for education in this province. Equally important, this linguistic duality exists alongside over 50  years of formal policies at the federal and provincial level in support of multiculturalism. That is, whatever commitments the government has to cultural plurality, they are subordinate in every way to and are almost always only expressed in English and French. We develop this argument in the following three sections, examining how linguistic duality is (re)produced through (1) policy, (2) funding and (3) research and advocacy. Linguistic duality (re)produced through policy

Approximately 2 million youth are enrolled in Ontario schools; the vast majority, around 95%, attend English-medium, publicly funded schools. Figure  1.1 shows the various types of language-education programs either required or available in English-medium schools; the names of the various programs are as given in Ontario curriculum and policy documents. The relative size of the circles in the figure indicates that learning the dominant school language – English – and Canada’s other official language – French – receives the most attention in policy, curriculum and funding. Indeed, these are the only two kinds of language learning that are required in Ontario schools, whether to demonstrate literacy in English on standardized tests, or as part of Canada’s national project of official bilingualism.

Figure 1.1  The place of language in Ontario’s English-medium schools

12  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

In addition, the border between learning English and French as additional languages has long been sharply enforced. The experiences of multilingual learners in French as a second language (FSL) programming underscore this point. Historically, multilingual learners were sometimes exempted from Ontario’s requirement regarding FSL education, and even excluded from more prestigious French immersion programs. This exclusion was rationalized by claims that multilingual learners must first acquire English before starting French (see Mady & Turnbull, 2010). These exclusionary practices run counter to broad support among migrant families for learning both official languages (Mady, 2017), and, as we will see in Chapter 2, broad interest among multilingual youth in learning English and French. The province has made efforts to change this situation, in part by revising its FSL curriculum in 2013. However, recent research indicates that students enrolled in French immersion programs in Ontario continue to be disproportionately white, and are wealthier than the general student population (OCDSB, 2019; Sinay, 2015). These enrollment patterns underwrite widely held attitudes about French immersion programs that they function as private schools within the publicly funded system (see Barrett DeWiele & Edgerton, 2021). Moreover, it was not until 2016 – some 40  years after the widespread implementation of FSL programming in Ontario – that the Ontario Ministry of Education (2016a) published a resource guide explicitly addressing how to support ‘English language learners’ in the FSL classroom. As suggested in Figure 1.1, Ontario also has additional policies regulating the learning of other languages in publicly funded schools. In each case, these programs follow a traditional ‘foreign language’ model, insofar as the languages are taught as subjects only. Regarding First Nations, Métis and Inuit languages, Ontario renewed its policy framework for Indigenous education in 2007 (see Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007b). As part of this framework, the province committed to expanding access to what it calls Native languages. In fact, a dedicated funding stream was created to support the learning of Indigenous languages in both English- and French-medium schools. Despite these positive developments, subsequent studies of the policy framework cast doubt on the province’s commitment to Indigenous language learning. For example, the framework has been assessed three times since 2007. In each case, these implementation studies focused extensively on standardized tests in literacy in English and numeracy, and graduation rates among Indigenous youth as proxies for determining the policy’s success. By contrast, little attention was paid to the status of Indigenous language programs (see Bale, 2019a). Regarding what are now called international languages, the policy regulating these languages dates back to 1977. When it first appeared, the policy referred to heritage languages and funded such programs at the elementary level only. Indeed, the different names for this policy reflect one of its central contradictions: is it designed to sustain the ethnolinguistic

Contradictions of Stability and Change  13

identity of students who speak non-English and non-French languages? Or is it designed as an enrichment activity for Anglophones and Francophones? Can it meet both goals at once? The first decade of this policy (1977–1987) led to some of the most explosive – and most explicitly racialized – conflicts in the history of Ontario public schooling, including two separate labor disputes led by Toronto teachers’ unions against the policy (see Bale, 2023, 2019b; Bale & Kawaguchi, 2020; Berryman, 1986; Cummins & Danesi, 1990; Kim et al., 2020). These conflicts turned on the policy’s contradictory stipulations. On the one hand, it did provide limited funding to learn heritage languages; in fact, the program was quickly taken up to support instruction in dozens of languages, including several Indigenous languages. However, on the other hand, these programs were only allowed outside the school day, had no formal curriculum and depended in practice on additional material support from parents and community members to make them viable. Moreover, during this first decade, school boards had the right to deny parent requests to set up a heritage language program. In these ways, the policy proved to be an expedient initiative that pleased almost no one: for heritage language advocates, it did not go nearly far enough to include minoritized and racialized languages and cultures in school life; for its detractors, the policy was a waste of public money that distracted from new FSL programming and thus posed a threat to Canada’s newly minted bilingual identity (see Bale, 2019b). Assessing the status of sign languages in Ontario is more complicated. They sit at the intersection of health, special education and language education policies in ways that simultaneously restrict access to sign language for deaf, deafened or hard-of-hearing children while expanding access for hearing people. Edelist (2019), for example, conducted a genealogy of the Infant Hearing Program (IHP), a program in Ontario that governs hearing testing for newborns and guides parents to support if their child ‘fails’ these tests. Her interviews with parents revealed that the IHP presents them with a false choice: either they access technologies such as cochlear implants and then commit to an aural-oral future for their child; or they request access to sign language. Parents described the latter option as an uphill battle, especially to secure the resources needed for the entire family, not just the child, to learn sign language. They also recalled that the IHP, whether in writing or through its staff, never presented both pathways (aural-oral and sign language) as an option. Consequently, over 90% of deaf and hard-of-hearing children in Ontario are taught in spoken English, while enrolments at Ontario’s provincial schools for deaf and hard-of-hearing children continue to decline (Beaton Vazquez, 2019). By contrast, access for hearing people to ASL continues to expand. Several Ontario universities offer credit-bearing courses in ASL (Beaton Vazquez, 2019), while the province recently announced a new curriculum for learning ASL and LSQ as subjects in high school. In its press release (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2021a: n.p.), the province described this

14  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

new offering as a ‘second-language curriculum’; indeed, this is the ASL program referred to in Figure 1.1. For many Deaf Ontarians, this framing implies that these classes are meant for hearing youth as an enrichment activity, not for deaf and hard-of-hearing students as a fundamental part of their language and literacy education, let alone for identity formation and community building (see Snoddon & Weber, 2021). Although this study focused on teacher education for Ontario’s English-medium schools, we briefly consider how this linguistic duality operates in the province’s French-medium schools as well. These schools, attended by almost 5% of Ontario students, are designed for and administered by Ontario’s minority Francophone population. With a legal basis in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Francophone minorities outside of Quebec (as with the Anglophone minority in Quebec) have the right to establish and administer their own school systems. At one level, we see a constellation of language programs mirroring that which exists in Ontario’s English-medium schools: the learning of French on a compensatory basis and the requirements for English as part of official bilingualism occupy the most space in these schools, with optional programs to learn other languages as a subject only. One important difference, stressed in many of the policies regulating these programs, is that this learning takes place in a context wherein French is a minority language and Francophones a minority community (see Ontario Ministry of Education, 2005). As such, French-medium schools have the additional goal of bolstering language, culture and identity for individual Francophones as for the Francophone community overall. One material indication of this mandate is that French-medium schools receive supplemental funding to support teaching French as a first language, over and above the funding provided for the Actualisation linguistique en français (ALF) program and the Programme d’appui aux nouveaux arrivants, shown in Figure 1.2. Linguistic duality (re)produced through funding

Figures 1.1 and 1.2, along with the accompanying discussion of them, give us some sense of how the linguistic duality in English and French organizes school life. Yet, program funding starkly reveals how policy works to (re)produce the hegemony of English and French. Table  1.1 collates funding allocations for the language-education programs we have discussed so far (see Ontario Ministry of Education, 2021b). The province provides two basic grants to fund schools: a grant based on per-pupil enrolments and a grant to support school-based leadership and administration. Any other programs the province commits to funding fall under one of several supplemental grants. One such supplemental grant, the language grant, supports all of the various programs for learning English and French as additional languages. There is a separate supplemental grant related to the Indigenous education framework described

Contradictions of Stability and Change  15

Figure 1.2  The place of language in Ontario’s French-medium schools

above; one stream within that grant is dedicated to Indigenous language programs. Another supplemental grant for continuing education includes a funding stream for international languages. What is not named in either of the two basic grants, or in any of the supplemental grants, are programs for ASL and LSQ; Anglais and Anglais pour débutants in French-medium schools; or modern and classical languages. We are left to infer that specialized instruction in these languages is either covered by another funding stream or does not enjoy dedicated funding at all. As indicated in Table 1.1, the ministry budgeted just over $900 million dollars to support all of its programs in English and French language learning for the 2021–2022 school year. This contrasts with the $23.9 million budgeted for international languages and $14.7 million for Indigenous languages. In addition to the amount of funding, there are important differences in how these programs are funded. For international languages, a flat dollar amount is paid per instructional hour, currently set at around $58 per hour. This does not change, no matter how many students are enrolled in a given program. Indigenous and FSL programs are paid on a per-pupil basis, weighted for grade level, program model (for FSL) and the average daily minutes of instructional time. However, FSL education is required for a total of six years, whereas learning Indigenous languages is an option. This combination of per-pupil funding and required learning thus generates enormous amounts of money for FSL. By contrast, Ontario’s compensatory language programs in English and French are not tied to actual per-pupil enrolments, but rather to a series of proxy

X X

X

–

–

–

X

English literacy development (ELD) For ESL students who are also not yet literate in any language

French as a second language (FSL)

Actualisation linguistique en français (ALF) For students with a legal right to attend Frenchmedium schools but who are not yet proficient in French

Programme d’appui aux nouveaux arrivants (PANA) Program for newcomer immigrant students that includes but is more than just French language instruction

French first language To cover higher expenses related to curriculum materials and program administration

Recent migrant supplement Limited-time funding to account for drop in immigration due to COVID; allocated to ESL/ELD and PANA programs

English

English as a second language (ESL)

The language grant, which covers:

Language program

X

X

X

X

–

–

–

French

Which boards receive this funding?

$79.6

$91.3

$9.9

$128.8

$286.9

$304.3

Allocation (in millions) for 2021–2022

No

Yes

No

No

Yes

No

Funding based on per-pupil enrolment?

•B  ased on ESL/ELD and PANA allocations over the last four years

•P  er-pupil enrolments weighted for grade level

•P  roxies used based on census data and attendance figures in a given board

•P  roxies used based on census data and attendance figures in a given board

•P  er-pupil enrolments weighted for program type, grade level and average daily length of the program

•P  roxies used based on census data and attendance figures in a given board

How is funding calculated?

Table 1.1  Language-education funding allocations for Ontario’s English and French schools (school year 2021–2022)

16  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

X

Indigenous languages

X

X $14.7

$23.9

Source: Ontario Ministry of Education (2021b).

Total allocation in 2021–2022 for all non-English and non-French programs: $38.6 million

X

International languages

Total allocation in 2021–2022 for all language grant programs: $900.7 million

Yes

No

•P  er-pupil enrolments weighted by length of daily instruction and grade level

•A  dollar/per hour rate based on total classroom hours of instruction

Contradictions of Stability and Change  17

18  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

calculations. These proxies, based on census data and overall school attendance, mean that some students are ‘counted’ toward the budget for programs they may not, in fact, need. That is, these proxies work to inflate the dollar amount being funded. There are likely good reasons for this inflation; the point is not to ask the ministry to spend less on ESL or ALF programs, but rather to underscore how policy and related funding mechanisms function to establish the centrality of English and French in daily school life. Not only does a dollar-to-dollar comparison starkly reveal that English and French language programs account for almost all of the $1 billion spent each year on language-education programs in Ontario, but also the variation in funding formulas suggests additional inequities in how those dollar amounts are calculated in the first place. Linguistic duality (re)produced through research and advocacy

As detailed as the funding documents discussed above are, there is less information available from ministry sources about student enrollments in various language-education programs. For example, the only language program for which there are annual enrollment data reported for all grade levels in all publicly-funded schools is FSL. The ministry also publishes annual enrolment data for a more complete set of language programs, but only at the secondary level. Further, while the ministry used to publish enrolments in international languages programs, it currently does not. At best, then, the data available regarding languageeducation programs is incomplete and inconsistent. Moreover, as George et al. (2020) have noted, conspicuously absent from ministry publications is any analysis of the racial identities of Ontario students. For example, for the last several years, the ministry has published tables of student demographics within each publicly-funded school (see https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/school-information-and-student-demographics). Included are percentages of students whose first language is neither English nor French; who are newcomers to Canada; who are identified as gifted; who are receiving special education services; whose families are identified as low-income; and whose parents have no formal degree or diploma. In a separate publication, the ministry reports school enrolments by gender, although it only acknowledges students as ‘male’ or ‘female’. Yet, among all this demographic information shared by the ministry, student racial identities are not included. Some individual school boards publish their own research with more complete demographic analysis. The Toronto District School Board (TDSB), for example, conducts periodic censuses of its student population to document the languages students speak, their country of origin, their racial identity and so on (e.g. TDSB, 2018). Moreover, both the TDSB and Ottawa’s largest school board have conducted their own research into their respective FSL programs in terms of their racial and

Contradictions of Stability and Change  19

class composition (OCDSB, 2019; Sinay, 2015). At the provincial level, however, there is no recent practice of collecting, collating or analyzing similar data – at least not for public consumption. These oversights and exclusions are also present in the publications of education advocacy organizations. People for Education is one such group, based in Ontario. In 2017, they found that in English-medium school boards, 63% of elementary schools and 58% of secondary schools enrolled students formally labelled as ‘English language learners’. Meanwhile, in French language schools fully 76% of elementary schools enrolled ‘French language learners’. This group of learners accounted for some 20% of students enrolled in French-medium schools, providing further evidence of Ontario’s growing Francophone population and the diversity of that population (People for Education, 2017). Likewise, Canadian Parents for French, founded in Ottawa in 1977 to advocate for FSL learning across Canada, publishes periodic analyses of FSL enrolments in each province and territory. In Ontario in the 2018–2019 school year, around 1 million students were enrolled in FSL programs out of a total student population of 1.93  million in Englishmedium schools (Canadian Parents for French, n.d.). Reports like these are extremely helpful insofar as they synthesize complicated ministry datasets to communicate clearly about ESL and FSL education. In this way, these reports reflect dominant policy initiatives regarding English- and French-language learning in Ontario. However, they are also part of creating an ideological common sense that English and French are the only languages that matter enough to have their respective enrollments analyzed in the first place. Moreover, similar to ministry datasets themselves, these reports do not consider who the students behind these enrollment figures are. For example, the percentages of ‘English language learners’ cited in the People for Education report by definition include multilingual Indigenous youth; multilingual migrant children and the children of migrants, as well as students with a refugee background; and deaf and hard-of-hearing students, whether or not enrolled in Ontario’s provincial schools for the deaf. They include multilingual Francophones who choose (or whose parents choose for them) to attend English-medium schools. Yet, when the act of counting intersects with the linguistic duality that dominates in Canada, these multilingual practices and identities simply disappear. In English-medium schools, this erasure means that multiple language identities are reduced to the singular category of English language learner who really only ‘count’ in the data, literally and figuratively, as a matter of funding. Or they are ‘captured’ in the data, again literally and figuratively, as FSL learners to assess the status of – but really to alleviate enduring anxieties about – Canada’s national project of official bilingualism. To be clear, we do not mean to ignore the political and conceptual problems associated with

20  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

counting, or with the discrete divisions between languages or races that counting requires in the first place (more about this in Chapter 3). However, we suggest that the absence of these kinds of data is not the result of some radical critique of enumeration. Instead, this absence reflects a logic that simultaneously takes for granted and reinforces the centrality of English and French in Canadian life. It is in this context that the province implemented a change to its teacher-education policy in 2015 to require that all teacher candidates learn about linguistic diversity and supporting students labeled English or French language learners during their pre-service programs. In the final section of this chapter, we focus on the ongoing shifts in the policy contexts that shape teacher education in Ontario generally, and the MT program specifically during the period in which we conducted this study. The Shifting Policy Contexts Shaping Teacher Education in Ontario

As argued in the previous section, there exists a racialized hierarchy of languages in Ontario, with English and French positioned at the top. This hierarchy is not only remarkably stable, but it is also actively reproduced through provincial policy, funding and in advocacy as they relate to language education. In contradiction to this stability, the policy contexts shaping teacher education in Ontario have been in a consistent state of flux, both before and while we carried out this study. Indeed, these policies have become more explicit in challenging and/or requiring teachereducation programs to orient their curricula and teacher-candidate learning on equity and diversity, broadly defined. In this closing section, we discuss these evolving policy contexts at the provincial and institutional levels as they relate to the MT program at OISE at the University of Toronto. The MT program is one of 16 teacher-education programs in Ontario, and one of only two graduate-level programs in the province. As with all university-based teacher-education programs, the MT program is regulated in two different ways. As a professional program, it must adhere to the Ontario Ministry of Education and Ontario College of Teachers’ (OCT) directives. As a graduate program within the University of Toronto, it is also subject to the various institutional policies that govern its academic focus, as well as efforts to attend to equity and diversity concerns. We address both levels of policy contexts, and discuss how the MT program responded to them through a process of policy and curriculum renewal. Addressing equity and diversity within provincial policies

The teacher-education policy that animates this study was announced in 2013, and took effect with the 2015 academic year. To support teachereducation programs in complying with this policy, the OCT published

Contradictions of Stability and Change  21

an updated version of its Accreditation Resource Guide (hereafter, the Guide) in 2017. Much of the content addressed in the Guide focuses on questions of equity and diversity, including (1) theories of learning and teaching and differentiated instruction; (2) supporting English language learners; (3) supporting students with special education needs; (4) mental health, addictions and well-being; and (5) Indigenous perspectives, cultures, histories and ways of knowing. In addition, the Guide (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017) makes clear that it is the responsibility of program providers to make strong connections to education policy documents related to various aspects of diversity. In fact, it is suggested that there be explicit references and use of key policy and resource documents such as Growing Success (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010), Learning for All K-12 (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013a), Equity and Inclusive Education in Ontario Schools (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017a), Creating Pathways to Success (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013b) and the Well-Being Strategy for Education (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2016b). In Chapter  6, we return to these expectations in the Guide, with specific attention to the expectation that teacher-education programs address the province’s assessment framework for English language learners. The Guide (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017) also mandates that initial teacher-education programs enable teacher candidates to acquire knowledge and skills pertaining to various aspects of diversity and equity. The wording is very specific in terms of what should be included in particular courses along with suggested teaching, learning and assessment strategies: culturally appropriate methods for creating inclusive, productive learning communities, both face-to-face and virtual, with meaningful, relevant and culturally responsive lessons and instructional approaches that engage learners (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 16) an understanding of the implications of systemic barriers that can affect student well-being and student achievement and thus necessitate a bias-free approach to foster positive, safe and respectful school culture (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 16) methods to allow students to see themselves in the curriculum through their backgrounds, experiences and knowledge in culturally relevant and responsive ways, including those that reflect traditional Indigenous ways of being and knowing (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 16) the colonial experiences of Indigenous peoples, such as residential school experiences, and the ongoing impact of these experiences on Indigenous communities and their members (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 33)

22  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

the diversity of languages within Indigenous communities and ways of supporting multilingual language development (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 33) understanding of the principles of an asset-based approach and teaching strategies are needed to plan for, differentiate, and personalize learning and assessment for individual students (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 21)

Finally, the OCT reviews all teacher-education programs in Ontario on a cyclical basis. As the Guide states, programs must demonstrate how they adhere to the teacher-education policy the Guide describes such that graduates are ‘able to work with all students, using student strengths and interests to promote their learning and development’ (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 21). Of the various documents named in the Guide, Ontario’s Education Equity Action Plan (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017b) is important to mention because it builds on the previous 10 years of equity work in Ontario. The document clearly states the need to remove systemic barriers to ensure that school and classroom practices reflect and respond to the diversity of students and staff. Specifically, the ‘School & Classroom Practices’ section of the plan highlights how current structures, policies, programs and practices may place certain students at a disadvantage, and provides a list of the most vulnerable students which includes ‘racialized students, students experiencing poverty, Indigenous students, newcomers to Canada, students who identify as LGBTQ or Two-Spirit, children and youth in care, religious minorities, French language minorities, students with disabilities, and students with special education needs’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017b: 14). In addition, there are specific indicators for educators, school administrators and the public to look for as the action plan is operationalized one year at a time. While the longevity of this equity work is important to highlight, so too is the unstable ground on which this work is carried out. For example, provincial elections in June 2018 led to a significant change in government. The Progressive Conservatives enjoyed a resounding victory, ousting the Liberal Party that had led the government for the previous 15 years. One of the many consequences of this shift in power is that none of the policy documents mentioned in the Guide and discussed above are easily found on the ministry’s website. Instead, the current government’s stated commitment to equity forms a considerably minor part of the overall agenda it has laid out for Ontario schools (see https:// www.ontario.ca/page/education-ontario). This raises important questions about what it means for teachereducation programs to be required to address provincial policies that no longer enjoy the support of government. By design, the OCT – the body

Contradictions of Stability and Change  23

responsible for enacting the policy discussed here, as well as accrediting teacher-education programs and certifying teachers – sits at arms-length from the Ministry of Education and the government more broadly. We might interpret this arms-length status as an effort to shield the organization from shifts in provincial politics, such as changes to the political parties forming government. At the same time, the clarity with which the OCT’s Guide refers to specific ministerial initiatives for fostering equity and inclusion is muddied when those initiatives are no longer prioritized by the ministry itself. Addressing equity and diversity within university policies

At the university level broadly, a number of policy initiatives were underway at the University of Toronto simultaneous to the implementation of the province’s new teacher-education policy and the subsequent changes in the MT program. These university initiatives included: (1) employment equity policies (University of Toronto, n.d.) with the stated purpose of diversifying faculty and staff; (2) encouraging faculty to adopt Universal Design for Learning with resources provided by the Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation (n.d.) to reduce barriers so that all learners can engage in rigorous, meaningful learning; (3) an expansion of the university’s accessibility services; and (4) renewal of the university’s commitment to the mental health and well-being of its students. Additionally, at the divisional level, OISE updated its Guiding Principles on Equity and Diversity in 2018. This document does not name any specific academic program at OISE. However, as shown in the following excerpt, it does create a general framework for programs such as the MT program in addressing equity and diversity in terms of recruitment, hiring, curriculum and program climate. The document states: To further ensure that social justice prevails in our programs we will aim to: • enrol and support a student body that reflects the diversity of the communities we serve through, for example, processes for student recruitment, selection, admission and subsequent support and accommodations; • ensure that social justice is promoted in all areas of our curriculum, in our pedagogy, in the climate of our classrooms, and in all aspects of the OISE environment; • hire and support individuals who have a demonstrated commitment and capacity to realize our social justice goals through their work and community involvement. (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 2018)

24  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Neither the university-wide policies mentioned here nor OISE’s divisional policies regarding equity and diversity specifically targeted the MT program. Nevertheless, they are important pieces of the policy contexts to which all university programs, the MT included, are held accountable. MT program renewal and the shifting policy landscape

The shifting demands of education policy in Ontario as well as at the University of Toronto discussed above led to the recursive program review and renewal of the MT program. Shortly before the province’s new teacher-education policy took effect in 2015, OISE’s upper administration took a decision to begin phasing out the faculty’s long-standing bachelor of education programs. Instead, the MT program, which had been a fairly small program originally designed for secondary-level candidates only, would be expanded dramatically in numerical terms to enroll the 800 candidates it now does; and it would expand programmatically to respond to the province’s new expectations for teacher education (McDougall et  al., 2017). These programmatic changes were implemented at whiplash speed and with considerable controversy over how such major program decisions had been made (Chiose, 2015). A multi-phase MT curriculum review process began in 2017 in an effort to slow down this rapid pace of change and think more carefully about what the MT program could and should be. The process included (1) the development of an MT program vision statement; (2) the development of program expectations; (3) curriculum mapping to identify connections between program expectations and requirements across its courses and field experiences; and (4) the creation of an action plan for the renewal of the MT program with the ongoing assessment that would eventually lead to re-visioning. All of the documents cited in this section can be found on the MT Visioning Process website (see Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, n.d.a). Driving this process was a working group composed of program leaders and course coordinators, in consultation with all MT instructors and field partners such as school district leaders and representatives from the Ontario Teachers Federation. This group met multiple times for more than a year. As one concrete outcome, this process culminated in a vision statement that reflects a commitment to equity, diversity and accessibility: Teaching excellence and scholarly research are the mutually reinforcing pillars of the Master of Teaching program. The program prepares candidates to become outstanding teachers and leaders who consult, critique, create and mobilize educational research. As a community, our faculty, students and graduates share a deep commitment to all learners and the building of a more just, equitable and sustainable world.

Contradictions of Stability and Change  25

A further outcome is the MT program’s updated admissions statement that aligns with both the program’s vision statement and OISE’s Guiding Principles on Equity and Diversity discussed earlier. One example of this alignment in the admissions statement reads ‘At the University of Toronto, we strive to be an equitable, diverse and inclusive community… OISE is dedicated to admitting qualified candidates who reflect the ethnic, cultural and social diversity of Toronto’s schools’. Connected to this admissions statement is the work of the MTRIC. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, this committee was formed as the MT program’s response to multiple reports from Black and other racialized teacher candidates of specific instances of racism they had experienced on campus in MT courses, as well as during practicum placements. In addition to surveying teacher candidates to better understand the racial identities (under-)represented in the program (discussed further in Chapter 2), the MTRIC has been working to develop more diverse recruitment pathways, particularly with respect to Black and Indigenous applicants. These efforts include outreach to middle and secondary schools and extracurricular programming to help minority students begin to imagine teaching as a possible career. Another goal of this visioning process was to identify core MT program expectations and to map them across the program’s various courseand field-based experiences. At the end of the process, the working group identified 23 core program expectations. These expectations are aligned with the mandatory content stipulated by the OCT and also reflect the graduate nature of the MT program as well as the program vision. The expectations include knowledge, competencies and values the MT candidates will develop and display following the successful completion of the MT program. Several expectations connect particularly well with the renewed focus on equity and diversity in Ontario and at the University of Toronto, namely that teacher candidates: • Engage in data collection, analysis and the mobilization of research in respectful ways that consider communities and context. • Recognize and investigate their own social locations, biases, (dis)advantages and predispositions in relation to their teaching and research. • Understand that teaching requires ongoing learning and engagement with current issues and the different perspectives and worldviews of local and global communities. • Demonstrate pedagogies and actions that support well-being, equity, social justice, cultural responsiveness and environmental sustainability to promote the transformative purposes of education. • Demonstrate an understanding of the ways systemic and institutional practices impact learners and groups, and identify ways to address inequities and inequalities.

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Through curriculum mapping, the working group identified where these program expectations can and should be found across course- and field-based experiences, and which teaching, learning and assessment strategies help candidates to meet these expectations. In this way, the program makes an effort to infuse knowledge of and commitments to equity and diversity throughout the program. At the same time, the MT program also includes required courses that address difference and equity explicitly and along a number of dimensions. These courses include: • • • • •

Introduction to Special Education and Mental Health Anti-Discriminatory Education Supporting English Language Learners Curriculum and Teaching in Social Studies and Aboriginal Education Indigenous Experiences of Racism and Settler Colonialism in Canada: An Introduction • Educational Research 1 and 2 Some of these courses were part of the MT program before the appearance of the province’s new teacher-education policy (e.g. Anti-Discriminatory Education, Educational Research 1 and 2). Others, in particular the Supporting English Language Learners course at the heart of the study, were a direct result of the new policy. In fact, as described in greater detail in Chapter  6, the name of the course was taken directly from the OCT’s Accreditation Research Guide (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017). Still other courses listed above were developed in response to other political developments in Canada. For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its 94 Calls to Action to address the legacy of residential schools and their role in white-settler colonialism in Canada and redress that legacy with concrete actions, appeared in late 2015. The additional focus on Aboriginal Education in the elementary-level MT course on social studies, as well as the new secondary-level course on Indigenous Experiences of Racism and Settler Colonialism in Canada: An Introduction represent concrete efforts in the MT program to respond to the Calls to Action. Conclusion

As we have endeavored to demonstrate in this opening chapter on the linguistic, policy and institutional contexts in which this study took place, there exists a fundamental contradiction shaping our work. On the one hand, a long-standing, stable hierarchy of racialized and minoritized languages exists. This hierarchy continues to be reproduced through language-education policies, funding mechanisms and advocacy that not only work to segregate the many languages taught and learned in

Contradictions of Stability and Change  27

Ontario into discrete silos, but also reinscribe English and French as the languages that dominate daily life in Ontario schools. On the other hand, there is no shortage of policies in the provincial, university and program contexts that name social justice, equity and inclusion as their explicit goals. These policies may or may not have direct, positive outcomes. As noted above, a change in government has removed most, if not all, attention ‘from the top’ to many of the provincial initiatives for equity and inclusion that teacher-education programs are, in fact, mandated to address. As well, we must also consider Ahmed’s powerful critique of the non-performativity of many institutional claims to equity, diversity and inclusion. Ahmed (2021: 318) uses this term to define ‘more precisely the speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name’. Irrespective of whatever critique we might raise of these institutional policy shifts, we close this chapter by stressing the gap between the stability of linguistic regulation and the hierarchization in Ontario schools on the one hand, and these stated commitments to equity and inclusion at the provincial and institutional levels on the other so as to frame the contradictory context in which all teacher candidates are now required to learn how to support English language learners. In Chapter 2, we provide greater detail about how we studied this contradiction, and the many people involved in bringing this study to life.

2 The Research Design and the People Behind It Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Mama Adobea  Nii Owoo, Katie Brubacher and Wales Wong

This chapter begins with a discussion of the research design informing this book. The bulk of the chapter focuses on the people who made this study possible, namely multilingual youth, teacher candidates, teacher educators and specialist language teachers, and the research team itself. The discussion not only reveals the contradictions between Ontario’s multilingual reality in the context of English–French linguistic duality and how they play out in the lives of the people connected to our study, but it also suggests the disciplinary and theoretical issues that motivated our study, which we address directly in Chapter 3. Critical Ethnography and Language Policy Analysis

Given Ontario’s rich linguistic diversity as described in Chapter 1, we welcomed Ontario’s new teacher-education policy requiring all teacher candidates to consider this multilingual reality as they learn how to teach. However, the mandates in the policy also marked a significant shift in the relationship between provincial oversight of teacher-education programs, which hitherto enjoyed considerable autonomy in deciding the structure and substance of their respective programs. Precisely because of this tension between new mandates and the traditions of relative autonomy, we knew that any attempt to study how this policy was taken up, whether in our own teacher-education program or in others across the province, must orient on studying language policy as social practice, rather than documenting policy ‘implementation’. As such, our study was inspired by the tradition of critical ethnographies of language in education policy. This research tradition has its origins in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and has since become prominent in language planning and policy (LPP) scholarship (Martin-Jones & de Costa Cabral, 2018). At the heart of this methodological perspective is viewing policy as a social practice of meaning making, rather than as a technocratic process of identifying problems and then designing specific measures to solve them. A social practice approach instead assumes that policy itself ‘(a) defines reality, (b) orders behavior, and (sometimes) 28

The Research Design and the People Behind It  29

(c) allocates resources accordingly’ (Levinson et  al., 2009: 771). This more anthropological approach to analyzing educational policy aims to overcome the conceptual cul-de-sac of structure versus agency, that is, of viewing policy as either static constraints that governments place on schools and the people in them, or over-romanticizing agency by assuming individuals can simply make out of policy what they will. McCarty (2011) offers a series of guiding questions that help researchers break out of this analytical trap. These questions are in part descriptive, by asking what policy ‘looks like’ as practiced by real people in concrete contexts. They are also critical by asking (a) how policy normalizes some linguistic practices, while marginalizing others; (b) how policy disciplines or otherwise regulates language use and language users; and (c) how policy works to define individual and collective subject positions. McCarty (2011) further challenges ethnographic researchers to ask how speakers of minoritized languages respond to and/or resist the constraints established by and through policy, and how ethnographic research conducted in partnership with speakers of minoritized languages might foster social justice. Johnson’s (2009) proposal for resolving the structure–agency contradiction adopts a scalar approach to link macro, meso and micro levels of policy creation and enactment. This approach is based on an analytical division of labor that traces policy appropriation in terms of the people implicated in and by policy, the policy’s stated goals, a close examination of the policymaking process, the discourses within and surrounding the policy, as well as analysis of the historical and social contexts within which the policy exists. For Johnson (2009: 142), ‘“policy” is a dynamic process that stretches across time, and implementation or “appropriation” is not just what happens after a policy is made—it is a link in the chain of policy process in which all actors potentially have input’. In their overview of critical ethnography in LPP research, MartinJones and de Costa Cabral (2018) identified several features that characterize this way of understanding and doing ethnographic research. Such work requires a commitment to understanding the research phenomenon from the perspective of participants’ values and beliefs, by considering how participants’ life histories are shaped by dominant ideologies within specific social contexts. Critical ethnographic work is also multi-scalar, not only in its efforts to understand the research phenomena from more local (or micro) contexts to more macro (or global) ones, but also in seeking to establish links between these scales as participants interpret policy and make meaning from it. Martin-Jones and de Costa Cabral also describe critical ethnographic work as methodologically diverse, which the reader will immediately notice as we describe our own research design below. Finally, this work is characterized by researchers’ reflexivity in terms of how we design, conduct and report our work.

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Antoinette, Julie and Jeff contributed to designing the new course that the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) created on Supporting English Language Learners (ELLs) discussed in Chapter  1, and were part of the original instructional team. As such, we were ideally positioned to study Ontario’s new teacher-education policy from the ethnographic, social practice perspective we just outlined. To understand how this policy would be taken up in OISE’s teacher-education program as well as others across the province, we designed our study as a multistranded inquiry with two broad objectives. The first was to determine whether Ontario’s new teacher-education policy, specifically its mandate regarding ‘supporting English language learners’, was consistent with the diversity, strength and needs of multilingual students in the province. The second was to identify how teacher candidates, teacher educators and practicing teachers in local schools interpreted and enacted this new policy. Figure  2.1 provides an overview of the various strands in our study; in the following sections, we describe each strand in turn. Me Maps

The mandate that all teacher candidates in Ontario learn about linguistic diversity and supporting ELLs both defines a kind of student in Ontario schools and assumes that this student will benefit from the policy initiative. The first major strand of our study aimed to unpack those

Figure 2.1  Overview of the research design

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assumptions. This strand involved collaborating with multilingual learners to create what we call ‘Me Maps’ (see https://sites.google.com/view/ memapping/home?authuser=0). Me Maps are video profiles in which multilingual children and youth describe their linguistic, cultural, social and academic identities, and share their perspectives on school, family, community and the broader world around them. Antoinette oversaw this work, collaborating with Shakina, Mama, Katie and Wales; the work was initiated through this project and extended through a second externally funded project led by Antoinette (see SAIRCY Project, n.d.). In this project, our approach to Me Maps was informed by McCarty et al. (2014: 82), who view multilingual learners not as objects of policy, but as policymakers themselves. Specifically, the authors ask: ‘In dynamic situations of language shift, how can we take youth language opportunities and resources into account when analyzing their language ideologies and practices?’ As the team got started, we soon realized that focusing solely on language was too narrow. That is, it was through an iterative process in which Shakina, Mama, Katie and Wales created initial video templates and activity guides for Me Maps, and then worked with multilingual children and youth to use them, that we learned that youth were interested in creating more holistic stories about their lives. Through an additional funded project, Antoinette, some of the doctoral-student researchers from this project, as well as doctoral students from the second project worked with multilingual learners to create the current set of 36 complete Me Maps. Most of the Me Maps were created in classroom settings with K-12 learners, or in after-school programs designed for newcomer children and youth with a refugee background; a few Me Maps were created in learners’ homes. The production process involved two stages. First, the research team used guides we created with specific prompts addressing themes such as past, present, future; family; language repertoire; friends; and school. Participants were free to choose whichever prompts they liked, and then created short videos in response. In some cases (especially earlier in the project), participants created these videos on their own at home. Later, as Me Mapping moved into classroom and communitycenter settings with the second project Antoinette led, participants were guided more explicitly in how to create these videos. Sometimes, participants would pair up and find a quiet space in which to work, taking turns being the ‘director’ and the ‘star’ in the video. Participants were invited to review the recordings they had just made before uploading them. We observed that most learners wanted to record their responses again. Each time they did this, they added something new in their videos. The practice they got from recording their videos several times helped to build confidence. The second stage of the production process involved Antoinette’s team taking the several short videos that each participant created and uploaded, and then editing them into a single Me Map for each participant.

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For this project, we were most interested in using Me Maps as a resource for supporting teacher-candidate learning about multilingualism in general and multilingual learners in particular. In the final year of data collection for this project (2019–2020), Shakina developed a number of learning opportunities for use with nine sections of the Supporting English Language Learners course. In the spring and summer of 2020, she and Antoinette conducted focus groups with candidates from six of these sections to gain their perspectives on Me Mapping as a pedagogy, and to understand how and to what extent using Me Maps contributed to candidates’ learning about multilingual students and linguistic diversity more broadly. What teacher candidates learned by engaging with Me Maps is discussed in Chapter 8. Policy ethnography

At the heart of the policy ethnography was the new required course in OISE’s master of teaching (MT) program, Supporting English Language Learners. We entered into this work with the goal of understanding how teacher candidates learn to think and act like teachers. That is, we designed this portion of the research to study (1) how teacher candidates make sense of required learning about linguistic diversity and supporting multilingual learners in relation to their own linguistic profiles, previous educational experiences, other coursework in the program and their goals as future teachers; and (2) how they demonstrate this sense-making in the work they produce for this course, in their unit and lesson planning, and in their practicum placements. The Supporting English Language Learners course is required for candidates in the second year of the program, and is offered in 14–15 separate sections taught by six or seven different instructors; numbers vary each year depending on overall enrolments and the availability of instructors. The course comprises 36 hours of instruction, organized into 12  sessions. At the time of our study, the course was offered to some cohorts on a compressed schedule in the summer, meeting twice a week for six  weeks. Other cohorts took the course during the fall or winter terms, while still others had the 12  class sessions spread across the fall and winter terms. Another aspect of variation is the cohort structure of the program. Cohorts are organized by the grade levels in which candidates are certified: primary/junior (P/J, Grades K–6), junior/intermediate (J/I, Grades  4–10) and intermediate/senior (I/S, Grades  7–12). In addition, the program forms J/I and I/S cohorts to have a mix of subject areas in which teacher candidates seek certification. As such, course content varies to address the specificities of teaching in these grade levels. To help ensure some consistency in what candidates learn in the course, there are three core assignments that all sections use: ‘My Plurilingual Journey’, in which candidates create a text about their experiences with language,

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language learning and language identity; an ‘ELL Case Study’, in which candidates use the Steps to English Proficiency (STEP) assessment framework provided by the Ontario Ministry of Education to interact with a multilingual learner and write a case study about them; and a ‘Unit Plan’, most often used as a culminating assessment and completed by small groups of candidates, in which they demonstrate how they would apply their learning from the course to their planning and pedagogy. To conduct this ethnographic case study of the course, Jeff, Katie and Wales focused on nine sections offered between fall 2017 and winter 2020. In designing this portion of the study, we aimed for a balance in certification levels and chose cohorts accordingly. However, I/S candidates are overrepresented in the dataset, in part because Jeff was the principal investigator of the study and taught three I/S cohorts during the data collection phase. For one J/I cohort, we chose not to pursue data collection because so few candidates consented to participate. In the end, we worked with two P/J cohorts, three J/I cohorts and four I/S cohorts. The focus groups we described above, which Shakina and Antoinette conducted regarding Me Maps, comprised mostly P/J candidates. Data collection in each cohort included documents, observation and interviews. The bulk of the document data comprises the three assignments described above. In addition, we collected discussion posts that candidates made on the learning platform used in our program, as well as any work created in class and posted to this platform. We collected document data like this from over 130 candidates in these nine cohorts. In addition, Katie and Wales conducted observations of participating teacher candidates in these nine cohorts. In each cohort, they observed approximately 12 hours of the 36-hour course. To help produce data that would be comparable across multiple sections of the course, Wales and Katie consulted the syllabi for each section and chose those class sessions during which similar topics would be addressed (e.g. STEP, the language demands of the content areas and supporting students with refugee backgrounds). Finally, toward the end of each course, Katie and Wales invited candidates to participate in interviews with the research team. These interviews were carefully structured to avoid ‘course evaluation’ conversations, and instead to help us hear directly from candidates themselves about the questions guiding this portion of the study. The interviews (as well as the focus groups that Shakina and Antoinette conducted) were the component of the data collection most directly affected by the COVID pandemic. We conducted fewer interviews in the final year of the project, and most of them took place via video conferencing. In the end, we interviewed 52 teacher candidates individually or in focus groups. Our research within this required course also included interviews with 10 members of the instructional team. Bale et al. (2019) reported an early analysis of these conversations, with particular attention paid to

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how our own diverse personal, professional and intellectual experiences with multilingualism deeply shaped our approach to teaching this course. Different from seeing this variation as a ‘challenge’ to achieving some sort of desired consistency across the multiple sections of the course, we framed our diverse experiences as a resource for enriching what the course could do. Finally, four members of the research team (Jeff, Antoinette, Julie and Shakina) have taught the course; Antoinette served as the course lead from its inception in 2016–2020, and again as of 2022, with Shakina in this role in the time in between. Our dataset thus includes our own researcher notes about our experiences teaching the course and/or overseeing it in the program. Complementing the policy ethnography

We built out from this core focus on the Supporting English Language Learners course in several ways. The first was to design a pedagogical content knowledge test of the beliefs, knowledge and skills that teacher candidates have for supporting multilingual learners. Through Jeff’s professional connections with researchers in Germany, we received permission to use a draft English language translation of the DaZ-Kom test (Köker et al., 2015) and adapt it for our purposes in Ontario. The instrument we created, the Pedagogical Content Knowledge for LanguageInclusive Teaching (PeCK-LIT) test, includes items related to Ontario’s curriculum and to real-world scenarios in Ontario classrooms (see the Appendix for sample items and related tasks). Jeff, Julie, Mama, Katie, Shakina and Wales collaborated to design and pilot the instrument, while Jeff, Jennifer, Jeannie and Yiran focused on data analysis. Our original intent was to use the PeCK-LIT test on a pre/post basis to better understand changes in teacher-candidate thinking over the course of the entire program. Each version of the instrument has five tasks with a total of 17 or 18 items related to Ontario curriculum and classroom scenarios across the grade levels and content areas. Most items invite open-ended responses, although a few on each version prompt for discrete answers. The instrument also includes demographic information about the languages that candidates grew up with, as well as those they used and/or learned at school. We also asked whether candidates had experience teaching languages before joining the MT program, and, for J/I and I/S candidates, what their teaching subjects were. We used this information to explore possible relationships within aggregated responses among certification level, identity as a multilingual person and/or experience with multilingualism, and subject area. We piloted the instrument in the 2017–2018 academic year, then administered a revised instrument in the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 academic years. In total, we had 580 responses from over 410 teacher candidates (some candidates took both versions of the test). The Appendix provides further

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information on how we developed and administered the PeCK-LIT test, and how we rated candidates’ responses. As we began data analysis, we understood that the differences in the two versions of the test instrument would not allow for a true pre/post analysis. Instead, these two versions – one administered in the first few months of the program, the other in the final few months – provide us with two snapshots of teacher-candidates’ thinking about multilingualism and how to design their instruction to best support multilingual learners. Complementing this research within OISE’s MT program were two efforts to understand the new teacher-education policy from the perspective of working teachers and teacher-leaders, as well as teacher educators in Ontario’s other teacher-education programs. In the summer of 2018, our research team conducted interviews with 12  teachers and teacher-leaders, mostly from Ontario, to explore their perspectives on the knowledge, abilities and stances teacher candidates need most to support multilingual learners. Kerekes et al. (2021) report analysis of these interviews, and Chapter 5 returns to these conversations in relation to the theoretical framing of this book. In addition, Julie collaborated with Shakina, Mama and Yiran to explore how Ontario’s other programs have responded to this new mandate to address supporting multilingual learners with all teacher candidates. They began by collecting publicly available documents (e.g. program descriptions, sample syllabi, accreditation reports) from 16 teacher-education programs in Ontario. Based on preliminary analysis of these documents, the team conducted interviews with teacher educators from the programs to understand from their perspective what it means to engage teacher candidates on the topic of linguistic diversity and supporting multilingual learners, and how their respective program integrates these topics into the curriculum. The team conducted 12 interviews with teacher educators from 10 programs in urban, suburban, rural and northern Ontario contexts. We present an analysis of these data in Chapter 5. Ethical considerations

We begin this discussion of the ethical dimensions of this project by noting that the institutional ethics review at the University of Toronto assessed the research design as ‘low risk’ to the various participants in our study, including children and youth. Moreover, our project was randomly selected for a ‘post-approval review’ in Year 3, for which we produced detailed reports on the number of participants, any significant changes to the research design, any participant withdrawals and so on, as well as documentation of consent forms. This process also confirmed that participants in the study were at most at low risk. We start here to underscore that low risk  ≠  no ethical issues to address. Quite the opposite,

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there remained several important ethical questions for the research team to work through. These questions fell into one of three main categories: producing and collecting video data with youth; producing and collecting data with our own students; and raising critiques of participants’ ideas and practice in ethical ways. Collecting qualitative data with children and youth always requires particular care, but especially when those data include their voices and images, as the Me Maps do. We created consent forms for parents and caregivers, as well as assent forms for children and youth participants to indicate their understanding of, and agreement to participate in the Me Mapping process. The forms were created and collected electronically, but at times we printed them out for families when requested to support their understanding of our request. Both the consent and assent forms used language that was as clear and concise as possible. Through Antoinette’s second project (see SAIRCY Project, n.d.), which worked in specific community and school settings that welcomed newly arrived families from Afghanistan and Syria with refugee backgrounds, the consent forms were translated into Arabic and Farsi/Dari. In these cases, Antoinette led a discussion with potential participants and their families that included a brief overview of the Me Map work. She was supported in this work by Dr Dania Wattar and volunteers from the community organization, who speak Arabic and Farsi/Dari, respectively. Also, the consent and assent forms included screenshots of sample Me Maps that Mama, Wales, Shakina and Katie had made, so that potential participants and their families could see what it was we were asking them to do. The forms also included a link to a website from a previous project that Antoinette led, which includes videos of multilingual youth, so that potential participants and their families could see a concrete example of what we intended to do with these videos. As mentioned earlier, during the production of the Me Map videos, participants were invited to review the recordings they had just made before uploading them. In addition, the research team held viewing parties for youth participants and their families so they could see the results of their work and get a sense of the process of creating the final, edited Me Maps. In one case, participants were invited to talk about their experiences with the Me Mapping process. The vast majority of the data produced for this project involved our own students, that is, teacher candidates in the MT program at OISE. Jeff, Antoinette and Julie already had considerable experience conducting research with our own students as participants. This helped us identify early in the research design phase which steps we wanted to take to protect potential participants. In terms of teacher candidates enrolled in the Supporting English Language Learners course, Katie and Wales were responsible for the entire recruitment process, whether or not Jeff, Antoinette and Julie taught those sections. A week or two into the course, the instructors would email candidates a copy of the consent form and

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explain that Katie or Wales would drop by class for about 30  minutes to invite participants. During these visits, the instructor would leave the class to ensure the confidentiality of potential participants and to allow candidates to freely inquire about the study. Katie and Wales would explain the research, review the consent form and field questions from teacher candidates. An important part of this process is that instructors were not told which of their students had or had not consented to participate. Teacher candidates were asked to consent to observations, the collection of their course assignments or both. Most participants who consented chose both. However, the J/I (Grades  4–11) teacher candidates would often opt for one and not the other. We are unsure of why this was. Some teacher candidates seemed uncertain about how their class assignments would become a part of the research. The candidates’ coursework was not collected as data until after the course was completed and final marks had been submitted. Close to the end of the course, Katie and Wales would make a second invitation for teacher candidates to participate in interviews with them. They emailed candidates a couple of days before to inform them of the option to participate in the interviews, and included a link to the consent form. Most of the interviews took place upon completion of the course. However, for one section that occurred in the final term of the program, candidates were given the option to interview earlier because they would be graduating, with some leaving the city before the post-course interviews took place. In terms of observations, in order to learn teacher candidates’ names, Katie and Wales would access their photographs on the MT program’s learning platform. During classroom discussions, instructors would state the name of the candidates who raised their hands and contributed to the discussion, which helped the researchers to identify participants in the first couple of classes. In one of the courses held in a smaller room, Katie often had to sit inside a horseshoe arrangement of desks. This made it difficult for her to conceal her screen so that other candidates would not know who was or who was not a participant. She had to be very intentional about how she angled her computer while taking notes, because at least one of the candidates was seen trying to look at the participant list. Similarly, Wales would find a seat to the side of the group during group work so as not to distract the candidates from their discussions and to angle her computer away from anyone nearby. When candidates were working in groups, Katie and Wales would actively protect participants’ identities by making it look like they were typing while everyone spoke and asking for everyone’s name. In most classrooms, they were able to find a seat where they felt like they were part of the class, but could also protect participants’ identities by hiding their screens from the class. Sometimes, students would talk to them or

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chat about course content at break, which they would take note of in their observations. In addition, Katie and Wales had the opportunity to share their knowledge on a topic pertaining to their area of research. Katie taught a lesson on critical literacy with multilingual students and nominalization, and Wales presented findings from her master’s research study on multilingual adult students’ translanguaging practices in writing. This helped Katie and Wales integrate more into each section of the course and not be seen as ‘outsider’ researchers. Another component of collecting data from our own students involved the PeCK-LIT test. A research instrument such as this requires many responses if it is to be of much use. We had two false starts in trying to recruit teacher candidates to complete the PeCK-LIT test. This led us to ask our MT colleagues for permission to administer the test during course instruction. In conversation with the MT leadership team, Antoinette received permission for us to administer the test in sections of the Education Research I & II courses. These courses are designed to introduce teacher candidates to research ethics and design, and to support them in conducting their own small-scale inquiry as teacher-researchers. In return for this access to these courses, we agreed to treat the PeCKLIT test in three ways: as an example of the kind of teacher-led inquiry that candidates were being asked to learn (i.e. a potential benefit to our colleagues who were giving up their instructional time and to candidates in terms of learning about research design), as an opportunity for candidates to reflect on multilingualism and their own novice teaching practice (i.e. a potential benefit to candidates) and as data collection for our project (i.e. a potential benefit to us). Our visits to these class sections would take about an hour. We would begin by introducing the PeCK-LIT test in the three ways mentioned earlier, and then we would engage candidates in conversation about the challenges and opportunities that survey research presents. Candidates would then be invited to complete the test itself, which took about 30 minutes. Only at the end of the test did we ask candidates to provide consent for us to use their responses as data. In the discussion afterward, we would ask candidates to connect their experience of taking the PeCK-LIT test to the ideas they raised earlier about survey research. In particular, we asked them why they thought we asked for their consent to use their answers as data only after they finished the test. From our perspective, we made this decision to ensure that everyone had the opportunity to reflect on how to support multilingual learners, and to know in greater detail what it was they were agreeing to before being asked for consent. For the few candidates who did not provide consent, we immediately deleted their responses from the dataset. For the vast majority of the candidates who consented, their responses did not include any personal identifying information.

The Research Design and the People Behind It  39

A final ethical consideration involves how our research team treated ideas and practices we observed in the data to which we strongly objected. We address this point throughout the data chapters, but it is important to mention here as part of our ethical deliberations. As we made our way through the enormous dataset this project created, we took advantage of many conferences to present our early analyses. This work was always done as a team, with each of us taking responsibility to present this or that aspect of the overall paper or symposium. After a few such presentations, we recognized that our analysis was beginning to fall into the trap of describing ‘good’ ideas and practices in the data and comparing them to ‘bad’ ones. This was never the aim of our research; nevertheless, we found ourselves starting to hold our research participants to a standard of some imagined ideal of language-inclusive, anti-racist practice. This was both unfair and unethical, and also not very useful in terms of research. The book itself is the explanation to the reader of how we attempted to get out of this trap. But it does not mean that we no longer had anything negative or critical to say. As such, we have taken great care in the writing of this text to express our critiques in ethical and empathetic ways. Would we read this text aloud to the person whom we are critiquing? How would we feel if someone wrote such things about us? Have we sought evidence to disconfirm the critique we are making? Is the critique offered in the spirit of engagement and change, and not simply expressed for its own sake? What are the conceptual and methodological limitations of our own study that might have produced data that we are now critiquing? These are the questions that guided our analysis and writing process. With respect to the last of these questions, we reflect throughout this book on the limitations in our own work, how our thinking changed through the doing of this research and the impact of both on the analysis presented here. Who This Study is About

While the notes above provide an overview of the research design that informed our multi-stranded study, the remainder of the chapter focuses on a far more important question, namely the people who made this study possible. We begin with four portraits of individuals involved in the research, and connect them to a discussion of the different participants and how they contributed to the project. The analysis presented here foreshadows the disciplinary and theoretical issues involved in this study; Chapter 3 then discusses these issues directly. The multilingual learners in our study

We start with Shazzy, who was seven years old when we met him. Shazzy is a precocious kid who is curious about different languages and

40  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

cultures. Shazzy knows and regularly uses Bangla, English, Hindi, Urdu and a bit of Korean. According to Shazzy, knowing Bangla has helped him understand Hindi and Urdu. He also tries speaking Korean with his Korean friend at school to make his friend feel more comfortable. At home, Shazzy speaks Bangla with his family. His favorite activities are reading, playing the piano and presenting book reports to his mother, who works abroad and is away from home sometimes. When we first met Shazzy, he was a huge fan of The Alien Next Door book series. He is absolutely fascinated with stories about aliens. As part of creating the Me Map video profile with our research team, we used Busch’s (2018) linguistic profile activity to ask participants like Shazzy to indicate where their languages live in their body. As Shazzy described his profile for the Me Map video, he held up his drawing to the camera and told us that Bangla lives in his heart. Later, in the same video, Shazzy told us that when speaking English, ‘I feel white because I feel normal’. Shazzy was one of 36 people between the ages of six and 20 who participated in creating Me Map video profiles. In their Me Maps, these youth talked about various aspects of their lives, including their linguistic and cultural repertoires, timelines, important milestones and special moments, home countries, places they have lived, families, friends, neighbors, interests, skills and their future dreams, goals and aspirations. The countries represented in the Me Map videos were as diverse as the languages spoken by the learners: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Jordan, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Syria, Turkey, the United States and Zimbabwe, among others. While several learners had settled in Canada with their families as part of a planned immigration process, many others had arrived in Canada as refugees. A few of the older learners had moved to Canada on their own to study in Canadian high schools as international students. In their Me Map profiles, learners often spoke of positive experiences they have had in Canada, ‘the most fun country’, thanks to teachers who made the classroom a safe space for them; budding friendships with peers at school and in their community; and their pursuit of dancing, singing, playing music, sports, cooking, skiing, gym, reading, running, video games and other old or new interests. Learners also demonstrated their resilience in navigating their new linguistic, social, cultural and academic environments despite painful memories from the past, interpersonal conflict with friends and the challenge of learning everything in a new language. In analyzing the Me Maps, we were particularly interested in understanding how the learners themselves defined their linguistic profiles. First, the portraits made clear that all these learners presented themselves as multilinguals with rich and complex linguistic repertoires. Their multilingual competencies included Afghani, Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Kinyamulenge, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish, Korean, Mandarin, Shona, Spanish,

The Research Design and the People Behind It  41

Swahili, Tigrinya, Turkish and Urdu. Perhaps more important than the sheer linguistic diversity they described, these learners did not make distinctions between the languages they used based on their level of proficiency in each language, but rather presented all of the languages as part of their overall linguistic identity. Indeed, when thinking about which languages were part of their repertoires, learners often cited their affinity for a language (e.g. ‘languages of my friends’, ‘language of my heart’) as a reason for including a language, rather than how proficient they described themselves being in that language. Moreover, the common distinction made between ‘home languages’ and English fails to account for how learners discussed the multiple languages in their lives. Learners talked about the languages they were formally learning at school, as well as those they learned informally through interactions with extended family members, neighbors and friends. This underscored the dynamic and fluid, rather than static nature of their plurilingual repertoires. For example, Adela, a 14-year-old learner from Syria, included Chinese as one of the four languages listed in her linguistic portrait because ‘I have a lot of friends in [an after-school program who] speak Chinese’. Amelia, a six-year-old learner from South Korea also included ‘Mandarin, Bangla, Chinese’ in her linguistic repertoire as she, too, had friends in her Senior Kindergarten class who spoke those languages (see Figure  2.2). Similarly, Faith, a 19-year-old student from China, named both her local language from Zhexiang and Mandarin as her first languages, and then discussed her knowledge of Hangzhou, which she described as a dialect from a region of China of the same name where she lived for 13  years. However, it is Mandarin that she uses to describe connecting with family and friends, talking about her feelings and doing her schoolwork. Zhexiang, which she later labelled as her native language, is reserved for speaking with her grandparents, as they do not know Mandarin.​ In addition to the dynamic language practices used to engage with friends and (extended) family, the multilingualism presented in the Me Maps was also tied to transnational patterns of migration, as well as to language practices that extend from national to regional contexts. Simon, a 19-year-old student, described the languages he knows and has been expected to learn in this way: And the languages which I can speak are my first language which is Kinyamulenge. I can speak French too which is an official language in my country. I can speak Kirundi. I actually was born in Congo but I grew up in Burundi so I can speak Kirundi too. I can speak Swahili which is a language that is spoken in East Africa, and I can speak Kinyarwanda. It is actually the language from the country beside Burundi, Rwanda, so Kinyarwanda from Rwanda. And I can also speak English, which is actually the language I’m speaking right now.

42  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Figure 2.2  Screenshots from Adela’s (left) and Amelia’s (right) Me Maps

In looking at Simon’s responses to other Me Map prompts, we see that when talking to his family back home, he mainly uses Kinyamulenge. However, when on Facebook, he states that he always uses Swahili to communicate with his friends in the United States and Canada. The use of Swahili comes up again when Simon mentions a common food in his diet, Ugali, which he describes as a maize flour. There are many different terms for this East African staple. Simon chooses to use the Swahili term and not the Kinyamulenge term. Edison comes from Shenzhen, a city in Guangdong Province in China. In his hometown, where most elders do not speak Mandarin and only speak what he calls the local Shenzhen dialect, Edison tells us that using this dialect with elders makes them ‘become more familiar, otherwise they will be very unhappy’. Edison describes himself as being able to speak Mandarin, Cantonese, his Shenzhen dialect and a little bit of English. He reflects on how these different languages have different phrases that reflect their culture and cannot be easily translated. He then discusses how it can be easier to study or deal with daily life in one’s first language. Yet, it is not his hometown dialect in which he is formally educated, but rather Mandarin and English. In these various ways, we see how the common labels that researchers and teachers use to describe the named languages that youth speak (e.g. home language, school language, native language) simply do not correspond with how multilingual youth themselves think about the languages and language practices in their lives (see Seltzer, 2022). Another recurrent and important theme from learners’ Me Map videos was that most were also learning French alongside English and other languages. Learners’ experiences with French included learning French as the official language in their home country or transitional country (e.g. Simon), attending a French immersion program in Ontario (e.g. Amelia), learning French while living and attending a French school in Quebec (e.g. Katrina), learning core French or extended French in schools in Ontario (e.g. Ali) and learning French informally through their interactions with French-speaking peers (e.g. Carissa). Some learners, such as Malik, a Grade 6 student from Syria, were excited and proud about having French as one of their languages, and associated learning French with being in Canada (see Figure 2.3).

The Research Design and the People Behind It  43

Figure 2.3  Screenshots from Malik’s Me Map

These learners’ Me Maps show us that in addition to being learners of English, French and a wide array of languages, they are also adding new cultural practices to their already diverse cultural repertoires. Many multilingual learners in our study had lived in more than one country before moving to Canada. Most of the participants with refugee backgrounds from Syria had lived in or been displaced to other countries including Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Kurdistan before being resettled in Canada, and they had built relationships with people from many different backgrounds while there. In some cases, their parents had come to Canada via policy mechanisms designed to attract what the government calls skilled immigrants, but had migrated to other countries before coming to Canada. This was the case for Kairavi, whose parents had moved first to the United States before settling in Canada. Several learners, such as Amelia, Carissa and Masood, had moved back to the countries in which they were born (i.e. South Korea, China and Iran, respectively) and lived there for a period of time before returning to Canada, thus having fresh memories of being immersed in another linguistic and cultural environment. Indeed, many of the learners in our study identified with more than one culture, and their cultural expressions were tied to a variety of factors including their languages, religious backgrounds, personal principles, countries they had lived in, their peers’ cultures, the food they enjoyed and the type of music they listened to (see Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4  Screenshots from Ali’s (left) and Malik’s (right) Me Maps

44  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

The teacher candidates in our study

Brenda was a teacher candidate in the MT program during the time of our study. Brenda was studying to become a teacher of Grades K–6. She was born in Seoul and migrated with her family to Canada just two months before starting Grade 1. Brenda belongs to the majority of teacher candidates at OISE who are multilingual, as well as a sizable minority of candidates who came to Canada either before starting school or during their school years. During the Supporting English Language Learners course that all teacher candidates at OISE must now complete, Brenda reflected on her childhood in an assignment called ‘My Plurilingual Journey’. She wrote about the ‘confusion’ and ‘frustration’ she experienced as a student: ‘I felt that I was not truly heard in my classroom due to the language barrier’. She recalled meeting Korean-Canadian students like her for the first time when she entered high school, and how together they learned to navigate the boundaries between being seen as ‘too Korean’ or ‘too Canadian’. Brenda’s reflections about her own racialized multilingual past contrasted at times with the teaching materials she created for a culminating assessment in the course. Working in a small group, Brenda helped design a unit plan for a future Grade 1 class. This imagined classroom included an Arabic-speaking student her team called Heba. In the unit plan, Brenda used Ontario’s assessment framework for ELLs to identify Heba’s proficiency level. Based on this assessment, Brenda concluded that Heba was ‘able to communicate in limited scope’ – a conclusion that was only possible by ignoring what Heba could also do in Arabic. Brenda did include Arabic language texts for Heba to make sense of the unit plan’s content. However, the unit plan described these texts as resources for Heba to use privately in support of her work in English, not to be integrated into that work or shared publicly with her classmates. A few months after the course ended, Brenda was invited to a focus group to talk about how her experiences with the Me Maps from this project had shaped her understanding of supporting multilingual learners. Reflecting on the multilingual Me Mapping activities that she was introduced to, Brenda stated that ‘one thing that I took away [was] that it doesn’t have to be just focused on the ELL, for the ELL, but also for everyone, like bringing all these diverse ways of learning and even diverse languages can have a lot of benefits, enriching the learning experience’. As we described earlier in this chapter, teacher candidates such as Brenda participated in this study in a variety of ways. The PeCK-LIT test we developed helped us understand teacher-candidate learning at the program level. Additionally, demographic items on this instrument, as well as items inquiring about candidates’ previous schooling and teaching experiences, helped give a more complete sense of who the candidates in the MT program are. The ethnographic case study of the required course on Supporting English Language Learners provided

The Research Design and the People Behind It  45

richer insights into how and what individual teacher candidates learned about multilingualism as they learned how to teach. As we progressed in our data analysis, we oriented on 19 focal participants from the case study, including Brenda. These are teacher candidates for whom we have substantial observational coursework and interview data. These participants were candidates at all three certification levels, and their participation in the study was fairly evenly distributed across the three years of data collection (see Table  2.1). In subsequent chapters of the book, as we present our study’s main findings, we pause to introduce you to these focal participants. The data from our study indicate that a slight majority (52%) of teacher candidates in our program is multilingual, and that many multilingual candidates spoke two or more languages in addition to English. There was considerable diversity in how French contributed to candidates’ multilingual repertoire. In some cases, candidates grew up in either English-only or multilingual environments and learned French Table 2.1  Overview of teacher candidates’ multilingualism, including focal participants No. of teacher Focal participants (grade candidate participants level)* (% of total) Migrated to Canada after having started/ completed school in another country, may or may not self-describe as English dominant

19/133 (14.2%)

• • • •

Fei (P/J) Yu (P/J) Luciana (J/I) Mira (J/I)

Migrated to Canada before starting school, self-described as English dominant and a regular user of their other languages

10/133 (7.5%)

• Brenda (P/J)

Born in Canada, self-described as English dominant and a regular user of their other languages

38/133 (28.5%)

• • • • • •

Born in Canada, able to understand other languages in their family/community but not a regular or confident user of the language(s)

6/133 (4.5%)

–

Born in Canada, self-described as Englishonly with connections to other languages through family and community, plus the language(s) they learned at school

25/133 (18.8)

• • • • • •

Born in Canada, self-described as Englishonly without connections to other languages through family and community, only the language(s) they learned at school

22/133 (16.5%)

• Alexis (I/S) • Shannon (I/S)

Insufficient data

13/133 (9.7%)

–

Sherry (P/J) William (P/J) Vera (P/J) Alya (J/I) Hannah (J/I) Ashley (I/S)

Charlotte (P/J) Faith (P/J) Isabella (P/J) Ezra (J/I) Davis (I/S) George (I/S)

*P/J  =  primary/junior (Grades  K–6); J/I  =  junior/intermediate (Grades  4–10); I/S  =  intermediate/ senior (Grades 7–12).

46  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

as a second language at school. In other cases, French was already part of their multilingual upbringing, as they or their family had migrated from a part of the world where French is a colonial language. In the latter instance, in fact, it was not uncommon for these candidates to have attended Ontario’s French language schools, only switching to English-medium education for post-secondary studies. Also, we learned from some candidates born abroad, particularly in the Caribbean, that they had never experienced the English(es) they grew up with as ‘nonstandard’ until they moved to Canada and attended school here. Finally, no teacher candidates in this study reported a language indigenous to what is now Canada as part of their multilingual practice, and only one candidate reported knowledge of sign language. As remarkable as this linguistic diversity is, we do not want to represent it as a binary of being/not being multilingual. Instead, how teacher candidates were multilingual was as diverse as the various languages they spoke. Table  2.1 describes the various ways in which case-study participants reported being multilingual. The intent here is not to establish fixed ‘types’ of multilingualism or to ascribe distinct identities or stances to them. Rather, our aim is to signal the various personal or familial experiences of language sustenance, shift, loss and learning as teacher candidates described them. On the one hand, this overview reveals that just over one-third of the participating candidates described themselves as monolingual English speakers. Yet, even here, all these candidates reported experience with learning an additional language at school, usually French, and in some cases in French immersion programs. In fact, many were just one generation away from multilingual relatives in their family. On the other hand, despite this high degree of linguistic diversity, almost all teacher candidates considered themselves to be English dominant, irrespective of the other languages in their lives and the degree to which they used those languages regularly. Also, there were no patterns governing which languages appeared in which descriptions. Instead, and as the vignette that opens Chapter 1 suggested, teacher-candidates’ language practices were influenced by a number of factors: their place of birth; how long they or their families have been in Canada; their parents’ earlier experiences of inclusion or marginalization, as well as their language choices at home; candidates’ experiences in school, including experiences with formal and informal language policies; and their own individual decisions about language use and language learning. In addition to this considerable linguistic diversity that our study documented, Kempf et al. (2020) found that just under half of teacher candidates in the MT program identified as racialized or as People of Color. The study was developed partly as a response to teacher-candidates’ experiences of anti-Black racism, both within the program and in some school settings where candidates completed practicum work. Teacher

The Research Design and the People Behind It  47

candidates who experienced this racism organized themselves and made a series of demands on the MT program. As part of its response, the program initiated the Master of Teaching Racial Inclusion Committee (MTRIC) in winter 2018 to study the racial climate of the program and make recommendations for change. The committee conducted multiple surveys and focus-group interviews, which documented for the first time the extent of the racial diversity among teacher candidates themselves, as well as candidates’ experiences of racism in the program. Based on these various inputs, the committee found that 48% of candidates identified as racialized. However, the program continues to significantly under-enroll candidates who identify as Indigenous (2%) or Black (6%) (Kempf et al., 2020: 24). Our study did not ask teacher candidates (or teacher educators, described below) directly about their racial identities, and the MTRIC study did not ask explicit questions about candidates’ language practices (although it did ask about gender and religious identity). In Chapter 3, we say more about these exclusions in our respective research designs. However, when placing these two studies in conversation with each other, what becomes clear is the extent of the racial and linguistic diversity among candidates in the MT program. In fact, this significant diversity distinguishes the MT program among most teacher-education programs in North America, especially considering that at the time these studies were conducted there were no specialized cohorts for preparing Indigenous, Black or other racialized and/or multilingual teacher candidates. At the same time, the ongoing under-enrollment of Indigenous and Black candidates in the MT program is consistent with most teacher-education programs in North America and remains an urgent challenge for the University of Toronto to redress. The teacher educators in our study

Shakina is an instructor of the Supporting English Language Learners course and has taught the course nine times to teacher candidates in the P/J and J/I divisions. Shakina was born in Malaysia and is of Tamil-Indian ethnicity. She began her career as an elementary school teacher in Malaysia, and has worked with multilingual learners across the K-12 and higher education levels in Malaysia, England and Canada. Shakina considers herself to be multilingual, and her language learning experiences include Tamil, Malay, English and French. Reflecting on one of the most significant moments for her as an instructor in the course, Shakina recounted that it was when a teacher candidate who identified as a racialized minority said to her, ‘I want to thank you for helping me to become more comfortable with who I am. Seeing how proud you are of your linguistic and cultural identities has made me feel more confident in my own identities’. Shakina observed that taking this

48  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

course had helped many teacher candidates, especially those who identified as multilingual, racialized, immigrants, newcomers, international students or former ‘English language learners’ themselves, to feel proud of and embrace their own linguistic and cultural identities, to become aware of how their experiences with language had shaped their teaching philosophy and to critically challenge the stigmatization of multilingual learners like themselves. Shakina observed, however, that this ideological shift did not always lead to a pedagogical shift in her teacher-candidates’ teaching. In the lesson plans, activities and materials that they developed during the course, support for multilingual learners was often treated as an add-on, rather than as a core component of their teaching. Thinking about the disconnect between what teacher candidates say and what they do, Shakina feels that there needs to be more pushback in the course by both the instructors and teacher candidates toward the language used to describe learners in official documents, assessment tools that characterize the use of home languages as a marker of low proficiency rather than of plurilingual competence and the equation of support for multilingual learners with accommodations and modifications. Shakina was one of 22  teacher educators who participated in our study. Together, they helped us understand how their respective institutions conceptualized the shift in Ontario’s teacher-education policy regarding the English learning needs of the province’s multilinguals, and what this policy shift meant for each program’s curriculum and instructional practices. As part of the ethnographic case study centered on the Supporting English Language Learners course at OISE, we interviewed 10 instructors of that course. In addition, we interviewed 12 teacher educators from 10 other teacher-education programs in the province who were responsible for delivering the course component in their respective institutions. In almost every case, these teacher educators had extensive experience both in second language education and in preparing future teachers. Moreover, in many instances they wore many hats (e.g. as program or practicum coordinators, members of curriculum design teams, associate deans or were seconded to the ministry to support curriculum and policy development) in addition to whatever specific contribution they made to preparing teacher candidates to work with multilingual learners. Table 2.2 provides an overview of the teacher educators interviewed for our study. It describes participants based on the kinds of professional and academic experiences they bring to their work in teacher education and preparing future teachers to work with multilingual learners. We indicate which teacher educators worked in the MT program at OISE, and which teacher educators worked in other Ontario programs. As indicated in Table  2.2, the teacher educators both at OISE and elsewhere in Ontario who participated in this study bring highly diverse educational and professional experiences to teacher education generally, and to preparing future teachers to work with multilingual learners

The Research Design and the People Behind It  49

Table 2.2  Participating teacher educators and their previous professional and academic experiences Professional experiences

Teacher educators at OISE

Teacher educators at other Ontario programs

Training and experience in ESL/EFL/TESOL

Andrew Anika Anne Barbara Jelayna Shu

Adelaide Chiraene Kevin

Experience teaching languages other than English/ background in French immersion

Andrew (German) Catherine Priya (Spanish)

Gina (French) Kezia (French) Sandra (French)

Experience teaching in multiple teacher education programs

Anne Barbara Catherine Diane Patricia

Adelaide Cristina Gina Kezia

Experience teaching multilinguals who sit at multiple intersections of social and school-based differences (racialized, have refugee background, labelled as special education students, attend schools in economically and socially marginalized settings)

Andrew Anika Diane Shu

Adelaide Chiraene Cristina Gina Inez Maddie

Experience teaching multilingual learners in international contexts

Kevin Patricia Priya

Chiraene Inez

Experience working in the Ministry of Education or with the ministry in policy development

Claudia Patricia

Chiraene Kezia

specifically. All 22 teacher educators have worked in public, independent and private school settings in Canada and/or abroad; several have also taught in on-reserve schools in First Nations communities in northern Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia. The international school settings and university settings where they had worked were widespread, including Bahrain, Brazil, China, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Taiwan and various regions in the United States. We did not ask participants specifically about their racial identities; we address this limitation in our data collection in our discussion of the book’s theoretical framework in Chapter 3. As different as their teaching experiences were in terms of geographical context, so too were the professional settings in which they gained experience with language teaching or teaching in multilingual contexts. Several participating teacher educators had themselves led entire programs in the past. Others had either attended or taught in bilingual teacher-education programs; in one case, the teacher educator worked in a program that prepared international teacher candidates, who themselves were English learners, to teach English as an additional language. Still others had previous experience leading professional

50  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

development for in-service teachers about language learning and multilingualism. Beyond these professional experiences, most teacher educators made direct connections in our interviews between their current work preparing future teachers to work with multilingual learners and their own personal experiences growing up in a multilingual setting, or the knowledge gained from academic preparation in applied linguistics, special education, second language research and teacher education. Our analysis of these interviews, presented in greater detail in Chapter  5, centered on how teacher educators reflected on and leveraged these personal, academic and professional experiences and identities as they engaged with teacher candidates about their future multilingual learners. The research team

Jeff is the principal investigator of this study and one of four faculty researchers on the project. He has taught the Supporting English Language Learners course three times to future secondary school teachers. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, he was born in the United States to a family originally from Canada, and lived in the United States until moving to Toronto in 2014. Jeff learned German, first through a children’s choir and then later at school and university, and he uses the language regularly for research and professional work. He learned Spanish after becoming an English as a second language (ESL) teacher in the United States, work he did for 10 years with newcomer students in secondary schools. Toward the end of those 10 years, Jeff worked in a high school outside Phoenix, Arizona. He would become the subject specialist for the district, a job that required him to lead professional development related to ELLs. This was the mid-2000s, just a few years after an Arizona voter initiative outlawed bilingual education programs. One outcome of that voter initiative was a mandate from Arizona’s Department of Education that all teachers, whether in- or pre-service, be trained in the state’s new English-only model for English language education. These were heady political times, an acute moment of racist anti-immigrant backlash in Arizona (see Arias & Faltis, 2012; Heineke, 2017; Moore, 2014). That social and political context exerted tremendous pressure on professional development providers, Jeff included, to temper what we were asking teachers to do to support multilingual learners. Most professional development stressed that the strategies we wanted teachers to use were ‘just good teaching’: these strategies might be designed to support one subset of students, but in fact they benefited everyone. At the core of this claim of ‘just good teaching’ is the contradiction between the universal and the specific: in this case, maneuvering through a moment of racist backlash both by downplaying the needs of the specific (i.e. the multilingual, often

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racialized learner) and by stressing the assumed benefits to the universal (i.e. the English-proficient, often white learner). Whatever the intent of this claim, it works in practice to subordinate the needs, aspirations and talents of multilingual learners in the classroom. Over a decade later, Jeff would face that contradiction again, now in a different country and teaching context, as he started work in OISE’s teacher-education program and began conducting this study. While the details of Jeff’s background, multilingualism and teaching experiences are specific to him, all of us on the research team have extensive experience as teachers, with multilingualism and with living and working across transnational contexts. Taken together, the faculty researchers on this project (Jeff, Antoinette, Julie and Shakina) have decades of experience working in teacher-education programs, in both Canada and the United States. Indeed, most of our experience has related directly to language education in some capacity, whether preparing future language-teacher specialists or preparing classroom teachers for linguistically and culturally diverse settings. Jeff, Antoinette, Shakina, Katie, Wales and Jeannie bring to the project many years’ experience working in school settings, in most cases with students identified as ELLs, or with students learning English as an additional language in multilingual settings. Among our team members, Katie and Wales have the most experience teaching in Ontario middle and secondary schools. Julie, Shakina, Mama, Katie, Jennifer, Yiran and Jeannie have their own extensive experience as language teachers of adult learners of English in a variety of institutional and national contexts. In addition to these professional experiences, our research team is as multilingual as the teacher candidates with whom we worked; our collective linguistic repertoire includes Cantonese, English, French, Gã, German, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian, Malay, Mandarin, Spanish and Tamil. Moreover, whether through professional, academic or personal experiences, we have lived, worked or have roots in Canada (in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan), Ghana, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Japan, mainland China, Malaysia, Mexico, South Korea and the United States. Finally, our own specific research interests and academic preparation are as diverse as our language practices and teaching experiences. As a research team, we brought these diverse personal, professional and intellectual experiences to bear on designing, conducting and analyzing the data from this project. Indeed, this project benefited greatly from the stability and consistency of the research team: Mama has been on the project since its pilot year in 2016; Shakina, Katie and Wales have been on the funded project from its start in 2017, while Jennifer, Jeannie and Yiran joined mid-way. See the About the Authors section for more detailed information about each member of the research team.

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Conclusion

Our analysis of the experiences of Shazzy, Brenda, Shakina, Jeff and the many others who participated in this study adds to the small, but growing research base on preparing teacher candidates to work with multilingual learners in linguistically diverse contexts. This discussion not only introduces you to the people who made this study possible, through their participation, insights and labor, but it also previews many of the core intellectual questions surrounding teacher education and multilingualism that this book engages. What social realities lead a racialized, multilingual seven-year-old person to state so clearly and so casually that speaking English makes him feel ‘white’ because he feels ‘normal’? What are the consequences for multilingual learners’ lives, as well as for the people who teach them, that they understand their language practices primarily in terms of the affinity they have for the different languages they use, while research, curriculum and education policy care about language – especially the English language – almost exclusively in terms of proficiency? Does it make any difference in learning how to support multilingual learners when teacher candidates themselves are multilingual? Related to this, and perhaps already foreshadowing a response, does it matter when teacher candidates have such diverse language practices, yet still consider themselves to be English dominant? How are we to interpret such significant differences in how teacher candidates like Brenda came to understand the role of multilingualism in her teaching? Are these inconsistencies ‘failures’ on her part to learn the ‘right’ things, or ‘failures’ on our part as teacher educators to do the ‘right’ things with candidates like Brenda? If not, how else can we make sense of these shifts in candidate thinking and practice? Regarding the teacher-education programs, the literature we address in Chapter 3 agrees that program coherence is an important factor influencing candidate learning. Yet, when teacher educators have such diverse personal, academic and professional experiences with language education, is program coherence possible? This diversity in personal, academic and professional experiences applied as much to the research team behind this project as to the teacher educators who participated in it. How does this intellectual and personal diversity manifest in the design, conduct and reporting of a project as complex as this? What obligations do we have as researchers to attend to this intellectual and personal diversity as we create and share research on teacher education and multilingualism? In Chapter 3, we situate this project in relation to a fairly new, but rapidly growing research area on the preparation of teacher candidates to work with multilingual learners, and we present the theoretical orientation of this book. Because such discussions can quickly become so abstract and distant from the people they are ostensibly about, the

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questions we have just asked are meant to underscore the direct connections between our analysis of the people who made this study possible and the major concepts and important theories that inform this book. We do not presume that the literature reviewed in Chapter 3 or the theories we discuss have clear ‘answers’ to these questions. Instead, the relevant literature and theoretical premises we discuss are offered as guiding principles to help us interpret and share the research this project produced. Throughout Chapter 3, we return to the people introduced here both to help make the conversation more concrete and to foreground the people this literature and the theories we introduce are meant to be about.

3 Framing the Study Jeff Bale

Since we began this work in 2016, the research base on teacher education and multilingualism has grown from a niche topic within teacher-education scholarship into its own coherent research area. In this chapter, we discuss this research base from three perspectives: (1) attending as much as possible to research from multiple national contexts; (2) reckoning with the ongoing disciplinary isolation that characterizes much of this research; and (3) foregrounding the people whom this research base is meant to support by connecting the discussion where possible to the people we introduced in Chapter 2. Our discussion of the relevant literature reveals important theoretical questions that remain largely unaddressed in scholarship on teacher education and multilingualism. We thus close the chapter by sketching out such a framework for conceptualizing the interplay between race/racism, language and teacher education. Comparative Perspectives

The research base on teacher education and multilingualism internationally is uneven in terms of its depth and scope. For example, while many Canadian programs include (and often require) coursework or other curricular experiences about multilingualism, our study is the first comprehensive study of this question in Canada; in this way, scholarship lags behind the collective experience of Canadian teacher educators. In the United States and northern Europe, by contrast, studies on teacher education and multilingualism are more numerous. In part, this is because teacher-education policies requiring this kind of learning are more common, and, at least in comparison with Canada, there is considerably more public and private funding available to study such policies in practice. The US state of Florida serves as a good example. Florida was one of the first states to require both pre- and in-service teachers to learn about supporting English learners; it later required teacher educators to complete professional development on infusing knowledge about second language (L2) learning and English learners across the teachereducation curriculum. With a $1.1 million grant from the US Department 54

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of Education, Ester de Jong led a five-year project at the University of Florida (see Coady et  al., 2016) to document the relationship between student achievement and teacher education that emphasizes support for English learners, and to understand what teacher educators need to know and be able to do in order to include content related to multilingualism in their instruction (Coady et al., 2016; de Jong & Naranjo, 2019; de Jong et al., 2018; Turkan & de Jong, 2018). In Germany, numerous state-level policies have appeared in the last decade or so that require teacher candidates to study heterogeneity, linguistic diversity and/or German as an additional language (see Morris-Lange et al. [2016] for an overview of specific state policies). This has triggered a veritable explosion in research on the topic. Most of this research has appeared in edited volumes that describe the genesis of a given state policy and how it was appropriated at one or several universities in that state, and then analyze the various dimensions of change in the teacher-education curriculum and outcomes in teacher-candidate learning (e.g. Becker-Mrotzek et  al., 2017; Jostes et  al., 2017; Karakaşoğlu et  al., 2011). What is noteworthy in the German case is the degree to which private organizations – in particular, the Mercator, Volkswagen and Bertelsmann foundations – have been involved in funding research on schools, teacher education, migration and multilingualism. Nevertheless, teacher-education policies with an explicit emphasis on multilingualism or working with multilingual learners do not always generate extensive research on the topic. In Australia, for example, teachereducation programs have been required for over a decade to include topics related to multilingualism and multilingual learners in their curriculum (Ollerhead, 2018). With some exceptions, discussed below, this requirement has not been taken up broadly in research. Similarly, in contexts with well-established educational models based on bi- or multilingual education, teacher education is often not a major domain of scholarship. For example, many countries in Central and South America have long-standing policies regarding intercultural bilingual education (IBE), designed to expand access to education for Indigenous peoples. While there is a significant research base on these programs and the policies that govern them, teacher education has not been a major focus. Virginia Zavala’s work in Peru is an important exception (e.g. Zavala, 2019; Zavala & Brañez, 2017). Similarly, within the considerable research base on mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) in African and Asian contexts and on the policies that govern them, little of that scholarship examines teacher education. For the few studies that do, they explore aspects of teacher-candidate learning that are beyond the scope of this study. For example, Makalela (2018) examines translanguaging teaching practices in a teacher-education program in South Africa. The context for that study, however, is a course designed to teach Sepedi as an

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additional language to future teachers, not to help candidates understand how to teach content in language-inclusive ways. While the intersection of teacher education with multilingualism may not be fully researched in every national context, what is noteworthy are the common reference points within existing studies to applied linguistic and/or sociolinguistic theories from North America and Europe. In particular, foundational concepts in culturally and linguistically sustaining practice – such as Funds of Knowledge (González et al., 2006; Moll, 2019), the various iterations of scholarship on translanguaging (e.g. Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, 2009; García & Li, 2014), critical applied linguistic perspectives on language dis/reinvention (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007), as well as applied linguistic models for teacher education and supporting English learners developed in the United States, such as the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model (Echevarría et  al., 2004) and linguistically responsive teaching (LRT) (Lucas & Villegas, 2011) – often inform scholarly explorations of teacher education and multilingualism beyond North American and European contexts. Again, Makalela (e.g. 2018) and Zavala (e.g. 2019; Back & Zavala, 2019) are important exceptions, insofar as they integrate scholarship from North American and European contexts with theories of multilingualism informed by Southern perspectives and epistemologies. Nevertheless, Northern scholarship figures prominently in framing the research on teacher education and multilingualism across many international settings. A Stable Research Area Coheres

One indication that the research base on teacher education and multilingual learners has cohered into a more stable agenda in teachereducation scholarship is the presence of multiple literature reviews on this topic. The reviews we discuss here are all based on research in the United States. However, as we argue later in this section, many of the trends identified in these reviews also characterize teacher-education scholarship on multilingualism in other contexts. Lucas and Grinberg’s (2008) work is sometimes acknowledged as the literature review that first identified the relationship between teacher education and multilingualism as a budding area of inquiry. The text begins to lay out a theoretical framework for informing policies that govern teacher-education programs and for reforming the curriculum of those programs; and it articulates a research agenda for better understanding what it means to center multilingual learners in teacher education. Because the interface between teacher education and multilingualism was still largely under-researched in the mid-aughts, the authors called for more descriptive studies to better understand how and to what extent

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teacher-education programs attend to, if not yet center, multilingual learners. They also argued for more comprehensive and systematic research on this question, research that focuses not only on programs and their curriculum, but also on teacher candidates and teacher educators in terms of their linguistic identities and experiences with learning and teaching about multilingualism, respectively. Additionally, the authors noted that of the 17  empirical studies informing their analysis, most focused on candidates’ beliefs about multilingualism and about students labeled English language learners. As we will see, this focus on beliefs has remained dominant in the literature. Finally, and building on Zeichner’s (2005) critique of teacher-education research broadly, Lucas and Grinberg argued for higher quality research on teacher education and multilingualism. In the 15 years since their text appeared, several comprehensive literature reviews have assessed the development of research on teacher education and multilingualism. Most of this scholarship comprises small case studies carried out by teacher educators, often working within a single course in their respective program (Cochran-Smith et  al., 2015). Moreover, the inquiry tends to adopt a process–product approach to teacher-candidate learning that focuses on outcomes based on curricular interventions or practicum experiences (Viesca et al., 2019). In response, Cochran-Smith et al. (2015) and Viesca et al. (2019) have called for more holistic research designs that broaden our understanding of how teacher candidates learn about multilingual learners. While Cochran-Smith et al. (2015) stress the importance of better understanding program coherence and how it shapes teacher-candidate learning, Solano-Campos et  al. (2020) underscore that teacher-candidate learning about multilingualism cannot be separated analytically from candidates’ own lived experiences with racial and linguistic diversity. That is, research on this question needs to be more explicit and systematic in accounting for teachercandidates’ own sense-making. Another consistent finding across these reviews is the ongoing focus on the beliefs and attitudes that teacher candidates have toward multilingualism in general, and teaching multilingual learners in particular (Cochran-Smith et  al., 2015; Feiman-Nemser, 2018; Solano-Campos et al., 2020; Villegas et al., 2018). In addition to the pragmatic challenges that lead to a limited focus on teacher-candidate beliefs (see CochranSmith et  al., 2015), a more conceptual explanation for this trend is the unspoken theory of change behind it, namely, that changes in how teacher candidates think leads to changes in how they (will) teach. However, as Viesca et  al. (2019) argue, these linear, developmental assumptions are inadequate for understanding how teaching – and teachers – change. Nevertheless, there is a small empirical research base that goes beyond candidates’ beliefs or attitudes toward multilingualism and their future multilingual students. Within this practice-oriented literature,

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scaffolding strategies have received the most attention. Solano-Campos et al. (2020) distinguish this kind of learning from theoretical knowledge about language acquisition itself, and how teachers use this knowledge to identify the language demands of the content they teach. This distinction suggests that simply learning strategies without knowing the theoretical basis for them, or how they address specific language demands present in the content areas, does not adequately prepare teachers to work successfully with multilingual learners. Other reviews make a similar point (e.g. Faltis & Valdes, 2016; Villegas et al., 2018), but underscore that the existing research has not yet clarified how much theoretical knowledge about second/additional language acquisition teachers (or teacher candidates) really need in order to support multilingual students. Moreover, Villegas et  al. (2018) note that even if candidates learn about specific teaching strategies that support multilingual learners, the existing research demonstrates that candidates typically do not base their instructional decisions on an assessment of learners’ needs or on a complete understanding of the goal of these strategies. In our introduction to Brenda in Chapter  2, we saw an example of this issue. On the one hand, Brenda and her peers included Arabic language texts to scaffold Heba’s learning in that day’s social studies lesson about community. On the other hand, however, is the question of whether a Grade  1 student is ready to read an Arabic language text about this topic on her own, or to make connections on her own between the book’s content in Arabic and the social studies content in English. The fact that neither Brenda nor the peers with whom she co-designed the unit plan foresaw this potential obstacle is part and parcel of being novice teachers. That is, it is unreasonable to expect candidates to fully understand such nuances of using assessment and knowledge of students to inform instructional choices before they have gained substantial experience in the classroom. Nevertheless, Solano-Campos et al. (2020) and Villegas et al. (2018) argue that if candidates such as Brenda had more opportunities to connect their learning about language-inclusive teaching strategies with theoretical knowledge about language acquisition and an understanding of the language demands embedded in a curriculum, they would enter the classroom better prepared to make instructional choices that are effective, and not only aspirational, in including all the languages their students know while also learning English. What is especially relevant about these literature reviews for our study is the conceptual, disciplinary and sociopolitical explanations they offer for how the research base on teacher education and multilingual learners has developed. First, most of the research is influenced by, if not directly rooted in, Shulman’s (1986) foundational concept of pedagogical content knowledge, which refers to specialized knowledge that teachers must have to make subject-area content accessible to students and support them in learning it. However, as Faltis and Valdes (2016)

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argued, Shulman’s concept paid no attention to how language mediates, or indeed co-constitutes, these different kinds of teacher knowledge. Second, the most recent efforts to integrate specific declarative and pedagogical knowledge about language hew more closely to what specialized English language teachers must know and be able to do (e.g. Barros et  al., 2021; Deroo & Ponzio, 2019; Deroo et  al., 2020; Motha, 2014), rather than helping general classroom teachers understand the language demands of the content areas or of the instructional tasks they design. Third, Faltis and Valdes (2016: 551) argue that broader social and political factors shaping teacher attitudes and practice toward multilingualism and multilingual learners are ‘particularly absent’ from research on this topic. They note an ongoing disciplinary divide between applied linguistic innovation in theorizing language, in particular translanguaging, on the one hand, and on the other that ‘no solid research exists on the impact of knowledge about bilingualism on preservice teachers’ advocacy, understanding, or practice in linguistically diverse classrooms’ (Faltis & Valdes, 2016: 551). Our own reading of the recent literature confirms some of the trends identified in these major reviews of US-based research; however, it also suggests that the field is beginning to move in the direction that these literature reviews have argued. For example, there has been a considerable shift toward practice-based studies that examine more than scaffolding strategies. These studies continue to focus on a small number of teacher candidates and analyze their learning in traditional practicum settings, extended school-based internships or in mentoring and/or tutoring models of working with multilingual learners. The kinds of practice informing teacher-candidate learning include analysis of multilingual learners’ class work (Athanases & Wong, 2018); applying models of content and language assessment to guide instruction (Davin & Heineke, 2016); and using lesson study to become aware of the context-dependent expertise that teachers need to best support multilingual learners (Von Esch & Kavanagh, 2018). Some of this research continues to focus on teachercandidate beliefs and dispositions, but analyzes shifts in these beliefs based on candidates’ experiences in practicum settings. Sugimoto et al. (2017), for example, found that practicum settings that do not model explicit or positive strategies for engaging multilingual learners can, in fact, reinforce teacher-candidates’ negative attitudes toward language learners and linguistic diversity in general. Other practice-based research has focused on how teacher candidates understand their respective content areas in terms of the language demands they present. Schall-Leckrone (2017) in the United States and Ollerhead (2018, 2020) in Australia, for example, used genre theory to help teacher candidates develop their awareness of discipline-specific forms of literacy. Additional studies focus their arguments on how teacher-candidate learning in practical settings should inform changes

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to university-based teacher-education curriculum. In Norway, Iversen documented how teacher candidates learn to recognize students’ translanguaging practices and begin to incorporate these practices into their teaching. Iversen (2020a: 51) argued that these ‘spontaneous translanguaging practices’ from practicum settings should be treated more coherently and proactively in university-based teacher-education courses. A second important development in recent research is a specific focus on teacher-candidates’ own lived experiences with language, and how these experiences inform their learning about multilingualism as novice teachers. For example, Iversen (2020b: 6) conducted a narrative analysis of focus-group interviews and teacher-candidates’ linguistic biographies, with particular attention paid to how candidates understood their own language practices. He documented how candidates tended to construct a binary between themselves as authentic speakers of Norwegian and their future multilingual students as ‘radically different’: not proficient in Norwegian, migrant and academically unsuccessful. In Catalonia, Birello et al. (2021: 13) worked with plurilingual teacher candidates to explore the contradictions between the pride they felt in their own plurilingualism (in Catalan, Castellano and English) and their negative attitudes toward linguistic diversity in schools. The authors explain this contradiction in terms of neoliberal ideologies embedded in European language policies that ‘project an elite kind of plurilingualism’ while simultaneously failing to consider other kinds of linguistic diversity as genuine, positive resources for classroom learning. This more recent scholarship is also beginning to adopt more critical perspectives on both the contexts and desired outcomes of preparing teacher candidates to support multilingual learners. Some of the most compelling studies are situated in South American contexts with longstanding policies for IBE, where research on teacher education for IBE programs is still fairly new. In Peru, Zavala and Brañez (2017) trace how language and education policies and institutional practices project a specific kind of Indigenous bilingual subject, and contrast this with the lived bilingual trajectories that Indigenous teacher candidates themselves describe. They conclude, foreshadowing part of the theoretical framework we present below, that rigid theoretical distinctions in applied linguistics between first language (L1) and L2 not only fail to capture Indigenous teacher candidates’ lived experience with language, but they also work to reinforce raciolinguistic ideologies about Indigenous people in Peru as having failed to learn any language proficiently. Working in the Chaco region of Argentina, Unamuno conducted sociolinguistic surveys and interviews with Indigenous teacher candidates in an IBE program to document how these candidates understood their own language and cultural practices, and their future role in IBE programs. Indeed, teacher candidates understood their learning in pre-service programs as part of a process of ‘recovery/revitalization of their indigenous language/cultures/identities

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and an amplification of their competencies and their own knowledges, that is, (re)affirming themselves as indigenous people’ (Unamuno, 2018: 77, our translation). While the context of teacher education for IBE programs is considerably different from that of general teacher education in Canada, this research is nevertheless exemplary in its close analysis of teacher-candidates’ lived experiences with linguistic and racial positioning, and connecting that analysis to how candidates learn to teach and what teacher-education programs should do differently to support their learning. Disciplinary Silos

From our perspective, what is most noteworthy – and what most directly shaped the theoretical framework detailed later in this chapter and the methodological choices we described in Chapter  2 – are the deep disciplinary divisions that continue to frame what matters most for teacher education in multilingual contexts. In this section, we address three specific disciplines, namely applied linguistics, teacher-education policy studies and critical teacher-education scholarship. While there is certainly some overlap in the research base among these three disciplines, we treat them separately here to clarify the argument. Moreover, our goal here is not to critique any specific discipline or set of authors, but rather to underscore the urgency of synthesizing the most useful and compatible disciplinary insights into a more coherent theoretical perspective on teacher education and multilingualism. Applied linguistics

Within applied linguistics, a major focus has been on establishing new conceptual frameworks to guide what teacher-education programs should be doing to prepare future teachers to work with multilingual learners. These frameworks include LRT (Lucas & Villegas, 2011) and Deutsch als Zweitsprache-Kompetenzen (DaZ-Kom) (Ehmke et  al., 2018), and frameworks rooted in systemic-functional linguistics (de Oliveira & Avalos, 2018; see also Schleppegrell, 2004). In each case, these frameworks identify specific dispositions or attitudes about linguistic diversity and the relationship between language and identity; theoretical knowledge of language learning and the cognitive and social factors that shape it; metalinguistic knowledge required for teacher candidates (perhaps also for those teacher educators who are not language specialists) to understand the language demands of the curriculum; and pedagogical know-how for designing effective instruction based on awareness and assessment of multilingual learners’ academic, social and linguistic needs. What is consistent across these frameworks is the imbalance in their respective emphasis on theoretical knowledge about language as it relates to learning and teaching, and theoretical knowledge about

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language as it relates to social differentiation and oppression. To be sure, each of these frameworks includes some attention to the social, political and historical dimensions of multilingualism. The LRT framework, for example, emphasizes teachers’ disposition toward advocating on behalf of their multilingual students, not just knowing how to design effective instruction within the classroom. Indeed, the framework draws on broader educational research rooted in critical theories of social justice to define the kinds of linguistically responsive orientations that teachers need. Still, the bulk of this framework comprises theoretical and practical knowledge about L2 acquisition. Not only is this know-how defined as conceptually distinct from attitudes toward multilingual learners, but it is also rooted in cognitive approaches to language education. Moreover, as Tandon et al. (2017) have argued, the approach to L2 acquisition in the LRT framework is out of step with current perspectives informed by translanguaging. The DaZ-Kom framework provides another instructive example. Only 2 of its 19 competencies in German as an L2 relate to the social and institutional dimensions of supporting multilingual learners. The rest focus on structural analysis of language, cognitive theories of language learning and discrete teaching strategies based on assessment and scaffolding at both the individual student and the classroom level. Indeed, as the LRT and DaZ-Kom frameworks quickly become a standard reference point for research on teacher education and multilingualism (at least in the United States and Germany, respectively), this analytical imbalance risks being reproduced in subsequent scholarship on the topic. Our point in highlighting this imbalance is not to critique the authors of these frameworks for under- or overemphasizing certain knowledge and skills. Rather, we see this imbalance as part of a disciplinary tradition in applied linguistics, namely its hesitancy, at times refusal, to center its analysis on racism and (settler-)colonialism and how they structure language education and, in our case, teacher education about multilingualism. For example, in their recent review of research within applied linguistics on race and racism, Von Esch et al. (2020: 1) argue that not only has the intersection of race, colonialism and language education been ‘eerily absent’ from applied linguistic study of language teaching, but also, some recent scholarship still fails to mention race or racism by name, instead using other concepts (such as language ideology or nativespeakerism) as analytical proxies. Teacher-education policy studies

Two trends are taking shape within research on teacher-education policy. Teacher-education policies with specific requirements about multilingualism or learning the dominant school language(s) as an additional language are still relatively new. Perhaps because of this, much of the

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research about these policies is descriptive and comparative. Wernicke et  al. (2021: 3–4) is an excellent example of this approach to studying policy. As the editors note, ‘The current volume is thus unique in that it provides a descriptive perspective of how teacher education programmes in a range of different countries have responded to multilingual contexts, thereby contextualising, historically and ideologically, the specific initiatives and measures taken in the participating countries or regions’. Based on contributions from teacher-education scholars in six European countries, the United States and Canada, the volume describes the various policy contexts governing teacher education in multilingual settings, and then analyzes how these policies have been taken up in practice in teacher-education programs. The richness of the descriptions in each chapter, and the collective conversation among the researchers involved in the project, lead to one of the volume’s most important contributions. Namely, this book challenges the tendency to think of societal multilingualism primarily as a recent phenomenon driven by migration, and instead considers the relationship between multilingualism and schooling from broader, historical perspectives. The second trend reflects the tendency within teacher-education policies to define the kinds of dispositions, knowledge and abilities that teachers need as competencies, that is, as discrete skills that teachers develop through teacher education and other professionalization efforts. Germany provides an excellent example of this and the impact it has had on policy-related research. As mentioned earlier, at both the federal and state level, Germany has been extremely active in policymaking with respect to education and migration (see Morris-Lange et al., 2016). The skills-based orientation within these documents is often reflected in the relevant research, for example in efforts to define and then measure intercultural competence (e.g. Bender-Szymanski, 2008) or competence in durchgängige Sprachbildung (e.g. Jostes & Darsow, 2017) or DaZ-Kom (e.g. Köker et  al., 2015). Furthermore, this work is typically quantitative by design, using surveys or pedagogical content-knowledge tests to measure which competencies teacher candidates develop and to what extent. In one way, this policy-oriented research in Germany is more comprehensive than the small-scale, qualitative case studies so common in US-based literature, and thus allows for different kinds of arguments to emerge. However, framing teacher knowledge as discrete, measurable competencies also risks flattening the complex relationship between language, race and migration to the narrow question of how multilingual learners acquire language skills in the respective dominant language, and which specific teaching strategies best support this learning. As such, there exists a similar limitation as that within applied linguistic research in not systematically accounting for the social and political contexts of multilingualism when studying the policies that govern teacher education.

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Critical research on multiculturalism and teacher education

With respect to the literature base on multiculturalism and teacher education, by contrast, there is no shortage of research that centers critical, anti-racist and/or decolonial analyses in its calls for curriculum reform (e.g. Banks, 2004; Baxan, 2015; Carson, 2008; Cochran-Smith et al., 2003; Eidoo, 2017; Evans-Winters & Twyman Hoff, 2011; Hollins & Guzman, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Marom, 2019; Mason & Ngo, 2019; Milner, 2008; Milner et al., 2013; Ragoonaden et al., 2015; Sleeter, 2017). As important as this work is, what is often less clear is the role of language and language education in its analysis. At times, language is subsumed under broader notions of ‘culture’ or ‘diversity’, as if language were just one among many domains of cultural diversity. However, as noted above, Lucas and Grinberg (2008) identified some time ago the specific dimensions to language that must be addressed in teachereducation programs. In fact, their argument in no small part helped launch a research agenda on teacher education and multilingualism, even if, as we argued earlier, that research has gone too far in framing language as primarily a cognitive question, thereby separating language from critical, anti-racist and decolonial perspectives. As such, the place of language in critical teacher-education scholarship continues to be an open question. Bree Picower’s (2021) most recent book is an excellent example, perhaps because the book itself and Picower’s overall contribution to teacher-education scholarship and practice are so significant. The power of this book’s arguments derives not only from Picower’s extensive experience as a teacher and teacher educator, but also from the deep collaborations between Picower and her colleagues at Montclair State University, teachers in Newark, New Jersey public schools, as well as networks of other educators committed to radical, anti-racist and decolonial practice. Picower combines her experience and these networks of practice with the main tenets of critical race theory and critical whiteness studies to examine how whiteness and racism function in both implicit and explicit ways in the teachereducation curriculum. Picower then enumerates several principles that teacher educators can adopt for their respective programs. As powerful as the analysis and corresponding recommendations are, they are silent on language and its place in anti-racist critique of teacher education, and what part language plays in establishing a liberatory, anti-racist teachereducation curriculum. A second example relates to our description earlier of the rapid increase in German research about the intersection of teacher education and multilingualism. That research tends to conceive of language as a set of competencies that students must have in German as an additional language and, by extension, considers language education as a set of competences that teacher candidates must develop. For Karakaşoğlu and

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Mecheril (2019: 20), two leading scholars on critical anti-racism, migration and education in Germany, framing this question as one of competencies reflects ‘the misguided belief that providing German-language support “gets at the root” of the tasks that a migration society presents to the education system’ (our translation). Instead, for these scholars, understanding the relationship between migration and schooling, and what this means for teacher education, involves a much broader project of rethinking education from the perspective of a migration society. This shift begins by understanding Germany as a ‘migration society’ not because of the presence of individual migrants, whose arrival in Germany is often presumed to be a recent phenomenon. Rather, Germany exists as a migration society because of the social relations that trigger migration in the first place. That is, the material and ideological conditions that produce Germany as a wealthy nation-state shape migration in two ways: not only are these the same material and ideological conditions that impel people toward Germany, but they are also the same conditions that produce the ideological category migrant and ascribe to it a particular position in German society. In this way, everyone is implicated in a migration society, not only ‘migrants’, and thus everyone has an obligation to change within a migration society (Karakaşoğlu et al., 2019). For Karakaşoğlu and Mecheril, consequently, teacher education must do more than develop teacher-candidate skills in this or that compensatory teaching strategy (e.g. German language support) targeting a single type of student (e.g. ‘students with a migration background’ as goes the standard euphemism in German). Rather, for them, teacher education is a far more comprehensive project of engaging teacher candidates in their fundamental stances toward and ways of thinking about the social relations that produce ‘students with a migration background’ in the first place. As powerful as their argument is, what remains unclear is how language, language use and language education fit into this critical rethinking of migration societies. A final example brings us back to the people involved in this study, and how our own disciplinary training shapes our decisions about what counts in ‘critical’ teacher education. In our discussion in Chapter 2 of the teacher candidates involved in this project, we discussed the Master of Teaching Racial Inclusion Committee (MTRIC) study (Kempf et al., 2020) that the master of teaching (MT) program undertook in response to teacher-candidate experiences of racism. The first round of surveys the committee conducted were paper and pencil, which required a graduatestudent researcher to visit every cohort in the program to solicit candidates’ participation. By coincidence, the researcher visited a cohort of Supporting English Language Learners that Jeff was teaching. As such, he was able to take a look at the survey, and was surprised to see that among the many questions asked of the candidates about their various identities (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender, religion), none had to do with language.

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Later, in conversation with a member of the committee that designed the survey, Jeff asked how they had decided which questions to ask, and why language identities or practices were not included. The response was twofold: it hadn’t occurred to the committee to ask these questions – a committee composed of experts on anti-racism, decoloniality and inclusion in higher education; and to add them now would make the survey too onerous and thus potentially lower the response rates. Moreover, recall our note in Chapter 2 that the demographic items we included in our Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Language-Inclusive Teaching (PeCK-LIT) test only asked about which languages candidates used at home as they grew up, in school and now as novice teachers; we did not ask candidates about their racial identities. Similarly, the interview protocols for our conversations with teachers, teacher-leaders and teacher educators did ask about racial identity, even if some participants addressed the topic in their responses to our questions. That is, our instrument design was not initially concerned with other kinds of social differentiation, such as racism, even if data analysis and our experiences doing the research took us in that direction. In both these examples, our respective disciplinary thinking reproduced a theoretical, methodological and practical separation between language and race/racism, and thus made it harder to understand – theoretically, methodologically and in practice – the intersection of language and racism in teacher education, and how we as teacher educators and scholars might respond. Race/Racism, Language and Teacher Education

To conclude this chapter, we outline the theoretical framework that guided the analysis in this book. In subsequent chapters, we revisit various aspects of this framework to expand on specific arguments about teacher education and multilingualism. For now, though, we begin with a general discussion of our understanding of race and racism and how we understand the connections, indeed the co-constitution of race and language as social categories of differentiation. In a final move, we draw on two recent conceptual studies about teacher education to clarify how race/racism and language shape the project of teacher education broadly and teacher-candidate learning about multilingualism specifically. Figure 3.1 is a visual summary of the theoretical argument that follows. What do we mean by race and racism? Is race real?

In response to and rejection of biological definitions of race – namely, that there is any genetic basis for dividing humans into discrete ‘races’ – critical scholars of racism stress the social construction of the category race (e.g. Omi & Winant, 1994) and how that category is deployed ‘as a

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Figure 3.1  Theoretical framework

system of categorization and subject formation’ (Frankenberg, 1997: 9). In this way, we quickly move away from ostensibly objective definitions of race to critical notions of racism or racialization, that is, from defining race as a fixed trait inherent in an individual, to understanding racism as a social, historical, material and ideological process. Not so dissimilar from current debates within critical applied linguistics as to whether languages are real, (mere) historical inventions or practices that humans engage in, conceiving of race and racism as constructed raises a similar question: is defining race as a social construction akin to asserting that race is not real? To address that question, the applied linguistic research centering anti-racism (e.g. Crump, 2014; Kubota & Lin, 2006; Von Esch et  al.,

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2020) typically refers to Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) and her argument that even if ‘race’ is a social construct, it has real consequences in terms of structuring society. Indeed, analysis of this structural reality of race and racism has been taken up widely across the academy, for example, in legal scholarship beyond Crenshaw’s in terms of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), or in history as the possessive investment in whiteness in public policy (Lipsitz, 1998). Within language education specifically, a recent focus in the United States has been on the gentrification of duallanguage programs (e.g. Blanton et  al., 2021; Heiman & Yanes, 2018; Valdez et al., 2016). In addition to the reality of structural racism, sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields (2014: 11) remind us that racist ideology is equally real, arguing, ‘Racist concepts do considerable work in political and economic life; but, if they were merely an appendage of politics and economics, without immediate roots in other phases of life, their persuasiveness would accordingly diminish’. Here, they are not simply referring to racist stereotypes or other such ‘bad ideas’ about this or that group of people. Rather, and more complicated, they focus on an ideological process that ultimately blames racialized people for the racism they experience, while simultaneously obfuscating the sources of that racism. To illustrate their argument, they discuss a 2009 case of an off-duty police officer shot dead in the course of a car robbery in New York City. The off-duty officer came across the theft in progress. As on-duty colleagues arrived at the scene, one of them assessed the situation and then fired at him, the off-duty colleague, ultimately killing him. He was Black, his on-duty colleagues white. Reflecting on multiple media reports about this incident, Fields and Fields (2014) argue: The instant, inevitable—but, upon examination, bizarre—diagnosis of many people is that black officers in such situations have been ‘killed because of their skin color.’ But has their skin color killed them? If so, why does the skin color of white officers not kill them in the same way? … Everyone has skin color, but not everyone’s skin color counts as race, let alone as evidence of criminal conduct. The missing step between someone’s physical appearance and an invidious outcome is the practice of a double standard: in a word, racism. (Fields & Fields, 2014: 27)

What makes Fields and Fields’ argument so useful is its attention to two ideological processes going on here. At issue is not only how one’s physical appearance is taken as presumed evidence of criminality, but also how the source of that presumption is erased by explanations such as ‘because of skin color’. This way of narrating – what the authors call a ‘verbal prop’ (Fields & Fields, 2014: 27) – performs the powerful function of locating the source of this ‘invidious outcome’ in the person who was

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killed. Consequently, this ideological process, which they call racecraft, is a constituent ideological element in both creating and sustaining the material reality of racism. That is, ‘racecraft has permitted the consequence under investigation to masquerade among the causes’ (Fields & Fields, 2014: 41). Fields and Fields’ (2014) argument resonates deeply with our experience conducting this study. Recall the comment we cited in Chapter  2 from Brenda’s ‘My Plurilingual Journey’ assignment. In it, she shares difficult memories of the exclusion she experienced after moving to Canada as a six year old, and how she and her fellow Korean-Canadian schoolmates learned to walk the racialized line between seeming ‘too Korean’ or ‘too Canadian’. In her story, Brenda invokes a common metaphor of ‘the language barrier’ to explain why she felt unheard in the classroom. Indeed, this same metaphor is found throughout our data. In a close reading of Fields and Fields’ argument, we might argue that this metaphor locates a trait inherent to Brenda, something objective – and objectively wrong – about her language that is the source of her not being heard. Or we might read this metaphor as something external to Brenda and her teacher and peers, something tangible that stands in the way between them. In either reading, this metaphor conjures up an objective gap between Korean and English as if it were natural, timeless and obvious, and primarily the responsibility of students like Brenda to overcome. Attending to this verbal prop and the work it does in ‘permitt[ing] the consequence to masquerade as the cause’ instead helps us understand Brenda’s experience as the result of policies, structures and ideologies that create a social reality that renders only one language as intelligible in the Canadian classroom. How does racism relate to other forms of oppression?

A second task in defining racism is clarifying its relation to other kinds of social differentiation and oppression. At one level, this is an historical question, in terms of understanding how racism, (settler-)colonialism and capitalism not only ‘relate’ to each other, but are also in fact mutually constitutive. It has become uncontroversial to argue that racism and colonialism are so intimately connected that they cannot be theorized separately from each another (e.g. Motha, 2014). European incursion into other parts of the world – whether for proselytizing, land seizure, labor seizure, such as the transatlantic slave trade, resource extraction, settlement or other material reasons – required a parallel ideological project of transforming the people encountered during these incursions into Others. This ideological process not only facilitated external colonial processes by construing colonized peoples in racialized terms as subordinate or non-human, not subject to emergent bourgeois ideals about individual rights and freedoms, and thus deserving of their violent treatment; but

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also, this ideological process of dividing the world by ‘race’ helped entrench social divides internal to the respective metropole as those societies were also radically reorganized by colonialism (see Bale [2011, 2014] for an application of this argument to the relationship between imperialism and language education policies in the United States). At times, especially in recent language scholarship that addresses this history (e.g. García et al., 2021; Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Rosa & Flores, 2017; Von Esch et al., 2020), emphasis has been placed on its ideological aspects. In particular, the goal has been to understand more clearly how the process of dividing up the world into discrete nations and discrete races also involved dividing human linguistic practice into discrete languages, and the impact this way of thinking has had on the study of language across multiple disciplines. Even if this scholarship insists on the material outcomes of this ideological process, what is sometimes left un(der)addressed are the material roots of colonialism in the first place, namely, its roots in capitalism. Radical scholarship on racism and on transatlantic slavery helps clarify this issue. In their extensive essay on ideology, Fields and Fields (2014) anchor their discussion in a synthesis of the histories of slavery and the Jim Crow South in the United States. Their argument stresses that even if ideologies are real, they are analytically inseparable from reproducing those same social relations. It is this second part of their analysis that is often overlooked when discussing racism and its origins. They argue, in no uncertain terms: Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. (Fields & Fields, 2014: 117)

In his own synthesis of this same literature, Roediger (2008) makes a similar point: The historical literature on the rise of race in colonial Virginia… uproots the reactionary common sense that imagines race as outside of historical circumstances. It [instead] locates the rise of personal whiteness in the material realities of class division and class rule. (Roediger, 2008: 3)

If we only focus our analysis on the ideological dimensions of racism, even if we allow for their material consequences, then it is difficult to understand, let alone do anything about, the material roots of racism itself. At the contemporary level, intersectionality has become a dominant theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between racism

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and other forms of oppression. Intersectionality is a political and intellectual framework emanating from Black feminist traditions for understanding the experiences of people who live at the crossroads of multiply marginalized subject positions (Hill Collins, 1990; see Hancock, 2007). One key insight of intersectional politics is not just that some people experience multiple forms of oppression. Rather, it is precisely the intersection of these various forms of marginalization that produce specific forms and experiences of oppression. Indeed, these experiences are easily overlooked when we treat multiple oppressions separately or additively, and not as simultaneous (see Smooth, 2013). Second, and perhaps counterintuitively, the political instinct of intersectionality is one of solidarity. The purpose of an intersectional analysis is to understand how various oppressions intersect specifically so as to challenge all of them. Rather than generating static or essentialized notions of identity, one located at each intersection, an intersectional approach ‘keeps the analytical gaze steadily on the dynamics of structural power’ (Wilson, 2013: 3, emphasis original). Ferguson (2016) raises important questions as to whether intersectionality is able to deliver on its promise of leveraging the specific to understand the totality of social relations that rely on differentiated forms of oppression in the first place. No matter its intent to reveal the ‘dynamics of structural power’, as Wilson (2013) argued, an intersectional analysis that remains at the level of the specific is unable to offer a logic of solidarity, and instead must rely on moral suasion as a strategy to make change. As Ferguson argues: A more compelling case for solidarity requires a conception of the diverse-yet-unified nature of power, one that illustrates how oppressions which sometimes contradict each other also systematically uphold an unfree and punishing world. By explaining that oppressed subjects share more than just experiences of discrimination… a robust theory of the social whole reveals a socio-material logic for political solidarity. (Ferguson, 2016: 43, emphasis original)

Thus, the challenge when conceptualizing racism – namely, its historical roots, how it manifests today and how it connects to language – is always to conduct the analysis from the perspective of the analytical whole. Or as Bannerji (2005: 146) concluded: ‘We need to venture into a more complex reading of the social, where every aspect can be shown to reflect others, where every little piece of it contains the macrocosm in the microcosm’. This is not mere academic hair-splitting, but rather connected to the fundamental question of one’s theory of change. Consider how the Combahee River Collective of radical Black feminists captured this complex theoretical idea in the most direct, succinct way: ‘If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free

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since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression’ (cited in Taylor, 2017, n.p.). Race and (dis)continuity

A final consideration in defining racism is its (dis)continuity over time. Indeed, many of the texts cited above not only appeared after Barack Obama’s presidency, but were also written specifically to understand the continued existence – the centrality – of racism in a United States that could also produce a Black president. A requisite part of conceptualizing the ‘diverse-yet-unified nature of power’ as Ferguson (2016) argued is to understand how systems of oppression such as racism change over time. Anderson (2010) provides a famous example of this, tracing the shifts in structural racism in the United States from slavery first and Jim Crow segregation second, to mass incarceration in an ostensibly post-racial era. Also in the United States, Taylor (2019) analyzes federal housing and urban planning policies after World War II. She documents their shift from explicit segregation in mortgage-lending practices to what she calls predatory inclusion, that is, extracting profit from federally guaranteed subprime mortgages, issued to Black women in particular, that were designed to fail. Eve Haque’s (2012) scholarship on the emergence of official bilingualism and multiculturalism represents a ground-breaking analysis of the dynamic reproduction of racism in the Canadian context. Haque’s argument is based on a genealogical analysis of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–1969), its final report, and the Official Languages Act (1969) and Multiculturalism Policy (1971) that resulted from it. As Haque documented, official bilingualism aimed to resolve one fundamental contradiction underlying the Canadian state, insofar as it reorganized a white-settler identity to include both Anglophone and Francophone settlers on more equal terms. At the same time, official bilingualism exacerbated another fundamental contradiction by denying official status or language rights to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples, and to other immigrant communities. Pierre Trudeau attempted to resolve these contradictions by endorsing what he called multiculturalism within a bilingual framework, that is, creating an ideological and implementational space (Hornberger, 2005) for immigrants to sustain their culture while denying them formal language rights. Nevertheless, by elevating only two languages – both the languages of white settlers – official bilingualism formalized a hierarchy of minoritized and racialized languages in Canada (Haque, 2012; Haque & Patrick, 2015). A simplistic read of this historical moment would conclude that official bilingualism is but another example of settler-colonialism and racism in the Canadian state. No doubt it is. But the power in Haque’s analysis is tracing how systems of settler-colonialism and racism (were) changed

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so as to entrench the hierarchy of racialized and minoritized languages that had already long existed in Canada. To wit: if English and French language rights were already codified in the British North America Act that proclaimed the confederation of the Canadian state in 1867, then why was a royal commission on this question necessary a century later? Despite the longevity of this hierarchy, the rise of Quebec nationalism from the 1950s and the Red Power movement of Indigenous peoples in the 1960s called the very existence of this hierarchy – and that of the Canadian state – into question (Haque & Patrick, 2015). In an effort to rescue itself, the state’s response was to ‘study’ the relationship between language, culture and Canadian national identity. The commission’s answer, in part, was official bilingualism. By placing language at the heart of a rebranded national identity, the commission shifted how race was encoded in Canada. For example, the commission’s original mandate used the term ‘the founding races’ – in reference to British and French settlers – to frame its study of the relationship between these two groups. Such language, however, was increasingly impossible to sustain, and not just because of domestic social movements. The civil rights struggle in the United States had begun to develop into a movement for Black Power; and revolutions and other independence movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America had imposed new ways of thinking about racism and (post-)colonial relations. These ideas resonated not only with racialized people living in Canada, but also among migrants from these same regions of the world, who arrived in Canada in greater numbers from the mid-1960s after racist immigration quotas were lifted. Over the course of its inquiry, the commission thus began to use the terms Anglophone and Francophone to refer to the same ‘founding’ groups; indeed, these terms have since become standard when referring to speakers of Canada’s official languages. What matters here, though, is the race work these terms do. In defining Canadian national identity in terms of two official languages, the commission not only helped to solidify the social hierarchy that had long existed in the Canadian state, but it also shifted the logic underlying this hierarchy away from race. As Haque (2012) argues so effectively, this did not mean that race was no longer central in organizing Canadian society. On the contrary, this discursive shift performed (and still performs) the dual task of entrenching this hierarchy while also obfuscating its roots in racism and white-settler colonialism. How do race and language relate?

Haque’s scholarship on official bilingualism is an important example of how research in applied linguistics has theorized ‘race’ and ‘language’, and how the field has begun to apply these theoretical perspectives in studies of language policy, teaching and learning. Von Esch et al. (2020)

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present a useful analysis of applied linguistic research that centers race and racism and how this line of inquiry has developed over the last 15 years. The authors noted their surprise that over this period of time there were few studies exploring racism and racialization in language teaching and pedagogy specifically. Instead, they discuss several longstanding concepts in critical applied linguistics and sociolinguistics (e.g. standard language ideologies, native-speakerism, linguistic hierarchization and language-teacher identity) and how the recent literature has (re)theorized these concepts from explicitly anti-racist perspectives. An important insight in their review is identifying the theoretical and/ or disciplinary bridge between critical scholarship on race/racism and language education. For example, von Esch et  al. (2020) cite empirical studies informed by critical race theory, anti- and decolonial theory, poststructuralism, racial capitalism and various critical theories that construe the denial of race as a strategy to maintain racism (e.g. colorblind ideologies and cultural racism). In most cases, the studies they cite borrow from one of these critical theories to analyze a specific context or experience of language education. In other words – and reminiscent of our earlier argument about the ongoing disciplinary isolation between critical applied linguistics and other kinds of critical social theory – most of the recent applied linguistic research that centers race applies critical anti-racist theories from other disciplines to their specific study. In only a few instances have these cross-disciplinary bridges led to new, explicit and coherent theories unto themselves of the interplay between race/racism and language. LangCrit

One example is Crump’s (2014) proposal for LangCrit. As the name implies, Crump roots her call for an explicit focus on the intersection of race/racism with language in critical race theory. Crump (2014: 216) proposes LangCrit to better understand ‘how linguistic identities intersect with racial(ized) identities and what this might mean for how individuals negotiate and perform their identities’. What makes LangCrit particularly useful is highlighting the tension that exists in much applied linguistic research between analysis of the ‘subject-as-heard’ and the ‘subject-as-seen’ (Crump, 2014: 219). Crump (2014: 216) argues that language scholarship focuses too sharply on the former, thus ‘masking… issues of race behind more “neutral” terms’. Instead, by foregrounding the subject-as-seen, Crump (2014: 219) defines LangCrit as a ‘critical framework for language studies that recognizes intersections of audible and visible identity in shaping possibilities for being and becoming’. However, because LangCrit relies primarily on post-structural notions of identity, it risks overemphasizing ‘individual social practices and identity performances’ (Crump, 2014: 219) in relation to historical, material and ideological conditions that shape these performances in the first place.

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Raciolinguistics

From our perspective, the theoretical propositions informing raciolinguistics are clearer in their understanding of marginalized subject positions (rather than individual identities) and the social conditions that produce them. The term raciolinguistics has roots in different disciplinary traditions, including Alim’s (2016) perspective informed by sociolinguistics and Rosa and Flores’ (2017) theorization rooted in linguistic anthropology, Foucauldian notions of governmentality, post-colonialism and post-structuralism. It is the latter approach to raciolinguistics that has made such a powerful intervention into critical scholarship on language, indeed for three reasons. Rosa and Flores are not the first to historicize the emergence of ‘race’ and of ‘language’ as social categories of differentiation, or how those categories have come to be seen as obvious, natural and timeless. However, they move the analysis beyond a simple intersection of race and language (which presupposes these categories of differentiation can ever be analytically separate from each other), and instead reveal how they mutually co-construct each other. Moreover, this collaboration has the effect of producing categories of race and language as taken for granted in how society is organized. While the authors arrive at this conclusion based on critical linguistic anthropology and Foucauldian analysis, their conclusion is not so dissimilar from Fields and Fields’ (2014) notion of racecraft, informed by critical scholarship in history and sociology. To provide an example from our study’s data of what Rosa and Flores mean by the co-naturalization of race and language in the production of raciolinguistic ideologies, recall Shazzy, the multilingual South Asian student we introduced in Chapter 2. In his Me Map video, as he held up the linguistic profile he had drawn, Shazzy talked about the different languages he speaks, and sometimes, with whom he speaks them (such as the bit of Korean he uses to interact with one of his Korean-speaking friends at school). But as he moved on to discuss speaking English, Shazzy said, ‘I feel white because I feel normal’. We understand this statement to mean that not only are English and whiteness conflated for this multilingual youth – who was just seven years old at the time he created this video, but also, for Shazzy, this conflation is the normal, natural state of things. Second, as they outline the main theoretical tenets of raciolinguistics, Rosa and Flores insist that the analytical gaze must shift away from the racialized individual or group, and thus away from efforts to understand what makes their language practices different. Instead, we must consider the practices of the perceiver, and the historical, social and material processes that have created racialized language(s) and their speaker(s) in the first place. This point has been captured most succinctly in their term white listening subject (Flores & Rosa, 2015), in particular how the perception of white listening subjects is shaped primarily by the racialized

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position of their interlocutor, not the objective language produced by that interlocutor. By framing the analysis around subject positions rather than individual identities, it is easier to understand raciolinguistic ideologies from the perspective of the analytical whole as Bannerji (2005) urged, versus as an individual phenomenon. Third, and directly related to the previous point, shifting our analytical gaze away from the specific practice of racialized subjects also means shifting our assumptions about what counts as positive change. Instead of asking teacher educators and candidates to focus their efforts on changing how racialized subjects use language as a strategy for social equity, a raciolinguistic analysis challenges us to focus on white supremacy itself and changing, if not eradicating, the material and ideological ways white supremacy manifests in institutions such as schools. Rosa and Flores (2017) clarify: We are not simply advocating linguistic pluralism or racial inclusion, but instead interrogating the foundational forms of governance through which such diversity discourses deceptively perpetuate disparities by stipulating the terms on which perceived differences are embraced or abjected. (Rosa & Flores, 2017: 641) How do race, language and teacher education relate?

The final component of this theoretical framework is an understanding of the relationship among race/racism, language and teacher education. Some studies have begun to apply a raciolinguistics perspective to teacher education (e.g. Schornack, 2019), and to theorize from teachereducator experiences teaching about race, indigeneity and schooling (Khanam et al., 2021). However, Daniels and Varghese (2020) and Rösch (2019) remain unique in explicitly defining a framework for understanding how race and language shape teacher education and teacher-candidate learning. In their essay, Daniels and Varghese (2020: 56) read scholarship on post-structuralism, critical whiteness studies and raciolinguistics alongside each other to establish ‘the centrality of raciolinguicized subjectivities within teacher education’. Extending Flores and Rosa’s (2015: 151) notion of the white listening subject, ‘who hears and interprets the linguistic practices of language-minoritized populations as deviant based on their racial positioning in society as opposed to any objective characteristics of their language use’, Daniels and Varghese frame teacher education as a form of white institutional listening which both produces and is produced by teacher-candidate subjectivities. Understanding teacher education from this perspective is necessary to avoid analysis rooted in judging some kinds of teacher-candidate learning or practice to be ‘good’ and other kinds to be ‘bad’. Additionally, this perspective helps us better

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understand how and why racialized and multilingual teacher candidates can also learn to perform this white institutional listening by policing the language practices of the multilingual youth with whom they work. Additionally, Daniels and Varghese extend the influential work of Deborah Britzman (2003) on teacher subjectivities. They connect this work to analysis of teacher subjectivities from critical race perspectives to propose the notion of raciolinguicized subjectivities. This framing understands teacher-candidate subjectivities as contingent and in a constant process of negotiation. On the one hand, raciolinguicized subjectivities as a notion helps identify who the imagined audience is in curriculum materials used in teacher-education programs. That is, do these materials anticipate a multilingual, racialized group of future teachers, or do they assume their audience to be monolingual and white? Moreover, and drawing on the work of Marcelle Haddix (2012: 170), the authors consider ‘the hybrid nature of [teacher-candidates’] racial and linguistic identities between the discursive spaces of their “sistahood” and the context of teacher education’. This means that as raciolinguicized teacher candidates move through their teacher-education program and the universityand school-based spaces in which the program takes place, they move between, among and sometimes simultaneously through subjectivities that position them variously as expert students and novice teachers, but also at times as racialized and multilingual subjects who might then be excluded or included, depending on the context and their interlocutors. The final insight from Daniels and Varghese (2020) that informs our analysis concerns putative solutions offered to ‘fix’ teacher education. The focus of their critique is specific to the United States, namely the claims made about high-leverage practices (Ball & Forzani, 2009) and other practice-based models for reforming teacher education, and are thus outside the scope of this study. However, the general argument the authors make is directly relevant, namely that such reforms ‘might in fact reinscribe Whiteness itself’ (Daniels & Varghese, 2020: 56). The solutions offered to teacher education can sometimes work to reinforce the dynamics, structures and ideologies they promised to redress. Importantly, the authors are not interested in ascribing intent. That is, a putative solution for teacher education need not intend to work in ways that further marginalize racialized and multilingual teacher candidates or their future students. Rather, the point is to reveal how these same solutions nevertheless ‘might reinscribe Whiteness, marginalize the experiences and insights of teachers and teacher educators/scholars of Color, and trivialize the importance of teacher subjectivity’ (Daniels & Varghese, 2020: 58). In the German language literature, Rösch (2019) advances the most explicit theorization of language, race and teacher education. Her entry point into the conversation is the concept of linguicism and the German language scholarship, especially that of İnci Dirim (e.g. 2010, 2016), that

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has expanded the term’s analytical scope. Drawing on post-structural analysis of race (Melter & Mecheril, 2009) and language (Dlugaj & Fürstenau, 2019) as ordering principles for society, this broader approach to linguicism denotes an ideological presupposition that nation and language are naturally linked. This assumption not only constructs monolingualism as the normal human condition, and multilingualism as the exception (Dirim, 2010), but also functions as a principle for organizing social reality. Rösch (2019) makes a further distinction between different dimensions of linguicism. If Linguizismus is a form of oppression that focuses on language itself (e.g. how specific languages are positioned in society), then for her Lingualisierung is a form of oppression that focuses on people, by essentializing and reducing groups of people based on stereotypical perceptions of how and what they speak. In particular, Rösch is concerned with how this discrimination occurs when the language practices of multilingual people are misheard. Although Rösch neither cites Rosa and Flores (2017) nor draws on raciolinguistics for her argument, she arrives at remarkably similar conclusions. The power of linguicism (or better, Lingualisierung) is how the listening practices of Germans are shaped by racialized categories that construct certain individuals as ‘migrant’. Consequently, ‘migrant’ language practices are misheard and marked as inaccurate – no matter how objectively correct that language might be. Yet, Rösch also underscores the flipside of Lingualisierung, namely a Privilegierung that accrues to those racialized multilinguals who also speak the dominant national language as part of their repertoire, and therefore sometimes gain greater access to institutions and other spaces of power compared to other racialized multilingual peers. For Rösch, a critique of the interplay of language and race must account for these multiple, and sometimes contradictory experiences. To synthesize linguicism with teacher education, Rösch draws on critical notions of Germany as a migration society, along the lines discussed earlier, and the kinds of migration pedagogy that have been proposed (e.g. Karakaşoğlu et  al., 2019; Mecheril, 2004). At the core of her argument is a specific theory of change that addresses what and who must change, and how that change takes place. As an example of the first two dimensions of change, Rösch argues that teacher candidates need the opportunity to think critically about how categories such as ‘multilingual’ are produced, and the racialized assumptions they project. Here, Rösch draws on Dirim (2016) and her argument that ‘multilingual’ too often is conflated with ‘migrant’. In this way, Germany and other migration societies are seen to comprise an Us, who speak the national language, and a Them, who do not. It is the multilingualism of Them that then becomes the central preoccupation of teacher education, insofar as preparing candidates to teach academic language or German as an additional language comes to be seen as desirable ‘solutions’ to the

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‘problem’ of ‘their’ multilingualism. In addressing how this change takes place, Rösch argues that teacher education must support future teachers in unlearning this Us–Them way of framing Germany. Candidates must engage in a more thorough history of multilingualism in the specific geographic space now called Germany, and also in considerations of multilingualism as a normal human and societal condition in general. In this way, teacher candidates can come to understand that the changes required in a migration society implicate everyone, not just speakers of racialized and minoritized languages. As rich as Rösch’s arguments are in theory, in the end they are most deeply concerned with teacher-education practice. Indeed, a significant component of Rösch’s critique addresses reflection as a common learning activity in teacher education, and the limits of reflection as a way to make change. On the one hand, and similar to Daniels and Varghese’s (2020: 56) concern about putative solutions that may in fact ‘reinscribe Whiteness’, Rösch (2019) argues: in fact, critical approaches [to reflection] focus more on revealing than overcoming the phenomenon they are meant to critique, which poses the danger of reproducing the very thing that needs to be overcome. (Rösch, 2019: 183, our translation)

In counterposing ‘revealing’ to ‘overcoming’, Rösch (2019) clarifies how teacher education can contribute to fundamental changes at school, concluding, In the context [of learning about] critical theories of racism and linguicism, the point is not to investigate or reveal [the dichotomy] between perpetrators and victims, but rather to understand and to undo these social positions, and the structurally anchored practices of discrimination and privileging related to them… In sum, reflection can be an important foundation for critiquing linguicism as well. But it cannot remain the only practice [in which we engage teacher candidates]. Instead, and more important, part of reflective praxis is the development of alternatives and the courage to try them out. (Rösch, 2019: 184, our translation)

The fact that Daniels and Varghese (2020) and Rösch (2019) have arrived at such similar theoretical conclusions is especially important because of a common critique made of raciolinguistics as being too specific to the United States. At the same time, there are important differences that cannot be overlooked. As Lackner (2022) argued, these authors take considerably different stances on engaging teacher candidates in exploring their own raciolinguicized subjectivities as they learn how to teach. As noted above, this is central to how Daniels and Varghese imagine changing both teacher-candidate thinking and practice. For Rösch, by

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contrast, she explicitly argues against this approach to engaging teacher candidates, lest that lead to a way of thinking about linguicism primarily as a question of victims and perpetrators. She argued: To avoid identity-based ascriptions of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of linguicism, while at the same time reflecting on how one’s social positioning is determined by language ideologies, I recommend thematizing relevant content that is independent from the group of teacher candidates. (Rösch, 2019: 188, our translation)

Rösch goes on to name several examples of teaching materials that could be used instead, such as studies related to candidates’ teaching subjects conducted in the various countries from which immigrant students and/ or their families migrated, or comparative studies of student success that attend to differences in how racialized and multilingual learners are included in schools in other countries as compared to their inclusion in Germany. As Lackner (2022) noted, the point of stressing this difference is not to suggest that one author is correct and the other is not, or to suggest that teacher educators must choose one recommendation over the other. Instead, we underscore this difference to return to a claim made at the end of Chapter 2: the major findings from the relevant literature reviewed in this chapter, as well as the main propositions from the theoretical framework we introduced here do not necessarily provide clear-cut answers to many questions that surround the preparation of teacher candidates to work with multilingual learners. Instead, we treat them as principles to help explore the following guiding questions in the remainder of this book: • How do teacher candidates make sense of new knowledge about supporting multilingual learners in relation to the racial and linguistic ordering in school that they experienced as students themselves and again now as novice teachers? • What are the possibilities and limits of requiring teacher candidates to learn about linguistic diversity and supporting multilingual learners in pre-service programs? • What are the possibilities and limits of new research on translanguaging in changing teacher candidates’ thinking and practice about this racial and linguistic ordering of school? In the chapters that follow, the book turns to addressing these questions directly as we present the main findings from our study. In Chapter  4, we discuss how multilingual learners are imagined to be in Ontario. Our analysis focuses on this subjectification as it is found in relevant ministry documents, as well as in our conversations with study

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participants and in the coursework teacher candidates produced. Chapter  5 introduces voices from the field to understand teacher education and multilingualism. The analysis in Chapter  5 is based on interviews with English as a second language (ESL) teachers and teacher-leaders in Ontario, in which they share their perspectives on how teacher education should prepare new teachers for multilingual classrooms. Additionally, Chapter  5 presents a comparative analysis, based on publicly available documents and interviews with teacher educators, of how Ontario’s 16 teacher-education programs responded to the province’s 2015 policy requiring all teacher candidates to learn how to support multilingual learners. Chapters  6 and 7 focus more closely on the case study of teachercandidate learning in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) MT program and its required course Supporting English Language Learners. Chapter  6 explores the contradiction between candidates’ generally positive dispositions to multilingualism in general and multilingual learners in particular, and the reprisal of deficit orientations as they engaged with ministry resources teaching and assessing multilingual learners. Chapter  7 focuses on the contradictions in how teacher candidates understood and took up our invitations to consider languageinclusive teaching strategies generally and translanguaging specifically. In the concluding chapter, we identify the implications of our analysis for teacher educators who aim to center multilingualism and challenge racism as they prepare future teachers, and offer a number of recommendations informed by our analysis for how to do so.

4 Who are Multilingual Learners in Ontario Imagined to Be? Shakina Rajendram, Mama Adobea  Nii Owoo, Katie Brubacher, Wales Wong, Jennifer Burton and Jeff Bale

Introduction

The central topic this book explores is preparing future teachers to work with multilingual learners in linguistically diverse contexts. This topic presupposes that defining multilingual learners is a straightforward task, and something that is widely agreed upon. We know that neither presumption is correct. This chapter draws on data sources from across project strands to reveal how the people and policies related to our study imagined multilingual learners to be. What this discussion demonstrates is that conceptions of multilingual learners varied in contradictory ways over time and across contexts. For example, each iteration of ministry policy regarding English language learners (ELLs) positioned this group of students in incompatible ways. Similarly, the teachers, teacher educators and teacher candidates who participated in this study rarely had a fixed or static understanding of multilingual learners. Instead, depending on their career stage, where they worked, their own personal and professional experiences with multilingualism and, for the teacher candidates, their experiences during practicum placements, participants expressed different and sometimes conflicting ideas about who multilingual learners are. The contradictions we identify in this chapter are not meant to be critiques of individuals, or to organize the data into ‘good’ versus ‘problematic’ ways of understanding multilingual learners. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 3, because so much of the research on teacher education and multilingualism is designed to explore candidates’ attitudes and beliefs about their future multilingual learners, this kind of analysis has already been done. Rather, we focus here on the contradictions present in our data and the conditions that produce them so that we can better understand how educators come to form ideas about multilingualism and multilingual learners, and how these ideas change. 82

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This analysis applies as much to us on the research team as to the participants in this study. Consistent with the reflexive stance that characterizes ethnographic study of language policy (Martin-Jones & de Costa Cabral, 2018), and similar to the kinds of self-reflection that we expect of teacher candidates as they learn how to teach, we introduce this chapter by reflecting on how our thinking about its central topic changed as a result of doing the research. For example, many of the original documents related to this project used the term ‘English learners’ to indicate the group of school students related to our study. The term appears in our grant application and in many of the research instruments we created for the study (such as interview guides and the tasks on the Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Language-Inclusive Teaching [PeCK-LIT] test we developed); and it appears in the first publication from this project (Bale et  al., 2019), which presents an analysis of interviews conducted with the instructional team of the Supporting English Language Learners course. As a research team, we discussed this terminological choice at length, debating the options available to us such as multi- or plurilingual, bilingual or dual-language learner. None of these terms seemed appropriate, whether for conceptual or contextual reasons. For one, bilingual in Canada is typically reserved for English–French bilingualism. For another, dual-language programs in non-official languages are uncommon here, with Alberta an important exception. In fact, such programs are not permitted by Ontario’s Education Act (see Kubota & Bale, 2020). Moreover, in 2015, multilingual learner did not circulate as widely as it does now in the literature or in policy conversations, and we wanted to use a term that was intelligible to our audience. Although we were aware of the deficit perspectives in a term that focuses only on what students do not yet know, in the earlier phases of our work we opted to use the term English learner, perhaps as the least worst option. However, our data analysis began to show in concrete ways how terms like English learner worked to interrupt teacher-candidate learning about their future multilingual students. We explore this topic in greater detail in Chapters 6 and 7. However, as an example, we were able to trace the contradiction between the generally positive dispositions teacher candidates held regarding multilingualism and language-inclusive teaching practices, and the emergence of deficit orientations as candidates worked with policy and curriculum documents that used terms such as English language learner or that focused primarily on English. Importantly, this reprisal of deficit thinking frequently occurred among candidates who themselves are multilingual and speakers of languages that are racialized in Canada. As such, using English learner in our analysis no longer seemed appropriate. Consequently, when presenting our own ideas and arguments, this book uses the term multilingual learner to refer to the students whom teacher candidates in Ontario are now required to learn about during their teacher-education program. However, when referring

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to specific data sources, for clarity we use the term as given in that data source. Although multilingual learner circulates more broadly now, and thus makes our work more recognizable to the reader, we use it with two important caveats. First, we follow Dirim (2010) and Wernicke et  al. (2021) in raising the concern that multilingualism too often is conflated with migration-related linguistic diversity. As discussed in Chapter  1, this is an important component of multilingualism in the Canadian state; however, it is not the only one, by far. Not only is this conflation factually inaccurate, but it also functions ideologically to reinscribe divisions between Us and Them, indeed to make those divisions politically more palatable. In this way, multilingualism among Us becomes an elite project of adding new languages to one’s native-speaker mastery of dominant national language(s) in a given context, while multilingualism among Them is a threat to national unity that must be mitigated by ensuring They learn the dominant national language(s). Second, we do not use multilingual learner as a synonym for English language learner. Rather, we recognize how the conflation of these terms functions as permission for teachers (and teacher candidates) to stop thinking about multilingualism once they believe students are proficient speakers of English. Both the ideological division between a linguistic Us and Them and the conflation of multilingual learner and ELL serve to justify structural and other kinds of social divisions that privilege some languages – and more importantly, the speakers of those languages – over others. In contrast, by attending more carefully to the many kinds of multilingualism in the Canadian state, we are challenged as researchers and practitioners to consider the multiple historical and contemporary processes that not only comprise linguistic diversity here, but also (re)produce the hierarchy that structures these languages in our daily lives. Considering this perspective on the terminological choices our project has made, the chapter now examines how the various people and policies related to this study understood multilingualism and who multilingual learners in Ontario are. We begin with an analysis of the suite of ministry documents that govern English language education in Ontario. We then turn to a discussion of how teacher and teacher-educator participants understood multilingual learners, and conclude by introducing five focal teacher-candidate participants and how they imagined multilingual learners to be. Ministry of Education Perspectives

Our analysis of how the Ontario Ministry of Education imagines multilingual learners to be focuses on the contradictions within the main documents that govern English language education in the province: (1) its formal policy framework (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007a); (2) its

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revised English as a second language/English literacy development (ESL/ ELD) curriculum (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007c, 2008); and (3) the assessment program for identifying and tracking ELLs, STEP: Steps to English Proficiency (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015). This suite of documents positions students whom they refer to as English language learners in deeply contradictory ways that undermine the few instances in these documents that reference multilingualism as an instructional resource. In so doing, they reinforce the hegemony of English as the sole measure of success for educating multilingual learners in Ontario schools. Our analysis is presented here in two parts. First, we focus on the ministry documents to uncover these contradictions; second, we discuss interviews with ESL teachers and teacher leaders and their interpretation of how ministry documents positioned multilingual learners in contradictory ways. Ministry documents

The ministry released its first policy mandate for supporting ELLs in Ontario’s public schools in 2007 (see Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007a). The emergence of this policy was shaped by several inquiries and reports from public and education-sector advocacy groups concerned with the lack of consistent support for ELLs in public schools (Markus, n.d.). The most prominent among these reports was the 2005 Annual Report of the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario (Office of the Auditor General, 2005), which highlighted the inconsistencies in funding ESL and ELD and how these programs operated across school boards. The main findings in this report addressed funding and accountability. While the ministry provided school boards with over $225 million annually in ESL and ELD grants, there was ‘no information on how much of that money school boards actually spent on ESL/ELD programs’ (Office of the Auditor General, 2005: 10). In one school board, more than half of ESL/ELD funding had been diverted to other areas, triggering concerns about inequities in ELL support. Additionally, in the absence of a tool to assess and track ESL/ELD students’ English proficiency, there was ‘no information about whether students whose first language is not English were achieving appropriate proficiency in English’ (Office of the Auditor General, 2005: 10). In response to the auditor-general’s report, the ministry began developing a comprehensive policy for K-12 students learning English, and stipulated that this policy must consider ‘(1) providing criteria for identifying English language learners, (2) describing procedures for data collection to enable tracking these students as a group, and (3) using this information to identify the most effective programs and approaches’ (Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, 2005: 161). The first policy objective (i.e. ELL identification) was taken up in the 2007 English

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Figure 4.1   An expanded view on ‘English language learners’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015: 7)

Language Learners ESL and ELD Programs and Services: Policies and Procedures for Ontario Elementary and Secondary Schools, Kindergarten to Grade 12 (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007a). This policy defined English language learners as ‘students in provincially funded English language schools whose first language is a language other than English, or is a variety of English that is significantly different from the variety used for instruction in Ontario’s schools, and who may require focused educational supports to assist them in attaining proficiency in English’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007a: 8). Later, in its English language assessment document, the ministry expounded on this definition of ‘ELLs’ by identifying specific examples of Canadian-born and newcomer ‘ELLs’, as shown in Figure 4.1. The ministry’s stated goal in providing the definition and examples of ELLs was to build a consistent approach to supporting these learners across the province by helping school boards to identify and assess a program for learners who needed support with English. While the ministry’s 2007 policy framework for English language education focused primarily on improving students’ proficiency in English (as one might expect), its revised curriculum from 2007 for secondary ESL and ELD programs was more inclusive by naming ‘students’ own languages and cultures’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007c: 4) and framing the development and maintenance of both as part of the curriculum’s goals. While positioning English as ‘essential to students’ success’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007c: 3), the curriculum document noted that:

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growth towards full linguistic and cultural competence in English should not be at the expense of students’ own languages and cultures. A major goal of any instructional program for English language learners should be to encourage students to value and maintain their own linguistic and cultural identities so that they can enter the larger society as bilingual and bicultural individuals. Such young people are able to choose language and cultural norms that are appropriate in any given situation or cultural context, and can fully participate in and contribute to our multilingual, multicultural Canadian society. (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007c: 4)

In addition, the curriculum document included descriptions of languageinclusive teaching strategies for effective ESL instruction, such as the use of bilingual books and what it calls the ‘strategic use of the first language’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007c: 48) to facilitate instruction. Likewise, the specific curriculum expectations for ESL instruction frequently mention leveraging students’ other languages to teach English. At the very least, this resource-based orientation recognizes multilingual learners as more than just learners of English. Different from the ministry’s policy framework, the curriculum document is more explicit in considering the relationship between students’ multilingualism and their expanding English language proficiency, even if the former is construed primarily as a tool for developing the latter. By contrast, the ministry’s assessment program for English lan​​ guage education, STEP: Steps to English Proficiency (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015), undermines even this resource-based approach to language-inclusive teaching strategies. As the document states, STEP is a direct outgrowth of the auditor-general’s report discussed above, and ‘the growing need for accountability with respect to English-language education’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015: 6). The document acknowledges student multilingualism, and includes in its ‘vision of the English language learner in Ontario’ that students ‘feel their language and culture are valued’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015: 8). Yet, the actual assessment scheme – used for identifying students who might need ESL services and for assessing their language proficiency over time – establishes English as the sole outcome of ESL/ELD education. STEP is organized as a six-point scale for assessing English language proficiency in the domains of reading, writing and oral language (see Van Viegen and Jang [2021] for a detailed analysis). In each case, the only mention of students’ other languages (referred to as ‘L1’) is at the lowest two assessment levels. In this way, the assessment scale views the use of other language(s) as a deficit – something that multilingual learners must rely on in order to fill communicative gaps in English – rather than an integral part of effective multilingual communication. Conversely, a high(er) score on this scale suggests that students use nothing but English in the classroom.

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As Van Viegen and Jang (2021) note in their analysis of STEP, these descriptors were developed through consultation and piloting with teachers, not based on empirical or conceptual research on language assessment. As such, this positioning of students’ other languages reflects the understanding some teachers had of multilingual learners and their languages at school. The authors also discuss early implementation studies of STEP, which included 16 school boards and over 300 teachers. They note that this inquiry-based approach to STEP implementation led some teachers to better appreciate their students’ multilingualism and question the monolingual assumptions in STEP. However, none of these findings was incorporated into STEP or led to any revisions of the framework. The assumptions embedded in the STEP assessment scheme also contradict the spirit of the ESL/ELD curriculum document cited above, which explicitly imagines multilingual youth as ‘able to choose language and cultural norms that are appropriate in any given situation or cultural context, and can fully participate in and contribute to our multilingual, multicultural Canadian society’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007c: 4). For example, should ELLs choose to leverage their language and culture as hoped for in the curriculum document, this assessment scheme would then define them as beginning learners of English. Consequently, despite the emergence of more nuanced understandings of multilingual students over time in ministry documents, this way of imagining multilingual learners is trumped by the ministry’s own assessment framework. Teacher interpretations of ministry documents

In our interviews with current ESL and ELD teachers and teacher leaders, participants discussed at some length the contradictory impact that ministry documents have had on how multilingual learners are understood in Ontario schools. For example, several suggested that the identification, assessment and placement procedures as implemented in Ontario have led to enhanced understanding of multilingual learners in their teaching contexts. According to Ally, an ESL/ELD system leader for a school board in a rural part of the province, there has been a marked increase in the number of learners identified as ‘ELLs’ in her school board over the past four years: Our numbers are sitting at 750… it’s gone in 4 years from nine to 750, and you know that that’s not just those people who have just arrived in those four years. It is a matter of identifying right, once we understand what is an English language learner.

At the same time, Ally expressed her concern that identifying and tracking ‘ELLs’ based on their proficiency in English alone runs the risk of

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pushing multilingual learners aside, that is, leaving their multilingualism behind once they reach a certain level of English proficiency: Let’s say you see a student and they’re stepping at Step 6 [the highest proficiency level on STEP] right across the board, what I don’t want is for schools to say ‘Okay, we’re done with the student now. They are fluent in English and we’re finished with them.’

Rather than reducing multilingual learners to their English learning, Ally emphasized the need for teachers to embrace a more holistic view of multilingual learners and support them not only as English learners, but also as multilingual learners with a rich linguistic repertoire who are learning several new languages concurrently: I want that other side of that student to be also valued and brought into the classroom, and that is the side of the student that has a linguistic repertoire different from, perhaps, other students in the class who are just monolingual… I think it’s important for teachers to understand that it’s not just about supporting them in their learning of English, it is about supporting them and developing fully their linguistic repertoires.

Other teachers we interviewed echoed Ally’s concerns around defining, identifying and assessing multilingual learners primarily on the basis of their English proficiency. Although the ministry acknowledges ELLs as a ‘a richly heterogenous group’ with unique experiences and needs (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2008: 7; see also Figure  4.1), several teachers suggested that the use of terms such as ELL, ESL and ELD have siloed learners into homogeneous groups and reduced them to their language, specifically, in terms of what they can or cannot do in English. Sylvia, an ESL/ELD consultant for a school board, expressed her concern about this reductionist approach to viewing multilingual learners: I get quite frustrated, you know, one of the challenges I think is just the language we use around ESL and ELD. I hate all [these] terminologies, because it’s such deficit thinking, and it’s almost like we’re being intentionally siloed by that language, because everything’s reduced. [It’s] very reductivist thinking. It’s all reduced down to the kids’ language, and that’s all it is.

Our conversations with teachers suggested that characterizing multilingual learners primarily by their English proficiency has created stereotypical profiles of who multilingual learners are, and what they look like or sound like. Sheila, an assistant curriculum leader for literacy and ELL programming, described how learners who could benefit from ESL support tend to get overlooked if they do not fit into the typical profile

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of an ‘ELL’, namely someone who is new to Canada and speaks, reads or writes English in a certain way: I’ve also had to act as an advocate in different situations, where I’ve informed teachers of the fact that this student is an ELL, because sometimes they don’t read as an ELL. You don’t necessarily know that, especially if they’ve been here close to the 5 years, or 4 years, or 3 years, or it’s a big class, and you don’t realize it.

Related to terminology and siloing, several teachers in our study reported resistance among multilingual learners and their parents to being identified as an ‘ELL’ or being put into an ESL program because of attendant stereotypes. Marina, an ESL support teacher at the elementary school level, spoke to the stigmatization that students in ESL programs face and their consequent resistance to being placed in such programs: ‘We still have racism when people are not proud to say “I am ESL”... “Don’t mark me ESL, I’m not ESL,” that’s the norm’. Jenny, an ESL resource teacher for one school board, also remarked that contrary to learners in French as a second language (FSL) classes, learners in ESL programs tend to be perceived from a deficit standpoint: With English language learners, we don’t have that asset-based language yet… When my daughter was young, and I mentioned she was in French Immersion, the reaction was, ‘Oh, wow! She’s learning everything in French. That’s wonderful! Good for you.’ But the parent of an English language learner, when they hear, ‘Oh, you’re in ESL?’ What’s the reaction? It’s not, ‘Oh, wow, you’re learning English as well as knowing Chinese or Korean!’ It’s a totally different reaction, it’s like, ‘Ohhh… Uh-oh. It’s gonna be really hard.’

The contradictions these teachers and teacher leaders discussed with us provide a compelling example of Daniels and Varghese’s (2020) argument about putative educational solutions that work to reinforce hegemonic whiteness, insofar as proximity to or embodying whiteness requires proficiency in dominant varieties of English. A political crisis emerged in the mid-aughts with respect to appropriate funding and support of ELLs in Ontario. This crisis opened up new opportunities to reposition multilingual students and rethink the relationship between multilingualism and English language education in Ontario schools. However, the solution to this crisis was framed discursively as one of accountability: how to ensure that provincial grants earmarked for ESL and ELD programming are indeed spent on those programs; and how to ensure that the money is being spent on the ‘right’ kids for the ‘right’ amount of time. Similar to accountability ideologies in the United States that work in practice to limit political and practical space for bilingual

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education programs (see Menken, 2009; Menken & Solorza, 2014), the subsequent implementation of the ministry’s assessment scheme foreclosed opportunities to think about multilingualism differently by reinscribing ‘L1’ at the bottom of its assessment scale. The framework reconfirmed that the goal for multilingual learners was not only to learn English, but to use English only. Indeed, this reinscription of hegemonic whiteness is announced on the very title page of the ministry’s assessment program (see Figure 4.2). While this page includes words from a few dozen languages and from multiple writing systems, they all say the same thing: English. Consistent with our analysis of the contradictions of bilingualism within a multicultural framework presented in Chapter 1, this image reflects a particularly Canadian way in which race and language collaborate to reinscribe whiteness in and through the English language. Other languages may be

Figure 4.2 Title page of STEP: Steps to English Proficiency (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015)

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recognized, they may even be included (at least symbolically) in language education policies such as the STEP assessment framework. In fact, this symbolic inclusion will often be deployed as evidence of how inclusive Canadian multiculturalism is. Yet, this symbolic representation is only possible insofar as it is properly subordinate to the real goal. Quite literally, these other languages only matter as long as they are saying the ‘right’ thing: English. In Chapter  6, we return to STEP to analyze in greater detail how teacher candidates engaged with this assessment program and the impact it had on their thinking and practice with respect to instructional planning. In the next section, we analyze the perspectives shared by teachers and teacher educators in our study on how multilingual learners are imagined to be. Teacher and Teacher-Educator Perspectives

As detailed in Chapter 2, we interviewed multiple teachers and teacher educators across Ontario as part of our study. The purpose of these interviews was to learn, from their perspectives, what kinds of knowledge, skills and dispositions teacher candidates need in order to be successful with multilingual learners and working in multilingual contexts. In these interviews, teachers and teacher educators communicated differing views of multilingual learners based on their own lived experiences and their professional experiences with language education. At times, these contradictory perspectives were held by the same person; that is, they drew on their own experiences to frame multilingual learners in different, and we argue, incompatible ways. At other times, teacher and teacher-educator participants focused on learning from multilingual learners themselves as the primary way for educators to understand this group of students. We address each point in turn in this section of the chapter. ‘The right attitude’

At the time Iris participated in our study, she was an ESL teacher in an Ontario elementary school, working in a ‘withdrawal’ program with students identified as ELLs in Grades 1–5. Before migrating to Canada, Iris had taught English as a foreign language (EFL) in her home country. Once in Canada, she earned a master’s degree in second language education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), while gaining extensive experience teaching ESL across the K–12 spectrum in Ontario schools. As Iris discussed her personal, academic and professional life, she articulated multiple, at times competing perspectives on multilingual learners in Ontario. In her interview with Mama, Iris addressed at length the learning expectations that she and others had for multilingual learners in the schools where she has worked. Iris contextualized her expectations for

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multilingual learners in terms of lack of material support and the challenging working conditions that she has faced: It all comes down to numbers and finances I believe, and we are given [a] certain amount of English language learner support positions, and we just have to deal with that… I’ve had about 20–30 kids that I’ve had to support in withdrawal groups, in a half teaching position. And before that, there had been several years where I’ve had to somehow magically support up to 40 kids with no English and very little first-language literacy or second-language literacy, as the case may be. So, all relatively speaking, it’s not terrible. I’m afraid that my criteria have dropped quite a bit since I’ve started teaching here in Canada, as to what acquisition of English language means. I’ve come from an environment where acquiring the English language was seen as a much more academic activity, where learning, where the expectations of the level to which you acquire the English language [were] much higher. Here, my expectations have been dropping through the years because I see that ‘very little’ is actually considered ‘good enough.’

Here, Iris was responding to Mama’s question about how well she felt multilingual learners were supported in her school; indeed, she began by describing difficult working conditions and the inflexible ways ESL positions are staffed. To underscore the nature of that challenge, Iris described her students as having ‘no English and very little firstlanguage literacy and second-language literacy, as the case may be’. To this, she then compared the more ‘academic’ project of teaching EFL before moving to Canada, where expectations were higher. This comparison led to an important admission: ‘I’m afraid my criteria have dropped quite a bit’. In this way, what began with the troubling, if all too common, reality of workplace conditions ended with a description of Iris’ lower(ed) expectations of multilingual learners here based in part on what multilingual learners in her home country were expected to achieve. When Mama asked Iris to provide more information about the learners with whom she works, Iris explained that her opinion was shaped by the surrounding social reality and informal expectations required of immigrant learners of English: The community does not have very high expectations of English language learning by the immigrants, let’s call them. There is a lot of tolerance to slow acquisition, there isn’t much pressure put on ELLs to do well in their learning of the language, it’s okay if they can communicate basic needs or be able to function without endangering themselves and others and the school, and anything else is perceived as a bonus.

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What is not clear in this statement is who comprises the ‘community’ to which Iris refers: the ‘immigrant’ community, the school community or community as a stand-in for society at large? Later, however, Iris discussed what she calls a ‘major issue’ over the last few years: that a lot of the kids that come to the country and therefore receive ESL support are kids that do not have strong first-language literacy or numeracy, and do not come from families that have strong literacy. So, one of the challenges is working both toward those students acquiring the English language and acquiring literacy skills, and actually being interested in acquiring literacy skills. Because a big group of them in the last several years has been from cultures that do not think of themselves as people who would do this, who would be excelling in academic circumstances.

Iris again stressed the various language and literacy skills that students are missing as they arrive in Canada. While earlier the ‘community’ to which Iris referred was more undefined, here she ascribed these low expectations to immigrant communities, that is ‘from cultures that do not think of themselves as people… who would be excelling in academic circumstances’. Later in the interview, Mama asked Iris to discuss which ideas and practices for supporting multilingual learners teacher candidates should learn in their teacher-education program. Mama also asked her to consider the extent to which, in her experience, these ideas and practices were present in ministry documents governing ESL/ELD programs. Iris recalled statements in these documents framing multilingualism as an instructional resource and calling on teachers, as she put it, ‘to bank on sort of the skills of first language of the kids’. It is here that Iris noted that the students she works with ‘don’t have strong first language’. For her, the ambitions in ministry documents to draw on students’ ‘first’ language do not work in practice. We note here this shift (i.e. from concerns over ‘first-language literacy’ to concerns that her students ‘don’t have strong first language’) as Iris discusses ministry documents and their prescriptions for classroom practice. Iris continued by contextualizing her perception of missing language and literacy skills within the ‘unstable situations’ and ‘traumatic experiences’ that many multilingual learners and their families have experienced. Iris notes that in many cases, her students were also linguistically and racially minoritized in their home country, or that their path to Canada was not a direct one, but rather included several intermediary, at times lengthy, stops along the way. For example, Iris noted that many students in her school who are understood as ‘the Tibetans’ in fact lived for some time in India and started school there. Thus, they have had a variety of language and literacy experiences (e.g. to varying degrees in

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Tibetan, Hindi and English). Iris argued that many of her colleagues overlook these experiences by seeing such students only as Tibetan. Iris further argued that teacher candidates are not being prepared for teaching contexts such as this, and that many teachers would not take the time to ‘go and actually research where those kids have come from, research that place, research that cultural or political environment those kids are coming from. A lot of teachers do not care about that, they would not have that interest’. This comparison of herself to her colleagues implies that Iris has, in fact, taken the time to engage in this kind of learning about and/or from the multilingual learners in her school. Finally, as Mama concluded the interview, she asked Iris whether she would like to add any final statement. Iris responded, ‘More resources would be great, but what matters is the right attitude, the attitude that you have to understand your learners, you have to understand how learning happens, and I think that is what really matters’. We agree with Iris. However, the pressing question is how do we prepare teacher candidates in ways that help them develop this ‘right attitude’? What became clear across this 65-minute interview is how fluid and dynamic one’s own attitudes can be with respect to imagining multilingual learners. Iris referred to multiple sources to inform her understanding of who the multilingual learners she works with are, including: previous professional experiences and lived experiences with migration, workplace conditions, ministry documents, her understanding of the communities from which multilingual learners come and her thoughts about what her colleagues are or are not willing to do in order to support multilingual learners. As varied as these reference points were, Iris was consistent in understanding multilingual learners as ‘immigrants, let’s call them’; with limited academic literacy in any language, potentially not even fully proficient in any language; and content with learning enough English to get by. The consistency in Iris’ ideas about multilingual learners complicates calls in the recent literature to engage teacher candidates in reflection on their own lived experiences with linguistic and racial diversity (e.g. Daniels & Varghese, 2020; Solano-Campos et  al., 2020). As recent empirical studies of engaging teacher candidates in this way have shown, reflection alone is not enough to help candidates become aware of the ideological inconsistencies in their own imagining of multilingualism and of multilingual learners (e.g. Birello et al., 2021; Iversen, 2020b). Even in pre-service contexts in which this reflection is specifically oriented on examining ideological dilemmas (Lindahl et al., 2021), there is no guarantee that reflecting on one’s lived experiences automatically leads to desired stances or pedagogical practice. However, it is when Iris began to focus on the complexity of multilingual learners’ lives, and their varied experiences prior to arriving in Canada that a more nuanced understanding of these students as knowledgeable and capable began to emerge. In the second part of this section,

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we draw on insights from other teachers and teacher educators about what it means not only to construe multilingual learners as experts in this way, but also to position multilingual learners as teachers in their own right. Imagining multilingual learners as experts and as teachers

Our interviews with other teachers and teacher educators provided further insight about the impact of imagining multilingual learners as experts on their lives and the knowledge they possess. For example, Jenny, another teacher participant working in an ELD program in a Toronto-area board, reflected on her encounters with fellow teachers, whom Jenny described as having migrated to Canada themselves and/or having earned additional teaching qualifications for ESL. Jenny describes how these interactions positively shaped her understanding of multilingual learners: I was very fortunate that in my secondary school there were many teachers in other subject areas that had ESL qualifications, or they had had the immigrant experience themselves or had second language learning experience themselves. So, they had ways to understand the experience of the newcomers. So those teachers were so open to attending an after-school session or looking at ways of differentiating assessment to support the success of the ELLs. Sometimes that was more helpful than other teachers who were looking for two or three quick and easy strategies to help ELLs, but didn’t have the right approach, in terms of a mindset of seeing the students as bringing a lot of assets to the classroom. They were more looking at, oh they’re so far behind or their language is limited and so they had difficulty just in a kind of a mindset and an approach to supporting them. Even though they were willing to expand their strategies—because they didn’t have a deeper understanding, either of language learning, [or] you know the psychological impact of arriving in a new country as a teenager—I think it was harder for them to have the patience and support them in different ways, like build on their confidence or their skills outside of the language area.

Here, Jenny noted the importance of having ‘ways to understand the experience of newcomers’ as a central part of forming the right ‘mindset’ for working with multilingual learners. In Jenny’s experience, it was teachers who themselves had migrated to Canada or who had committed to ongoing professional development were best able to learn from multilingual learners and their experiences. Kezia, a veteran teacher educator whom Shakina and Mama interviewed, echoed this stance that teachers should above all learn from their multilingual students. In response to a question about what teacher

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candidates need to know and be able to do in order to best support multilingual learners, Kezia stressed her understanding of multilingual learners as experts who should be positioned at times as the teacher. Imagining multilingual learners in this way requires teachers to change how they teach, not only multilingual learners to change how and what they learn. Kezia explained: It’s important for teacher candidates to know that our English language learners don’t come without knowledge and experience, and it is up to us to find ways in which those English language learners can share with us and with their peers what they do know and to be able to work from their prior experiences and make links from what they do know to what we’re hoping they will learn and what they will teach to us and their peers. So that means looking at ourselves and reflecting upon our own beliefs… and our own experiences. And it also means trying to find different ways in which we can develop relationships with our students who don’t share our same experiences or language, and find[ing] ways in which they can communicate what they do know and be open in my opinion to using different languages within the classroom. To be able to do that… I think it requires the use of different languages within the classroom, and allowing children to use their own languages in the classroom and creating space for them to be the experts and teaching me as a teacher, teaching their peers and allowing them or validating their identity, which might require some learning on my part.

Consistent with Kezia’s ideas, Claudia, another teacher-educator participant, described multilingual learners as teachers of their teachers. They ‘help to refine the teacher’s practice. Learn from your learners. What are your learners teaching you? Are you really understanding what they are bringing you? What that means to engage them? What that means to practice?’. As these teacher educators stressed, in order for teachers to adapt their practice and properly address the complexity of knowledge that multilingual learners possess, they must first imagine multilingual learners as more than students with limited language skills, but rather as experts from whom teachers can learn. What is consistent across these different perspectives on multilingual learners that teachers and teacher-educators provided is the need for teachers to change. That is, these participants not only imagined multilingual learners as experts in their own right, but they also understood that the obligation was on them as teachers to create space for multilingual learners to share their expertise, to make the time as teachers to examine their own stances and to engage in sustained learning – in a word, to change. Even in our conversation with Iris these ideas began to emerge. Although Iris often viewed the multilingual learners she works with primarily in terms of what they can’t do, when she began to discuss

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what she had learned about and from multilingual learners about their lives, her perspectives began to shift. In this way, by centering multilingual learners as experts and creating space for them to teach others, we begin to find a way out of the contradictions so prominent in imagining who multilingual learners are. In the final chapter of this book, which focuses on the implications of this analysis for centering multilingual learners in teacher education, we present one possibility for using resources such as the Me Map video profiles of multilingual learners as a way for teacher candidates to engage with multilingual learners as experts on their own linguistic and cultural lives, and to learn directly from them about how best to support multilingual learners. For now, we conclude this chapter with an analysis of how teacher candidates imagined multilingual learners to be. Teacher-Candidate Perspectives

We noted earlier that the teacher candidates in our study tended to express positive dispositions toward multilingualism generally and toward their future multilingual learners in particular. As detailed in Chapter 2, a slight majority of the participating candidates were themselves multilingual, although virtually all described themselves as English dominant. Moreover, a sizable minority identified as racialized or as People of Color, although our teacher-education program continues to under-enroll Black and Indigenous candidates. Despite these generally positive dispositions and the linguistic and racial diversity within our program, the case-study portion of our project revealed deeply contradictory ways in which candidates imagined their future multilingual learners to be. In this final section of the chapter, we introduce five focal participants and discuss their understanding of multilingual learners. Ezra

Ezra was a teacher candidate from a junior/intermediate (Grades 4–10) section of the course. While his immediate professional goal was to be a music teacher in elementary school, he was also interested in eventually becoming a principal and was considering teaching philosophy and music at university level. As a high school student, he taught violin privately to students whom he described as ELLs from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Yet, Ezra’s love of teaching music began while educating students in Grades 1–5 for two years in Shanghai, China. He described most of the students in the school as ELLs, the children of diplomats from all over the world, but predominantly Japan, Korea and Vietnam. While teaching in Shanghai, he was directed by the school to speak in English only. This contradicts with what he later learned in the Supporting English Language Learners course about incorporating all student languages in instruction. However – and not so dissimilar to Iris’ reflections on

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her past teaching experiences discussed above – Ezra made sense of this difference by distinguishing between the two contexts, referring to his teaching experiences in Shanghai as related to EFL. At the time of our study, Ezra was volunteering at a music school, teaching drums to students he described as being underprivileged students of color, which, he suspected, meant that some of them were ELLs. This was not the only instance in which Ezra equated racialization and poverty with ELL status. Ezra described himself as growing up speaking English and being half Chinese. Ezra told us that his father speaks Cantonese, but made a conscious effort to not speak it at home because Ezra’s mother did not know Cantonese. His family enrolled Ezra in a French immersion program in elementary school, and he continued with French for two years in secondary school as part of an international baccalaureate program. It is noteworthy that Ezra’s family focused on bilingualism in Canada’s official languages, but not on Cantonese. Ezra had a negative experience learning French in Grade 10, so he quit. While teaching in Shanghai as an adult, he decided to learn Mandarin. He took Mandarin classes with a private tutor three times a week for two years. He is certified to speak Level 3 Hanyu Kaoshi Shuiping. He felt that this allowed him to connect with mainland Chinese citizens in ways that most of his Western colleagues could not. At the time of our study, he tutored Chinese students in English online, so he used his Mandarin there as well. In Ezra’s interview with Katie, he struggled to find any examples of experiences with multilingual learners during his practicum placements. In considering how he might identify multilingual learners, Ezra conflated socioeconomic status and race with multilingualism: So I had a bit of an interesting situation with my last placement because I was bouncing between three different schools to [one] where middle/ upper class, predominantly white, English first language, both parents in the household school, so it was, you know, a well-off school, essentially. And then I—because I was a music [teacher] I had to bounce between another school. This other school was lower socioeconomic status, Caribbean, African immigrants, single-parent homes, lower EQAO scores, you know, working, working single parents who weren’t as involved. So, I had this very sharp contrast, and I didn’t really encounter ELLs [in the] first type of schools and these upper-class schools, I didn’t really. English language learning never really kind of came into play because the demographic was all homogeneous.

Here, ‘upper class’ and ‘white’ are seen as synonymous with English as a first language and homogeneity. Not only does this stance overlook the plurality of languages and cultures that are likely present in these wealthy and white spaces, given Canadian immigration policies that favor formally educated individuals with at least functional proficiency in English

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or French (see Haque, 2017), but it also reinforces the idea that ELLs are necessarily also racialized and poor. Ezra then reflected on working at the school with African and Caribbean immigrants, where he described the ‘English that they use was a lot of slang, lots of slang and casual, informal modes of communication’. Although the ministry documents discussed earlier do include speakers of non-dominant varieties of English in their definition of ELLs, our participants generally did not address this category of students at length. Ezra then explained that while he did not learn this explicitly from the Supporting English Language Learners course, he inferred that he ‘should be careful about correcting them…. Because, how they communicate with each other is their culture’. When teaching a student whom he described as having a ‘heavy Ghanian African’ accent, both he and his associate teacher would make sure that the student pronounced subject-specific vocabulary such as violin, crescendo and other Italian terms correctly. Ezra stated that it is important to have ‘high expectations for your English language learners because they will rise to them’. Vera

Vera was a primary/junior (Grades  K–6) candidate whose family immigrated to Canada from Serbia in the former Yugoslavia the year before she was born. Her goal was to become a homeroom teacher in Grades K–3. Her family were one of the first to immigrate from Serbia to the Ontario town in which she grew up; they then helped other Serbians to settle in the community as they arrived. Before starting in the master of teaching (MT) program, she tutored a recent Syrian immigrant for a year as part of the federal government’s language instruction for newcomers to Canada (LINC) program. Vera was nervous when she started tutoring, because she described the Syrian student’s language skills as being lower. It ended up being a great experience because the Syrian student had taught Kindergarten at a refugee camp, and she was just a bit older than Vera. They are still friends even though Vera is no longer her tutor. In describing her experiences with this LINC student, Vera made a connection to her parents, who were also escaping war when they immigrated to Canada. Vera listed the Supporting English Language Learners course as her favorite in the MT program. In fact, for her research project, a required part of the program, Vera did research on using arts-based pedagogy to support ELLs. Vera’s relationship with Serbian and English changed throughout her interview with us depending on her framing of multilingual learners. After describing her parents as fleeing the war in the former Yugoslavia, Vera said distinctly that she grew up speaking ‘their’ language. She stated that her family speaks English at home. She then described how she learned to speak both English and Serbian at the age of three. At church,

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the family all used Serbian. There was even a Serbian language school in the basement that she used to go to, whose teachers also taught in the public-school board. This would suggest, then, that Serbian is Vera’s language as well; indeed, she later described Serbian as her second language. Vera also told us that she visited family in Serbia once a year. Vera mentioned that it was on these visits that she became more aware of her proficiency in Serbian, noting that her Serbian improved while immersed during these trips. Hearing Vera describe her own linguistic life in this way helped to understand comments such as the one below, as she reflected on a wholegroup discussion in her section of the course: That being an ELL student, sometimes you get, like, almost treated like an infant, sort of seen as not being able to do all the things that other students can do, but that’s not true. It’s just that you don’t know the language. It hasn’t happened to me as a native English speaker, but I could definitely see that happening with other students.

In this instance, in which Vera refers to negative perspectives on ELLs that others have, she positioned herself as a native speaker of English. In this way, the category of ‘ELL’ worked to distance Vera not only from these negative perspectives, but also from her own experiences with multilingualism. Vera comes from a small town, a space which she constructed as not having any multilingual and immigrant students. I grew up in [town name redacted], Ontario, which is a small, sort of small town outside of [city name redacted]. Very like monolithical. Mostly, I think I was the only I guess I’m second generation, I think also, only one in my class who was second generation? Yeah, we didn’t have any. I don’t think we have any ELLs.

Vera described places like her home town as monolithic and not having any ELLs, even though at least her Serbian immigrant family lived there. The idea, as discussed earlier, that this language belonged to her parents and not to her can be read as part of organizing small-town spaces in Ontario as not having ELLs, perhaps not even recognizing these spaces as multilingual. ELLs are to be found elsewhere – despite this candidate’s objective status as a multilingual person. Moreover, Vera’s home town is more than just a rural space, but rather a well-off suburb. Vera’s parents are professors at a local university. She described her family as well-educated immigrants who live on one side of town, and not as refugees who live on the other side of town with the rest of the Serbian community, with whom she doesn’t always connect. Her family would drive across town on the weekends to be with

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the larger Serbian community. Similar to the intersection of class and race revealed in Ezra’s understanding of multilingual learners, Vera’s understanding of the label ‘ELL’ was twofold: not only is the presence of ‘ELLs’ a function of the racial ordering of Ontario, but also of the class divisions that exist within her own multilingual community. Hannah

Hannah was preparing to be a French teacher in a junior/intermediate section of the program. She also described herself as having a ‘passing familiarity’ with German, Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Ewe and Gã. Hannah grew up in Ottawa in an Anglophone family, but the entire family speaks both French and English. Ottawa is Canada’s capital city. It is located in one of the largest Franco-Ontarian regions in Ontario, and sits directly on the border between Ontario and Quebec. Further, as a product of Canadian official bilingualism, many government jobs require proficiency in English and French. Perhaps not surprisingly, Hannah felt that it was expected that you learn French in Ottawa. Hannah also did a three-month exchange to France, and worked at a summer camp in Quebec. She was proud to be mistaken as a Francophone in France when she spoke québécois. When her family moved to the greater Toronto area, she discovered that many of her classmates were not bilingual in French and English, as she was, which made her feel out of place. However, Hannah’s view that there was significantly less bilingualism in greater Toronto did not account for the other kinds of multilingualism present there. Hannah’s thinking about multilingualism was influenced by ministry documents and the language teaching models they prescribe. Prior to coming to OISE, Hannah worked as a library technician in an elementary school and interacted a fair amount with people she understood as ELLs. She enjoyed watching newly arrived students develop their English. She recalled that one ELL came for one-on-one support sessions three or four times a week. This was a Grade 7 student who had been in Canada since Grade 1. Hannah did not understand how this could happen, since she understood that funding for formal English language support only lasted a couple of years after students had been in Canada. In this way, Hannah viewed students’ language and multilingualism in terms of funding models and their expectations for language development. Hannah went into the Supporting English Language Learners course thinking that the course would not apply to her as a French teacher, because she believed that all children are on a level playing field learning French. Despite this expectation, Hannah learned a lot about pedagogies that could be applied to her French teaching, which ‘blew her out of the water’. This was especially true in terms of the multilingual teaching strategies she learned in class, including an assignment where the children

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researched what is special about their own families. While Hannah’s understanding of multilingual learners had initially been influenced by ministry categories and structures, her thinking was challenged by learning to understand students through a translanguaging lens. For Hannah, although multilingualism in French is easily identifiable, ELLs and the languages they speak are not. Hannah has only ever taught French immersion, which she believed made her less aware of when she is working with ELLs, because everyone is learning through the medium of French. Hannah understood this as ‘evening the playing field’. Moreover, in discussing a recent practicum placement, she stated that the English learners in her classes were all Francophones, so she could speak to them in French: Yeah, so the way in which in French immersion… they theoretically have a 50-50 day. So 50% of their day is French, 50% of their day’s English. When they’re in their French half, it’s supposed to be 100% French, right? If they’re, if they’re in a, if they’re in a subject that is a French subject, it’s in French, they talk in French, the teacher speaks French, but when they’re on the English side, it’s just normal regular school. So I know the, the English counterpart for my [Associate Teacher] had to work with them as ELL students. But we did not because, well, for those kids, it was their first language, they were fine.

Here, Hannah separates multilingualism in French from being defined as an ELL in English. In the one case, the students’ multilingualism disappears and requires no attention from teachers; in the other, ‘on the English side’, it gets labelled and students need additional support. How multilingualism was organized across different spaces became especially clear in Hannah’s thinking when she discussed race. For Hannah, white multilinguals were not part of the category English language learners. As she discussed her past practicum placements, Hannah said: Depends on where I end[ed] up in Halton [Regional School Board]. But, like, three out of my four placements were in Burlington, which is pretty homogenous… Sort of, like, you know. Yeah. Not too. Basically, like you have a class full of white students who maybe immigrated from Western Europe, a couple like their grandparents came over a couple years ago. So just in terms of English language learners, there are significantly fewer. But I did, I did a placement off of Milton and it was a completely flipped population.

In Milton, Hannah estimated that about 80% of her students spoke English, French and ‘something’. Within this subgroup, Hannah guessed that 40% spoke four or five languages. She was unsure of the students’ languages in Milton, but described them as East Asian. This is the

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population which Hannah described as ‘flipped’, in which racialized immigrants comprise the majority, not white immigrants from Western Europe. It is here that ELLs are to be found. Insofar as these students’ languages are ‘something’, they are rendered an unknowable category. However, even within this ‘flipped’ population of multilingual ‘East Asian’ students, Hannah was unsure who the ELLs were. She identified one student from the class who had recently arrived from Morocco. After speaking to the English teacher counterpart for her French immersion class, she discovered that ‘actually half of the class was classified as English language learners, but they were all like just about finished their STEP levels. They were all very, very high’. In this way, multilingual students’ ability with languages was evaluated only in terms of their English proficiency. Consequently, because these ELLs were deemed to be close to English proficiency, their multilingualism would again soon cease to matter. Davis

Davis was an intermediate/senior (Grades  7–12) candidate who described himself as a monoglot. However, in his interview with Wales, he did say that he learned to read Latin, Old French, Old English, Middle English, German and Italian when he was in a medieval studies program in graduate school. Even though he can read multiple languages, he was quick to distinguish this skill from being able to speak the language. Born and raised in a small town in British Columbia, he was also ‘exposed regularly to the sounds and phonemes of Germanic and Slavic language’ when he was at home. He recalls being surrounded by mostly ‘white English speakers’ and only became aware of how it feels to be culturally and linguistically different when he traveled as an adult. He reflected, ‘In Cuba and Mexico, for example, I recognized quite quickly that my behaviours and my language were not the norm. In Cuba I was marginalized. In Cuba I was weird’. When discussing his experiences with multilingual learners during his practicums, Davis noted that they were accustomed to working in samelanguage groups, and often used all of their languages when taking notes and completing activities. While discussing this in the interview with Wales, he reflected on the study room that ELL students went to during his practicum: [T]hey had this great little room [where] I spent as much time as possible. It was like ELL study period or something… Any ELL student who wanted to could come in there during lunch hour and just sit and work on their projects for their other classes and they could get help from each other which was really cool. That was like the best thing. You could see them all like helping deliver to all ages. Grade 12 students like

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helping a Grade 9 student with their science homework. If they shared it, they would share the same language L1. That was great. Or they could go to the teacher who was sitting there eating their lunch for help. That was fantastic. But yeah, that was sort of L1 congregating amongst themselves. And I don’t know if there’s any downside to that at all. I can imagine there is, but it might be, you know, it’s sort of encouraging isolation, maybe as opposed to integration, but at the same time, I think it’s a great idea. I think it’d be worth it even if it wasn’t.

In this study space, ELLs had the opportunity to access their home languages as a resource. Davis thus imagined ELLs as motivated to learn English and to do well academically. These supportive interactions could benefit the students’ understanding of subjects such as science. However, Davis also worried about ELLs of the same-language groups working in separate spaces as potentially ‘encouraging isolation’ even though the study time was an opportunity for ELLs to be teachers to each other by tutoring both content and English. Even with the benefits of a learning community for ELLs, Davis wondered about the possible disadvantages that prevent them from integrating with their peers in the school. As someone who identified as a monolingual, Davis also saw students’ home languages as inaccessible. He said, ‘From my point of view, an ELL’s L1 is essentially a black box. They could be saying and doing all kinds of incredible things in that black box, but I can’t peer into it’. This metaphor for language as a mystery and thus unavailable to him created a separation between teacher and student, preventing him from effectively supporting the ELLs in his classes. However, he later described how he understood the difficulties that ELLs encounter, since he is also a language learner. Maybe because I’ve sort of been a language learner, or I learned a lot of languages myself, again, not to produce language but to decipher it, but I’ve learned a lot of language myself. Maybe I had found myself sympathizing with the students a little bit because I know how hard it can be to read, learn to read your language, let alone read and speak it. And I’ve often thought, you know, about different strategies for teaching myself new languages when I come to a new one. I’ve learned to read several already. And I’ve sort of experimented with some strategies. And some work and some don’t. So I often think about that sort of thing. So watching these kids learn, learn English, for the first time was, I found myself sort of thinking back to the strategies I’ve used and thinking forward to when I’m - if I’m eventually an ELL teacher, maybe I will, what sort of strategies I’ll be able to draw on, and you know all that stuff.

While Davis’ ‘black box’ metaphor illustrates his limited understanding of ELLs’ other languages, he does relate his own experiences with

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language learning to formulate approaches for his future pedagogical practices. His perspective of how ELLs can learn expands by reflecting on his own difficulties with learning a language and how he developed independent learning strategies. Mira

Mira was a junior/intermediate candidate who grew up speaking Arabic. She started learning French at the age of two and learned Spanish and English in high school. Born and raised in Lebanon, she started learning English in Grade 6 from textbooks and lots of reading. As she grew up, she realized that ‘English is a must in the world’ so she started to also learn the language on her own outside of school. She went to the American University of Beirut, an English-medium university, but described herself as having limited proficiency in English, so it was hard for her to understand the lessons in class. She improved her language skills by reading and socializing more with others in English. After completing her undergraduate degree, she moved to Canada to start the MT program. Her goal was to be an FSL teacher. As a candidate who identified herself as multilingual, Mira showed empathy and an understanding for the experiences of multilingual learners. In an interview with Wales, Mira commented that she liked the Supporting English Language Learners course ‘[b]ecause of valuing. Like it is always underscored, when the professor valued my first language, this like boosted myself’. Her awareness of her linguistic repertoire was reflected in her understanding of the course content and her application of this knowledge through her teaching. In an assignment that asked candidates to reflect on their own multilingualism, Mira revealed how her past experiences shaped her emerging teacher identity: I am tolerant. I am tolerant, as I listened to and read about people’s experiences and cultures in different countries. And now I understand their attitude and behaviour. I am resilient, as I often placed myself outside of my comfort zone in situations that can be stressful. I developed coping mechanisms, and the capacity to set short- and long-term goals to develop my language proficiency. I am empathetic. I can put myself in my students’ shoes, in particular, newcomers and those who are learning a foreign language.

Mira was not only aware of the challenges she faced when learning a language, but also showed an appreciation for being exposed to different cultures. This ability to adapt to her surroundings, which she perceived as ‘outside of my comfort zone’, strengthened Mira’s capacity to understand what most of her multilingual learners are experiencing in the classroom.

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In a case study of one student identified as an ELL, Mira wrote, ‘Currently, Lea is not receiving additional support in English language; her exemplary behavior and her positive attitude toward learning can mask her mild difficulties’. Her impression was that the student is hiding her learning difficulties behind a positive attitude. Informed by her own experiences as a language learner, Mira could relate to and support Lea in her practicum, who was not receiving additional support, because she recognized the challenges Lea faced. Since Mira had also learned French and taught it during her practicum, her perspective and recommendations on learning a language were not limited to English, as was often the case for other candidates involved in our study. Mira recognized the benefits of knowing multiple languages, and recommended that Lea also be supported in French because the ‘[French] curriculum highly values intercultural awareness’. As with her own language learning experiences, Mira always highlighted the importance of connecting language and culture. Conclusion

The focal participants introduced here imagined multilingual learners in ways that provide compelling evidence for Haque and Patrick’s (2015: 27) arguments about the racialized hierarchy of languages that exists within the Canadian state. As these authors argued, ‘Language policies have been used in Canada as a way to address state concerns with national unity and control, producing forms of racial exclusion and maintaining a white-settler nation. Accordingly, these policies have functioned to manage racial difference through processes of erasure, forced assimilation and exclusion through the technology of language’. Their analysis is based on a series of federal policies that led to the formalization of official bilingualism in Canada, as well as federal policies governing Crown–Indigenous relations. Our analysis of ministry documents and how teachers, teacher leaders and teacher candidates imagine multilingual learners extends their analysis by revealing the process, that is, how these ‘forms of racial exclusion’ unfold, and how the ‘technology of language’ functions more locally at the school level to reproduce this racialized hierarchy. With respect to teacher candidates, the data reveal the priority of official bilingualism in their lives. For Ezra, this was a choice made for him by his parents, to focus on rigorous forms of French language learning (i.e. through French immersion and international baccalaureate programs) in lieu of also learning his father’s language, Cantonese. For Hannah, this was an obvious part of growing up in Canada, so obvious in fact that it was hard for her to understand why so few people in greater Toronto were bilingual in French as compared to Ottawa, her home town. For Vera, the prominence of official bilingualism revealed

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itself as she positioned herself in contradictory ways as a bilingual speaker of English and Serbian, or a native speaker of English from a part of Ontario where ‘we didn’t have any ELLs’. In this way, not only are English and French repositioned at the top of this hierarchy, that is, as the only languages that really matter, but also, we begin to see how people learn about this hierarchy, how they learn to internalize it, even and especially as multilingual former students in Ontario schools now learning to teach in them. Second, these data underscore how this racialized hierarchy of languages renders English and French as the only identifiable and knowable languages in Ontario schools. Hannah’s lack of certainty about the other languages her students spoke, describing it as English, French and ‘something’; her description of multilingual learners in her French immersion placement as being native speakers of French, so ‘they were fine’; and Davis’ metaphor for multilingual learners’ languages as a ‘black box’ that he ‘can’t peer into’ all reveal how multilingualism in Ontario and its schools is often seen as inaccessible, perhaps even unknowable. We understand this reproduction of multilingualism as something inaccessible as an example of the ‘processes of erasure’ that Haque and Patrick (2015) identified. What makes this erasure particularly noteworthy is the fact that, at least in the case of these participants, these perspectives were held by multilingual people themselves. In each case, they described positive experiences with learning various languages, and they expressed generally positive attitudes toward societal multilingualism, toward their future multilingual learners and toward the Supporting English Language Learners course they were required to complete. Third, these data underscore the extent to which race and class collaborate in producing a hierarchy of languages and distributing this hierarchy across social space. For Ezra, wealthy, white spaces could not also be multilingual. Instead, Ezra associated multilingualism and the presence of ELLs specifically with poor, racialized spaces. For Ezra, these kinds of multilingualism were inaccessible in their own way, insofar as the language practices used by African and Caribbean students belonged to their cultures and could not be engaged by teachers. Similarly, Hannah organized her thinking about the school board in which she conducted her practicum placements according to a racialized framing of who ELLs were and where they were to be found. White European immigrants or their children did not – and perhaps could not – qualify as ELLs for Hannah, whereas other parts of this region with ‘flipped’ populations (i.e. with higher proportions of racialized students) did. For Vera, this spatial organization was based more specifically on social class, insofar as ELLs were to be found on the other side of town, where poorer Serbian families lived. It is with Mira that we begin to see a way out of these contradictions. In some ways, we see some of the same privileging of English and

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French in her own life story. Understanding the dominance of English internationally led her to seek additional support for learning the language and to attend an English-medium university in her home country. Moreover, she migrated to Canada to become a certified teacher of FSL, a choice most likely inspired by the demand created by policies for official bilingualism for qualified FSL teachers with advanced proficiency in the language. Yet, we also learned from Mira how she leveraged her own experiences with multilingualism and migration to connect with multilingual learners in Ontario, to develop empathy with them and to learn from them as she learned how to teach. In the concluding chapter, we elaborate on experiences such as Mira’s as one possibility for centering multilingualism in the teacher-education curriculum.

5 Preparing Teacher Candidates to Support Multilingual Learners: Insights from the Field Shakina Rajendram, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Yiran Zhang, Julie Kerekes and Jeff Bale

Introduction

This chapter focuses on how teachers and teacher educators perceive and respond to linguistic and racial difference in the context of Ontario’s new teacher-education policy (see Chapter  1 for an overview of the policy). The chapter draws on data from (1) interviews with English as a second language/English language development (ESL/ELD) teachers and teacher-leaders in Ontario schools; (2) analysis of program-related documents and websites from Ontario’s 16 teacher-education programs; and (3) interviews with teacher educators from 10 of these programs. After briefly reporting our analysis of Ontario’s teacher-education programs and how their curriculum has responded to the 2015 policy requirements, we divide the chapter into two main parts. First, we analyze the data thematically in terms of what teachers and teacher educators perceive to be important components of supporting multilingual learners. In addition, the interviews with teacher educators shed light on their experiences, challenges and recommendations for how teacher education can prepare teacher candidates to work with multilingual learners in mainstream K-12 classrooms. Similar to Daniels and Varghese (2020), we do not address these topics invested with a preference for a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing the needs of multilingual learners, whether in schools or in the teacher-education curriculum. Rather, our intent in this first part of the chapter is to better understand how teachers, teacher educators and the programs in which they work perceive linguistic and racial difference, and how those perceptions work to position knowledge and strategies for supporting multilingual learners as central to teachers’ work – or not.

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Second, we extend the analysis by engaging in a theoretical discussion of how raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa, 2019) animate a social mapping that organizes different parts of Ontario according to imagined racial and linguistic identities, and then projects these identities onto students. Our discussion focuses on how teacher educators described these raciolinguistic ideologies as held and/or enacted by others, and we also reveal how raciolinguistic ideologies were evident at times in participants’ own efforts to challenge deficit orientations and other assumptions they ascribed to teacher candidates. Overview of the Teacher-Education Programs, Participants and Data Sources

The data discussed in this chapter come from two strands of our study. The first comprised interviews with 11 practicing teachers with extensive experience supporting multilingual learners in Ontario. Among these participants, 10 worked in Ontario; one participant (Polly) was employed in Alberta at the time, but had been a high school teacher in Ontario working with multilingual learners. The teachers’ pseudonyms and relevant experiences are listed in Figure  5.1. In our interviews, we asked the teachers how multilingual learners could be best supported, the challenges they faced and what they thought teacher candidates needed to know in order to best work with multilingual learners. The second relevant project strand explored Ontario’s 16  teachereducation programs. Our goal was to understand how the programs and the teacher educators working in them appropriated the province’s 2015 teacher-education policy regarding support for multilingual learners. This work involved surveying program websites (e.g. mission or vision statements, program descriptions and publicly available syllabi); collecting publicly available documents about the programs, such as accreditation reports from the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT); and conducting interviews with teacher educators and/or administrators from these programs who have taught a component in the program related to supporting multilingual learners. Table  5.1 lists the 16 universities with teacher-education programs accredited by the OCT. Among them, 15 offer bachelor of education programs that are either concurrent with or consecutive to undergraduate programs. In addition, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) offers two graduate-level programs: the master of teaching (MT) program at the heart of this project, as well as a smaller master’s (MA) program in child studies and education, which prepares early-childhood and elementary-level teachers. (Niagara University offers a master of science in education in addition to its BEd. However, this graduate program operates on its campus across the border in Niagara, New York, and leads to teacher certification in that state. It thus falls outside the scope of our discussion.)

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Figure 5.1  Teacher participants in our study

Based on preliminary analysis of these document data, we identified teacher educators and/or program administrators at all 16 institutions who appeared connected to or responsible for content on multilingual learners. Of those we contacted, 12 teacher educators from 10 different programs agreed to be interviewed. In our interviews, we asked participants about the possibilities and limitations of required learning Table 5.1  Institutions in Ontario with OCT-accredited teacher-education programs Brock University

Trent University

Lakehead University

Tyndale University College

Laurentian University

University of Ontario Institute of Technology

Niagara University

University of Ottawa

Nipissing University

University of Windsor

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)/ University of Toronto

Western University

Queen’s University

Wilfrid Laurier University

Redeemer University College

York University

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about linguistic diversity and supporting multilingual learners in their respective program, and what they believed to be the most important components of supporting multilingual learners their candidates needed to learn. Figure 5.2 provides an overview of the teacher educators who participated in our study. To protect participants’ identities, we have not listed the institution where they work. Instead, we have highlighted their professional experiences relevant to supporting multilingual learners. We repeat a limitation discussed in earlier chapters, namely that our interview protocols for the teacher and teacher-educator participants described here did not ask them explicitly about their racial identity.

Figure 5.2  Teacher-educator participants in our study

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Supporting English Language Learners: Programmatic Responses to the Policy

Our document analysis revealed that all 16  programs had some kind of component in their curriculum on supporting multilingual learners. However, it was not clear whether this component was implemented as an institutional response to the province’s teachereducation policy or based on individual instructors’ initiatives. Overall, we observed three ways in which the delivery of this component was achieved: (1) through a mandatory stand-alone course that all teacher candidates are required to take, such as Supporting English Language Learners at OISE and English Language Learners in the Classroom at Wilfrid Laurier University; (2) through an elective stand-alone course that is open to all teacher candidates but not mandatory, such as Teaching English Language Learners at Lakehead University; and (3) infusing content about supporting multilingual learners into courses that address diversity and inclusion, such as Cultural and Linguistic Diversity at Trent University and Teaching for Diverse & Equitable Classrooms in Ontario at York University. Regarding this third approach, our interviews with teacher educators indicated that infusion of content on multilingual learners was often a result of instructors’ own experiences working with such learners and tied to their own teaching philosophies and research interests, rather than being mandated by the program or otherwise resulting from a program decision. The teacher educators we interviewed were not aware of whether the infusion of this content was systematic across their programs. They suggested that because many of these courses are taught by sessional faculty (i.e. instructors hired on a semesterly or annual basis), the scope and content of these courses may vary from instructor to instructor. The variation we found in how Ontario’s teacher-education programs have appropriated the province’s teacher-education policy reflects the contradictions of mandating curriculum change via policy. On the one hand, as we have discussed in earlier chapters, the policy requires programs to address supporting English language learners (ELLs) in their content and in practical experiences during the program. As such, only offering elective courses on topics related to this mandate, and our participants’ interpretation that infusion approaches were based on individual instructors rather than on program stances are inconsistent with the policy. On the other hand, teacher-education providers in Canada have traditionally enjoyed significant autonomy in program administration

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(Gambhir et  al., 2008; Van Nuland, 2011). This often leads to variation in program structures, practicum placement opportunities, content offerings and teacher-educator knowledge across institutions in the same province (Crocker & Dibbon, 2008). It also means that programs have enjoyed considerable latitude in responding to mandates, such as those in the 2015 policy, addressing change in stages rather than initiating major structural changes all at once. From this perspective, the heterogeneity in program responses to the province’s policy is not surprising. Nevertheless, it reveals the limitations of mandates in the Ontario policy context, and raises important questions about the extent to which all teacher candidates leave their respective programs with the curricular and practical experiences the province expects them to have gained. Teacher and Teacher-Educator Perspectives on Supporting Multilingual Learners

Analysis of the interviews we conducted with teachers and with teacher educators revealed a number of themes common to both groups that reflected their perspectives on what teacher candidates need to know and be able to do to best support multilingual learners. These themes included differentiating instruction for multilingual learners; creating and utilizing linguistically and culturally responsive curriculum and lesson plans; anti-racist pedagogy, making effective use of the STEP assessment framework; scaffolding academic language across the curriculum; supporting and engaging families of multilingual learners; and teachers having language learning experiences as a basis for empathy toward multilingual learners. The convergence of their stances demonstrates how dedicated these teachers and teacher educators are not only to the multilingual learners with whom they currently work, but also to ensuring that future teachers are well prepared to support multilingual learners. However, as the variation in program responses to the 2015 policy we just described suggests, teacher-education programs may consider content on supporting multilingual learners as peripheral rather than central to teaching and teacher education. Our interviews with teacher educators also suggested that teacher candidates may be adding what they learn about multilingualism to their existing (and often deficit-oriented) views on racial and linguistic difference, rather than challenging and reconstructing those conceptions. In this section of the chapter, as we discuss the components of support for multilingual learners that came up in our interviews with teachers and teacher educators, we also examine how certain aspects of K-12 programming and teacher education may reproduce deficit ideologies of multilingual learners and privilege whiteness over the linguistic and cultural practices of racialized communities.

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Support for multilingual learners as central or peripheral

A common theme in the interviews relates to recurring debates in school contexts about whether multilingual learners are best supported through integrated or withdrawal models. In the former model, multilingual learners are fully integrated into the mainstream classroom and receive support during regular lessons from the classroom teacher (who presumably holds formal qualifications for or has received professional development on supporting multilingual learners); sometimes, integrated models are based on the classroom teacher and an ESL/ELD specialist co-teaching and collaborating to support multilingual learners. In the latter model, multilingual learners are withdrawn or pulled out of the classroom a few times each week to receive targeted support from a specialist ESL/ELD teacher. Teachers who proposed that multilingual learners be integrated into mainstream classrooms, such as Iris, Sabrina, Fatima, Ally and Polly, argued that co-planning, co-teaching and co-assessing between ESL/ELD and mainstream classroom teachers can maximize language learning opportunities for multilingual learners across the curriculum. Similarly, Chiraene, a teacher educator, felt strongly that mainstream and ESL/ELD teachers needed to work together to support multilingual learners in the regular classroom, especially in the context of online/hybrid teaching becoming the dominant mode for class delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chiraene explained that it had become difficult if not impossible in her experience to plan instruction for multilingual learners separate from other students. She emphasized that now more than ever it was important for all teachers to design lessons with the needs of multilingual learners in mind, and differentiate their lessons to support multilingual learners: This is a real opportunity because once you go online, all of a sudden our ESL teachers can’t withdraw students. They have to work with classroom teachers, right? You can’t be having multiple Google classrooms set up to support your ESL learners. [It] is quite interesting because some are still… creating these classrooms and pulling the students out rather than working with the classroom teacher to figure out… how can we differentiate this lesson to support those students? Or are we thinking about [whether] we’re planning these lessons with those students in mind? So it might be an opportunity, we might see more integration in the future. It’s hard to say. I’m hopeful.

Similarly, other teacher educators emphasized that as Ontario K-12 classrooms become more linguistically diverse, the onus was no longer solely on ESL/ELD teachers to ensure that multilingual learners develop English proficiency. Rather, mainstream teachers must also have a solid

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understanding of the needs of diverse learners and be equipped with strategies and resources to differentiate instruction and support the language learning of multilingual learners across the curriculum. Polly noted that whatever subject is being taught, whether math or science, teachers should be ‘incorporating the lens of the language piece and what language outcomes are part of this lesson, and what part’s content and what part’s language, and how do we incorporate assessment for both’. To prepare teacher candidates to support multilingual learners in mainstream classrooms, Sandra, a teacher educator, reminds her candidates that ‘all teachers are language teachers’, and she always includes a component in her courses on how to support the language learning needs of multilingual learners through differentiated instruction. Sandra described: The second piece that… I’ve always included in the course is some level of lesson planning around [the question of] how do you differentiate a lesson for English language learners? Because a lot of them come in and think that ‘Okay, I’ve got to..​.tea​ch my class and then I’ve got three ELLs. So that means I have to do two separate lesson plans.’ Yeah, no, you don’t. So it’s getting their head around that and how to, [how] it really complements the evaluation and assessment courses.

While all of the teacher educators and teachers we spoke with believed strongly that multilingual learners should receive support both from their ESL/ELD teachers and their mainstream classroom teachers, they expressed concerns that mainstream classroom teachers sometimes viewed the responsibility for supporting these learners to lie solely with the ESL/ELD teachers. According to Ally, a teacher, this was especially a concern at the secondary school level, as it was ‘easy for secondary teachers to say, “you know, I’m just a Biology teacher, don’t ask me to be the English teacher here, too. Don’t ask me to have two languages happening in my Biology class”’. The peripheralization of support for multilingual learners in mainstream classrooms and the shifting of this responsibility to ESL/ELD teachers also extended to the realm of teacher-education programming. In our interviews with teacher educators, we observed the same tension of whether programs should address questions of diversity and differentiation through stand-alone courses on supporting multilingual learners, or infuse that knowledge across all courses. On the one hand, teacher educators suggested that creating a mandatory stand-alone course in some programs has the potential to signal to candidates that supporting multilingual learners is a central component in learning how to teach. As Sandra stressed, ‘If you mandate a class around how to support ELLs, they’re going to say, “my knowledge about how to support ELLs is important”’. On the other hand, only addressing linguistic diversity within a standalone course may reinforce the idea that support for multilingual learners

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is peripheral or an add-on, rather than a central part of what teacher candidates will be doing in the mainstream classroom. As evidence of this, a few teacher educators noted resistance or ambivalence from teacher candidates toward stand-alone courses about supporting multilingual learners. As they described, these candidates felt that they were not learning to be ‘language teachers’ and were ‘not going to teach ELLs’. Sandra stated that many of her candidates believed that ‘I teach XYZ, I am not going to teach ELLs’, suggesting that they saw themselves only as subject teachers, rather than also as language teachers with a responsibility to support the language learning of multilingual learners while teaching their respective subjects. Sandra recommended that in order to orient future classroom teachers on the needs of multilingual learners and not to push this responsibility onto ESL/ELD teachers, support for multilingual learners needed to be made more central to candidates’ learning. Sandra and several other teacher educators suggested that this could be accomplished in a both/and way, that is, by implementing a mandatory stand-alone component on supporting multilingual learners, while also infusing the topic into all core courses across the teacher-education curriculum. Jelayna, another teacher educator, described similar experiences of candidate resistance to learning about multilingual learners by contrasting her experiences as an instructor in required and elective courses on this topic in her program. In response to a question about the challenges she faces in preparing teacher candidates to support multilingual learners, Jelayna stated: I know what the biggest challenges are. I know what it is. It’s dealing with, sorry to say it, but snarky students. So I had some of them really have an attitude about not wanting to take this course. And I understand that that might not just be this course, but required courses in general. And I could tell you that I am teaching a course right now, which is open to [teacher-education] MA and PhD students. So, it’s an elective for the [teacher candidates], and I have no attitude from them at all. They’re fantastic. So I see a striking difference. And so there were, I’m not sure whether it was me [as] the teacher or the content of the course, but they didn’t seem to enjoy it very much. So that’s a challenge.

Despite these concerns over teacher-candidate resistance to required learning about multilingual learners, Jelayna continued by noting, I am really glad that there is a requirement, because it has certainly raised awareness among faculty and students that this is a thing; that there are lots of English learners, and they deserve recognition, and their needs should be met. So I’m glad that this has become part of the regular curriculum.

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Jelayna’s insights indicate an important contradiction of required learning about difference in teacher education. On the one hand, in her experience, such requirements led to pushback from, ‘sorry to say it, but snarky students’. On the other hand, required learning also raised awareness about multilingual learners and their lives as a central part of learning how to teach. We do not read this contradiction necessarily as a problem to be overcome – or even one that can be. Rather, we understand it as a reminder that candidates’ attitudes toward multilingualism and learning to support multilingual learners are deeply shaped by how teacher education positions knowledge about multilingual learners within the curriculum (i.e. as central or peripheral to the project of learning how to teach). As our interviews with teachers and teacher educators indicated, no single program model can resolve this contradiction. Instead, the question of whether support for multilingual learners is central or peripheral to teacher-candidate learning is far more a question of program stance and coherence: to what extent do required, elective and infused program components work together to support core learning outcomes in a given program (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015)? The potential of linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy

Many of the teachers we interviewed provided examples of linguistically and culturally responsive practices they used to support multilingual learners. Linguistically and culturally responsive teaching refers to instruction that affirms and validates the diverse linguistic and cultural identities of learners (Hollie, 2018). Fatima and Jenny spoke about choosing resources that reflected the identities of the students they taught. Kelly, Ally, Sylvia and Marina all spoke about the importance of creating space for students to use their first language and to bring translanguaging into the classroom. Marina explained her choice to include all student languages in her lessons as follows: I love speaking in my language because I wasn’t allowed to, and so I include languages when students are presenting and I always try to find students that speak the same language together. I’ll have them do presentations in their first language, and then in English. And same with writing, and with books, and so that we have, and I do have books, right? And dual language books.

Other linguistically and culturally responsive practices teachers cited were getting multilingual learners to create multilingual narratives about their families’ or their own journeys to Canada, using texts from diverse authors and building multicultural and dual-language book collections. The teacher educators we spoke to similarly emphasized the need for teacher candidates to learn about linguistically and culturally responsive

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curriculum and lesson planning. However, examples shared by some teacher educators suggested that what appeared to be linguistically and culturally responsive curriculum might in fact be designed or implemented in ways that applied a ‘White gaze’ (Paris & Alim, 2014: 92) to teaching, that is, teaching for and about diversity in ways that appeal to and comfort white teachers, rather than foregrounding the knowledge, desires and needs of racialized and multilingual learners. Shay, a teacher educator, discussed this issue at length with respect to lesson plans her candidates developed during their practicum placements. Based on her observations about the lack of cultural inclusivity and attention to diversity in these plans, Shay told us how she has made it her personal goal to work with her candidates on creating lesson plans that are more inclusive. I work with my student teachers to help them to develop an inclusive lesson plan. I can give an example… Some student teachers, they have a lesson plan [that they] did within the placement, and then I give them a B [grade], they were very mad at me and saying, ‘Oh, my school principal and my teacher really love it. They gave me an A. Why do you give me a B?’ I say, ‘Oh, it is an A if you teach a class of all white kids, but it’s a B if you have children of different cultural diversities’.

Additionally, Shay continually encourages her candidates to be more critically aware of what she describes as the ‘Eurocentric’ nature of the texts and tasks that are traditionally used in the classroom: We want to prepare our candidates no matter what subject matter they teach, they need to be aware of the English language learners. They come from different cultures. For example, I think nowadays the Ontario textbook has become more culturally diversified, because it has been at least 10 years of people talking about diversifying our curriculum. Earlier if you look at the school curriculum, it is very white mainstream. For example, when I even talked to my student teachers saying, ‘If you teach stories about Snow White… or you know all kinds of stuff like children’s books, it’s really about a white girl [who is] beautiful. You know, she’s the major character, everything [is] positive about her… So how can you… make sure you’re aware those old stories are very Eurocentric’. So you want to bring in the critical thinking.

In Shay’s opinion, although the Ontario curriculum has become more culturally diverse over the years, the lesson plans that candidates create based on the curriculum were what she described as designed for ‘a class of all white kids’ rather than for ‘children of different cultural diversities’. This is consistent with the data reported in other parts of the book (see Chapters 4 and 6), which suggest that despite curricular and pedagogical

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commitments in teacher-education programs toward asset-based and linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy, many candidates still demonstrate deficit thinking about multilingual learners in their instructional planning. (Over)reliance on the STEP assessment framework

Most teachers spoke about the importance of learning how to use the STEP assessment framework to support programming for multilingual learners. According to Jenny, STEP ‘provides us with a tool to build capacity around knowing strategies to work with students’. Jenny suggested, however, that teachers still lacked an understanding of how to use STEP to support multilingual learners: Being really knowledgeable about STEP and the theory behind it in terms of how students progress from being beginners to stronger, to at a point where even though their oral skills are strong, but they still need academic language support, I don’t think that is widely understood.

Ally stressed that new teachers needed to have an understanding of what STEP is, ‘that it’s an assessment tool, an instructional practice tool, a next-steps tool, a reporting tool… that’s a really important component’. Sabrina and Fatima recommended that new teachers receive training on how to modify curriculum expectations for multilingual learners at various STEP levels. According to Sabrina: You must not just understand the curriculum that needs to be taught to the learner, but what does it mean to modify the curriculum to make it accessible to your English language learners? That means that you have to understand the STEP continua. I would love to see teachers getting that training on creating and modifying curriculum expectations. For instance, you take the STEP Observable Language Behaviours, and then you marry that language with the curriculum expectations, and then you come up with a brand-new expectation. I think that is really key to have that exposure.

In line with OCT requirements that teacher candidates learn about ‘using the Steps To English Proficiency (STEP) resource to support programming’ (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 21), several teacher educators in our study incorporated a STEP component in their courses. As one of the co-authors of STEP, Chiraene shared her experience cocreating the assessment scale that differentiated the learning needs of students who had access to formal schooling and those who did not. Chiraene believed this differentiation was ‘a real strength’ of STEP. Chiraene

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teaches her candidates how to use STEP by giving them language samples to assess, although she noted the limitations of this: We work with STEP and I’ll give them real examples that I have, like looking at text and… giving them writing examples, and we’ll do some teacher moderation pieces. Like it’s limited, but I’ll take a couple pieces of writing and have them place the student on a STEP. And then I’ll have them make… suggestions around accommodations and modifications.

Using an approach similar to Chiraene’s, Inez gives her candidates assignments requiring them to assess multilingual learners’ levels using STEP, to recognize multilingual learners’ needs at each STEP level and to strategize ways to fulfill these needs: So I wanted to teach students specific assessments and strategies, accommodations that were very specific and could be used right away. And the assignments reflected that… So the assignment I have is where they take a part of the lesson and the STEP and decide on an… imaginary EL learner and identify which STEP they’re at, and show what activities they’re going to be teaching and how they’re going to accommodate that student at that STEP within the mainstream classroom.

Sandra remarked that integrating STEP into her courses had been effective in educating teacher candidates as well as practicing teachers on the use of the assessment they had observed during practicum: On the surface with the infusion of STEP into the Catholic and public boards, I think it’s done a great job for… educating and the professional development of teachers. So I like that we’ve integrated stuff into our course because at the very least… they’ll get a mirroring of what they’ve seen being used during their practicum. So [it] kind of links up that way.

While recognizing how STEP had helped ESL/ELD teachers like her with several aspects of their work, Marina argued that support for multilingual learners needed to be more than just using STEP, ‘teachers need to know that it’s not just STEPs’. She worried that assessing learners solely on the basis of which STEP level they had achieved would draw attention away from their many other daily accomplishments, such as understanding something new that was taught: The other piece… is, what do they [multilingual learners] celebrate? What do they want to say, ‘I celebrate because I understand’? And it is not the ‘I know how to use STEPs for this.’ ‘I celebrate because I understand. I got involved because I could do this!’

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According to Marina, too, her school board’s overreliance on STEP had resulted in multilingual learners being grouped together with special needs learners with individual education plans (IEP): They need to actually embrace that [multilingual learners] are diverse and have a pushback. Well, the STEPs, this child is that, how do I assess them? So all of a sudden, they have assisted the funding policy for [the school board] and lumping them with informal IEP kids. They think that’s appropriate, and it has caused me tears that there is not a backlash against it.

The consensus among the teachers and teacher educators in our study was that the STEP tool had been beneficial in general for assessing, supporting and placing multilingual learners in relevant programming. Although Marina indicated some important concerns about STEP, we acknowledge the difference between this consensus and the arguments about STEP that we raise in Chapters 4 and 6 about this assessment tool. In Chapter 4, our critique focused on the reproduction of linguistic hierarchies in STEP; in Chapter 6, we reveal how teacher-candidate engagement with STEP reinforced deficit thinking and practice by positioning multilingual learners only in terms of what they cannot do in English, rather than what they can do in all the languages they know. In fact, one of the central examples we analyze connects to Sabrina’s insistence that candidates be trained on ‘marrying’ curriculum expectations with STEP descriptors. As we considered explanations for this gap between our arguments about STEP and the consensus among teacher and teacher-educator participants in the study, we were reminded of STEP’s origins in a moment of political conflict in Ontario. As discussed in Chapter 4, STEP was one response to a controversy that emerged in 2005 over misused provincial funding for ELLs. Prior to this conflict, there was no formal provincial policy regarding the instruction of ELLs in Ontario, and no standardized approach to defining, identifying, placing and tracking the progress of such learners. Consequently, the introduction of a policy framework in 2007 and STEP in 2011 might well be interpreted as progress, even as a solution to the crisis in ESL program mismanagement that had been declared in 2005. None of these interview participants connected their interpretation of STEP to its origins, although two of our participants were part of the team that worked on the final version of STEP. Nevertheless, a reminder of STEP’s emergence helps us make sense of why ESL/ELD professionals and teacher educators might respond positively to having a concrete tool – any concrete tool – to work with that helps to generalize knowledge about the needs of multilingual learners among teachers in the province.

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At the same time, teachers’ and teacher educators’ (over)reliance on STEP as the primary assessment and placement tool reveals a lack of resources and training related to assessing learners’ multilingual proficiency in Ontario’s classrooms. Several teachers highlighted gaps between what they wanted to do to support their multilingual learners, and the structural constraints they faced in terms of the unequal distribution of funding and resources in Ontario schools. For Sandra, the various policies on supporting multilingual learners in Ontario, including STEP, merely pay lip service to ‘support’ because they do not address the systemic changes (e.g. provision of adequate resources and training) that need to occur for multilingual learners to be included in mainstream classrooms: I find the policy… keeps reiterating this idea of, ‘We need to include everybody, we gotta include everybody, they include everybody, everybody needs to be included.’ But there’s nothing on what needs to happen systematically and on the individual level for that to happen, because schools can talk all they want, but sometimes they… are not doing as much as they should be. And they’re not made to do much either.

Sandra’s insights lead us to ask more directly: if STEP is seen as a solution, then which problem(s) is it solving? On balance, teacher and teacher-educator participants understood STEP as a useful, concrete tool to help teachers and teacher candidates better understand lesson planning that supports multilingual learners and their development of academic English. As Sandra suggests, however, support for learning academic language is not necessarily synonymous with inclusion at the systemic, school or individual levels. Her insights reinforce Daniels and Varghese’s (2020) caution about education policy solutions that not only fail to address the problems they promised to, but also work to reinforce systemic, racialized marginalization. Academic language and empathy

As they discussed what mattered most for teacher candidates to know about supporting multilingual learners, several teacher and teacher-educator participants distinguished between ‘everyday’ and ‘academic’ English as they expressed concerns about the ability of multilingual learners to use academic English. Some teacher educators also discussed the role that empathy could play in helping teacher candidates appreciate the challenges multilingual learners face in developing academic language. Kevin, a teacher educator, considered it important to distinguish between ‘academic English and what it is and why it is challenging and how it is different from everyday English’ and to teach multilingual

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learners the academic language they needed in different subjects. According to Kevin: When students join the school, they need to learn the academic language to succeed at school. It’s not just about knowing facts and maybe being able to think… Each content area like math or science has specific language in terms of either vocabulary, grammar or discourse.

Echoing Kevin’s emphasis on teacher-candidate awareness of the academic English challenges multilingual learners faced, Inez stated: I really think every teacher needs to know that just because they sound like they’re English speakers doesn’t mean they are academically adept in English to handle the academic language, academic reading and writing, even though conversationally, they sound fabulous, they sound like they know what they’re talking about.

In cautioning teachers that multilingual learners might not be adept in academic English even if they sound like English speakers, Inez may have been drawing on the distinction made in the Ontario Ministry of Education’s (2008: 11) Supporting English Language Learners: A Practical Guide for Ontario Educators that ‘[t]eachers can sometimes be misled by the high degree of oral proficiency demonstrated by many English language learners in their use of everyday English, and may mistakenly conclude that these ELLs are equally proficient in their Academic English use’. This curricular resource, which guides the work of Grades 1–8 ESL and ELD teachers in the province, goes on to remind teachers that all ELLs ‘must master two distinct forms of English language: Everyday English proficiency and Academic English proficiency’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2008: 12). Other Ontario curricular resources such as the STEP tool also make the same distinction and evaluate multilingual learners based on their mastery of ‘academic’ language (see Chapter 4 for more analysis of STEP in this regard). The pressure that Inez and other study participants experienced to socialize their multilingual learners into an ‘academic’ version of English confirms Flores’ (2020: 22) argument that linguistically diverse learners, especially those who are racialized, are often framed as ‘lacking academic language’ (emphasis original). Flores (2020: 22) further argues that the concept of academic language is ‘a raciolinguistic ideology that frames racialized students as linguistically deficient and in need of remediation’. García et al. (2021) explains that attempts to divide language into academic and non-academic registers stem from idealized representations of language in texts that are produced mainly by white monolingual English users in socially dominant positions. They add that the academic/ non-academic language distinction fails to take into account the inherent

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heterogeneity and complexity in multilingual learners’ diverse language practices. Few study participants challenged dominant notions about academic language specifically as part of an anti-racist project. Instead, several discussed approaches based on empathy to counter deficit discourses about academic language. The most common strategy for challenging these discourses was for teachers and teacher candidates to experience learning another language themselves, because this could help them empathize with the experiences of their learners. Having lived with her toddler in a Spanish-speaking country, Gina, a teacher educator, understood her multilingual learners’ experiences of living in an unfamiliar place and learning to speak another language. Similarly, Kelly, a teacher, suggested that living in Egypt and Japan and being immersed in different languages and cultures had helped her empathize with the experiences of multilingual learners who had to adapt to a new language and culture: to live as a newcomer myself and then coming into the country and learning to navigate those languages that are completely different languages and completely different cultures and even religions that are very different… so going through all the steps of learning that and acclimatizing to those two different cultures and then even learning the languages… to have that experience and to bring that back to this role now that I come into, I think has been really helpful.

Applying this insight to teacher education, several participants agreed that by putting teacher candidates in multilingual learners’ shoes, teacher educators could cultivate and strengthen candidates’ capacity for empathy. Kezia, a teacher educator, talked about the value of being put in a situation where the candidates did not understand the language being spoken, in order to help them understand multilingual learners’ experiences of learning academically in another language: What I find helpful is to put them in a situation in which I teach a class but in a language that they don’t know. So that they have an experience in which they can learn based on strategies I choose to implement even if they didn’t understand what I was saying. I found that to be most effective.

If García et  al. (2021) are correct in their argument about the connection between idealized representations of (non-)academic language and the dominant white subject positions that enforce these assumptions about language, then we might read these participants’ ideas as an invitation to teachers and teacher educators to shift their subjectivities away from being expert speakers of academic English. From a different subject position of being a novice speaker of an unfamiliar language, the

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pedagogical intent is to reconsider the demands placed on multilingual students to learn and use academic English from a place of empathy. In fact, several instructors of the Supporting English Language Learners course at OISE do just this: they start their first class session with 20–30 minutes of teaching in a language that few candidates understand, for the same reasons these participants suggested. However, we also note an assumption in García et al.’s (2021) argument, as well as in our participants’ comments about empathy and OISE course instructors’ pedagogical choices, that most teacher candidates will arrive at teachers’ college without the lived experience of having attended school in a language they do not understand and without the experience of having an idealized form of academic English imposed on them. As noted in Chapter 2, this assumption does not hold for the teacher candidates in our own program: over half of the candidates in our program during the time of this study identified as multilingual, with just under 15% immigrating to Canada after having started school in another country using a non-English language. Beyond this objective mismatch, teacher educators and teacher-education scholars risk further marginalizing racialized and minoritized candidates when we organize our instruction assuming that the candidates we work with are predominantly monolingual and white (see Daniels & Varghese, 2020; Haddix, 2012). The caution here is to consider organizing instruction in teacher-education courses centered on the lived experiences of racialized and multilingual teacher candidates and to invite monolingual and/or white teacher candidates to shift their thinking in relation to those experiences. Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Mapping Linguistic Difference

In the first part of the chapter, we addressed teacher and teachereducator stances on supporting multilingual learners and what they think future teachers should know based on a thematic analysis of the interview data. Here, we discuss the raciolinguistic ideologies implied in some of these insights, and how these ideologies can work to obscure the barriers to supporting multilingual learners that exist in schools and in teacher-education programs. As introduced in Chapter  3, raciolinguistic ideologies are personal and socially held beliefs and perceptions that typecast the language practices of racialized individuals and groups, thereby underestimating and/or overdetermining these subjects’ academic and/or linguistic abilities. Raciolinguistics provides a useful heuristic for appreciating the overt and covert distinctions imposed on categories of speakers within dominant language structures because it draws attention to the unspoken racial biases that shape the evaluation and legitimization of linguistic competence and language standards (Rosa, 2016). Our analysis here is informed by the genealogy of raciolinguistic theorizing presented in Rosa (2019). Rosa traces the inspirations for his

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thinking with Nelson Flores about raciolinguistics (e.g. Rosa & Flores, 2017) by connecting to several core concepts within linguistic anthropology. The most relevant for this discussion is Irvine and Gal’s (2000) notion of iconization, which Rosa (2019: 5) defines as ‘the naturalizing semiotic process whereby stereotypes about language are mapped onto social personae and vice versa, thereby contributing to broader modes of social and linguistic differentiation’. In this section, we analyze interview data with teacher educators to reveal stereotypical mapping in multiple ways. At times, teacher educators discuss this mapping as they observe others engaging in it (i.e. teacher candidates, their colleagues, teachers in local schools); at other times, we argue that teacher educators themselves are projecting their own raciolinguicized stereotypes about who multilingual learners are and where they are and are not to be found in Ontario. In this way, we unpack Daniels and Varghese’s (2020: 57) argument that ‘raciolinguistics offers us a way to view teacher education as an institutional listening and perceiving entity that embodies the hegemony of Whiteness’ (emphasis original). The raciolinguistic mapping of northern Ontario

We begin with an excerpt from our interview with Gina, a teacher educator working in northern Ontario. Here, Gina is discussing the different kinds of practicum experiences teacher candidates complete during their program, and how teacher educators in her program prepare candidates for these placements. She explained: So maybe if you’re looking at how to improve the teaching of ELLs in teacher education, it might mean that during those initial practicum placements—like one assignment that we give our students is, they have to write an observational report—what do they see? Well, sometimes, if you’re just going in without knowing what you’re looking for, you may not see everything. And so, it would be nice. And I don’t know if the researchers [on your project] are thinking of this. It’s just sort of what comes to mind to me is to say, do you recognize who are the learners in your classroom? Are there special accommodations for different types of learners in your classroom?

Gina’s comments raise important questions about how teacher candidates learn to ‘know what they’re looking for’ as they move from university- to classroom-based elements of teacher education. Here, Gina posed this question about teacher-candidate perception in quite neutral ways. However, at multiple points in her interview with Mama, her comments revealed a number of raciolinguistic ideologies at play in mapping a linguistic landscape, not only onto the northern Ontario context in which she worked, but also onto the people teaching and learning in that context.

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To highlight these ideologies, we place two extracts from the interview with Gina in conversation with each other. We intentionally use longer extracts to give as much context to Gina’s comments as possible; readers can return to her comments while reading the discussion that immediately follows. In the first extract, Gina describes the assumptions teacher candidates make about who multilingual learners are and are not. She notes: I bring to light to my students [i.e. teacher candidates] to share that ELL learners aren’t all immigrant refugee students that they can see visually. ELL learners can be someone from Estonia. We have a family here where I live, in [town name redacted], where the child came to play hockey. And so, he looks like everybody. But he is an ELL learner, and so we can’t make assumptions. And because, like, for example, his little sister arrived under the age of six. She’s been here for two years. She sounds like a native speaker at six. But she’s not. She’s an ELL learner… If a pre-service teacher went into the classroom, I don’t know that they would have been able to identify her as an ELL learner. So, that would be something interesting to see… and so we teach them that, you know, we can’t, not to make assumptions.

In the second extract, Gina described the context in which her teachereducation program is located. She explains: I teach in northern Ontario. In northern Ontario, we have very, very few English language learners. So, on the surface, we might think that, you know, this may not be prominent in our teacher-education program. But we do have some of our pre-service teachers sometimes make the assumption that, ‘well, I’m not going to have immigrant students in my classroom, so that’s not as important for me.’ And our job at [this university] is to remind, or to teach our students—because you don’t know what you don’t know—that coming [to] a Northern Ontario context, is [that] we do have quite a few students from Northern indigenous communities, who are English language learners. So, they are Cree speaking. And they come to our communities, and they have basic English, so we, our preservice teachers sometimes make assumptions that because they did a lot of their schooling in English, that they are English proficient as first language holders, but in fact they’re not. They are ELL learners. So that’s one piece.

These two extracts from Mama’s conversation with Gina reveal how assumptions about race and language interact in shaping teachercandidate learning about ‘what to look for’ in practicum placements. Gina’s comments reflect the different kinds of raciolinguistic projections she observes teacher candidates making. On the one hand, Gina discusses

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candidates’ assumptions that English learners must also be racialized immigrants or refugees. These racialized expectations not only assume that multilingual learners can be seen before they are heard, but also the perception of some immigrants as white brings with it an assumption that they are monolingual speakers of English. This racial mapping prevents candidates from considering the possibility that these students, too, are multilingual learners who might also need targeted support in learning English. On the other hand, the conflation of the categories ‘English language learner’ and ‘immigrant’ also leads candidates to misperceive Indigenous students. As Gina noted, some Indigenous students move from schools on First Nation reserves to those in northern cities. Candidates’ assumptions that this movement within Ontario takes place only in English misperceives, even silences, Indigenous students’ multilingualism. In this way, candidates do not consider that some Indigenous students may also need support in learning English. These extracts reflect Gina’s understanding that teacher candidates use what she describes as ‘assumptions’ to ‘know what to look for’ as they enter their practicum placements. We read these assumptions as raciolinguistic ideologies that ascribe subject positions to multilingual learners based on racial categories, which candidates project onto the students they encounter. At the same time, we note raciolinguistic distinctions in how Gina has construed the same assumptions she wishes to counter in her teaching. First, Gina’s references to newcomers from Estonia can be read as reflecting a racialized conflation of that country with whiteness. Gina did not define these two students by directly saying they are white. Rather, she referred to their country of origin, describing the elder sibling as coming to Canada to play hockey and ‘look[ing] like everybody’ else. These details imply these students are white, and that the broader point Gina wants to impart to teacher candidates is self-evident. However, as the war in Ukraine and the subsequent movement of millions fleeing this conflict underscore, these assumptions overlook the racial diversity in European spaces presumed to be white, as well as the violent regulation of racialized people moving in and among those spaces (see Abdelaaty & Hamlin, 2022). Second, and directly related, as Gina seeks to challenge candidates’ incorrect assumptions that Indigenous students in this area are necessarily ‘English proficient’, she describes Indigenous students as moving ‘from Northern Indigenous communities… to our communities’. Distinguishing between communities that belong to Indigenous people and ‘our communities’ can be understood as a racialized mapping of Ontario that assigns racialized subject positions to specific – and separate – spaces. Gina is not alone in making this differentiation; rather, it is part of a broader colonial logic that overlooks the history of how white-settler

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spaces came into existence and are maintained, thereby naturalizing the idea that this part of northern Ontario is predominantly white. Finally, in her comments Gina refers to the theorized gap between academic and social language discussed earlier in this chapter. Recall her description of the younger Estonian learner as ‘sound[ing] like a native speaker at six’, but who in fact is an English learner. This distinction also appears in Gina’s comments about Indigenous, Cree-speaking students, who Gina argues should be considered ELLs but are often assumed by teacher candidates not to be. Here, Gina describes the English these students bring with them to school as ‘basic English’. In both extracts, this same theorized gap between academic and social language is in play. But we note the difference in construing the social English of white European immigrant students (who sound like native speakers) as compared to that of Indigenous students (who have basic English). Our point is not to criticize Gina or to simply identify this racialized difference. Rather, we underscore that these raciolinguistic projections revealed themselves in comments explicitly wanting to challenge teacher-candidate thinking. That is, embedded in this effort to prepare candidates to ‘know what to look for’ when they enter a practicum placement, we find another set of raciolinguistic ideologies about who multilingual learners are, and about the (mis)perceived quality of their language practices. As opposed to changing the assumptions teacher candidates might have about their future students, this form of racialized mapping might instead reinforce those assumptions as candidates consider ‘what to look for’ when they enter a practicum placement. Raciolinguistic (in)stability amid shifting demographics

Later in our interview with Gina, she described important changes taking place in her northern Ontario context. She stressed ‘that there is a shift happening in northern Ontario, namely in [this city] within the past year, and I’m hoping that this is shared with your researchers’. She reported what she described as ‘anecdotal evidence’ that, at the start of the 2019 school year, one school in her city had welcomed 100 new families from Nigeria. Gina then connected this anecdote to Syrian newcomers who arrived in Canada between 2015 and 2017. She underscored that: We, as a faculty [who] are preparing these teachers, can’t ignore the fact that in 2017 Canada accepted 30,000 refugees. And not all the refugees and new immigrants to Canada stayed in Montreal. And they [teacher candidates] have this assumption that they [newcomers] stay in big centres and big cities. That is no longer the case in Northern Ontario. And so our preservice teachers need to have the skills and knowledge necessary to support all students—so, the Northern students as well as new immigrants to Canada. And what does that look like in a Northern

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Ontario community, where teachers historically have really not had to make accommodations for students?

Gina’s discussion of demographic shifts occurring in northern Ontario connects to several themes we discussed in Chapter  4 with respect to how multilingual learners are imagined to be. As she argues, many teachers, teacher candidates and teacher educators assume this part of the province to be linguistically and racially homogeneous. Even if we allow the categories of ‘English language learner’ and ‘racialized immigrant or refugee’ to be synonymous, this imagining is not accurate, as Gina notes in her observations about newcomers increasingly choosing to settle in northern Ontario. However, and perhaps more important, such raciolinguistic projections erase the significant degree of linguistic and racial diversity that has long been the reality in northern Ontario and its schools. For example, the largest school board in northern Ontario offers instruction in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language) in 14 of its 32 elementary schools, and in 5 of its 9 secondary schools. These classes teach the language as a subject and are supported by the province’s Indigenous education policy framework described in Chapter  1. While these programs are open to all students, the extent of this programming reflects the location of these schools on the traditional lands of, and in close proximity to, several First Nations communities. Moreover, this board’s catchment area includes one of the largest Francophone communities in the province. Many, if not most, Franco-Ontarian children will attend schools in local French language boards, as opposed to those in this public English language board. Nevertheless, the French language still contributes significantly to the multilingual reality in this board, insofar as it offers 13 French immersion programs in its elementary schools. Similarly, the neighboring school board offers 12 Anishinaabemowin language programs across its elementary and secondary schools, which in fact is greater than the number of French immersion programs in this board. Finally, the website for another large school board in northern Ontario offers information in English, Ojibwe and Oji-Cree, reflecting the language practices of the families whose children attend its schools. Gina’s insights reveal the extent to which this multilingual reality in northern Ontario has long been silenced by deeply held beliefs that students in this part of the province are all the same. As she noted, ‘teachers historically have not really had to make accommodations for students’. We don’t dispute this point. However, we might read it differently by arguing that teachers historically have neither perceived the linguistic and racial worlds their students move within, and thus not understood the need to transform their teaching. Nor have they been required to do so. Compounding the naturalized hegemony of English in this part of the province is the extent to which specialized programming for language

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education is siloed according to raciolinguistic categories. Inez was a teacher-educator participant who works in another northern teachereducation program, one that has both a component on supporting ELLs and a specialized pathway to prepare Indigenous teacher candidates. In this excerpt from our interview, Inez discusses the province’s formal definition of English language learner (a topic described in greater detail in Chapter 4). She explained: A lot of [teacher candidates] are very surprised about Canadians [i.e. students born in Canada] who we consider English language learners. Another surprise to them was that the Indigenous students, our Aboriginal students, were not accounted for in the funding. They really learned this through the guest speaker. And the guest speaker explained that the [school] board still serves these students, even though they’re not directly funded ELL learners. They find a way to work around that so that they get ELL support.

Inez’s comments underscore how provincial funding for ESL/ELD education plays an important part in shaping teacher and teacher-candidate assumptions about who ELLs are. Her insights reveal the interplay between material distribution of resources and the kinds of ‘naturalizing semiotic processes’ that are ‘mapped onto social personae’ that Rosa (2019: 5) discusses. The raciolinguistic ideologies we describe here animate a social mapping that siloes specific language-education opportunities and defines which students are seen as legitimate recipients of these opportunities. Raciolinguistic mapping elsewhere in the province

The raciolinguistic mapping we analyzed above is not limited to northern Ontario. Irrespective of whether Ontario’s teacher-education programs are located in major urban settings (e.g. Greater Toronto, Ottawa, London, Windsor) or smaller urban settings (e.g. Thunder Bay, Sudbury, North Bay, St Catharines) or whether they might be understood as serving southern Ontario or being ‘up north’, every teachereducation program in the province prepares candidates for schools that are linguistically and racially diverse in some way. To recall and build on information presented in Chapter 1, Ontario is the largest province in Canada with nearly 40% of the total national population. Although just under 3% of people living in Ontario identified as First Nation, Métis and Inuit on the 2016 census, a larger proportion of Indigenous people in the province is under 24 years of age as compared to non-Indigenous Ontarians. Furthermore, two-thirds of Indigenous people reported living outside their respective First Nation community, with almost one-third living in the Greater Toronto Area or Ottawa alone (Statistics Canada,

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2016). Ontario has also long been a popular immigration destination, receiving almost half of all immigrants to Canada (Ministry of Finance, 2021). Additionally, almost 3 in 10 Ontarians were identified on the 2016 census as visible minorities, a government term meant to refer to nonwhite, non-Indigenous people (Ministry of Finance, 2016). Despite the objective reality of this linguistic and racial difference, teacher educators working in various parts of the province discussed assumptions similar to those described by Gina and Inez about the presumed homogeneity of the schools and communities in which teacher candidates would soon be working. In our interview with Adelaide, a teacher educator in a mid-sized city in Ontario, she described the challenges she has experienced in engaging teacher candidates in her program’s component about multilingual learners. The biggest obstacle from her perspective was candidates’ fixed perceptions of the areas in which they teach as homogeneous. Adelaide stated: And I say to them, even if you have one student who’s an English language learner, what do you do with that one student to make them feel included? So the challenge is always that sometimes some think, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be teaching in Toronto. So, I don’t have to worry about diversity, right?’ Because they think it’s only Toronto, where you have to worry about it. So I say, ‘Even if you’re in a small town, you don’t know where you’re going to teach.’

An important aspect of Adelaide’s insights is pushing back against the idea that linguistic diversity only matters in certain areas, or once some imagined numerical threshold has been met. Later in the interview, Adelaide did underscore shifting demographics in her part of the province, similar to Gina’s discussion of changes she has experienced in the north. Adelaide told us: So, where we are here, they do have English language learners, especially. There’s more of them now. That’s because there’s increased immigration. Also, about 2–3 years ago, they accepted a lot of Syrian refugee children. So, I know that they had a big impact, that had a big impact on the local school district here. So, they actually had English language specialists who would be brought in and work with the children, one on one. [The specialists were brought in] just because of the Syrian refugees, my understanding was this. I think it was about 800 students, I believe—800 families, I mean—that were settled here for Syrian refugees. So, their children, obviously, were English language learners, and they had to get a lot of support for that.

From Adelaide’s comments, the nature of this ‘big impact’ on the schools in this area is unclear. The fact that specialists were brought in from the

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outside suggests that the board moved quickly to ensure that these newcomer multilingual learners received some kind of support. However, her description of these specialists as brought in ‘just because of the Syrian refugees’ who worked with these students ‘one on one’ suggests their arrival was construed as a problem to solve, rather than as an opportunity to rethink how the presence of these students and the Arabic and other languages they speak could contribute to reimagining the multilingual landscape in these schools. Conclusion

As noted throughout our analysis in this book, Daniels and Varghese (2020) have argued that practice-based teacher education constitutes a form of white institutional listening that works to normalize whiteness, in particular by focusing on assumed student deficits and needs, rather than seriously engaging or interrogating either the lived experiences of teacher candidates or how these experiences shape candidates’ perception of their future students. Moreover, the idea that best practices are universal and can place all students, including multilingual learners, on an equal footing allows whiteness and the dominance of English associated with it to remain hegemonic in teacher-education programs and in school settings. As Daniels and Varghese (2020: 61) stress, there are always ‘power-laden tensions at play’. In fact, we have used these tensions to organize the content of this chapter. We began by reporting the major themes emerging from our curriculum analysis of Ontario’s 16 teachereducation programs, as well as from our interviews with a dozen teacher educators across the province. These themes reflect widely accepted ideas about best practices in supporting multilingual learners in mainstream classroom environments. However, we argued that raciolinguistic ideologies are embedded within these themes, not only in terms of how teacher educators describe the assumptions of others with whom they work, but also at times in their own descriptions of best practices and efforts to change teacher-candidate thinking. Our intent in dividing the discussion into two parts was to underscore how hegemonic discussions of ‘best practice’ have become, and how such discussions in teacher-education programs can function to reinscribe whiteness and monolingualism in English as the ‘“invisibilized” norm against which difference is measured, constructed, and maintained’ (Daniels & Varghese, 2020: 57). In response, Daniels and Varghese (2020) suggest the need for decentering whiteness in practice-based teacher education. As this chapter has noted, one important way to defocus whiteness in Canadian teacher education is to challenge racialized conceptions that multilingual learners are only immigrants and refugees who lack the right kind of English, and instead to engage teacher candidates in exploring the history, ongoing presence and multiplicity of the multilingualism that exists here. Part of

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this involves interrogating assumptions that whiteness is devoid of diversity. This means reframing ideological discourses in policies, teachereducation curriculum and practicum experiences that conflate whiteness with English monolingualism and frame it as the status quo. We close this chapter by drawing on the experience and insights of Shay, a teacher educator introduced earlier in the chapter. Shay identified her goal as a teacher educator to encourage candidates to rewrite the curriculum such that it imagined racialized languages and cultures as valuable to the Canadian schooling experience. She explained: My goal is that we need to break down this Eurocentric worldview. For student teachers, if they grew up in the Eurocentric environment, they were not exposed to diversity. So, then they tend to have this Eurocentric worldview. Then even when they come across the need to support ELLs they still only see them as somebody with needs, they want to help. They don’t see the learning aspect of it. So they don’t see how the newcomers, the ESL learners, contribute back to the school system or the society. They tend to see them as somebody with the problem instead of somebody who is resourceful. My goal is that I want to work with my student teachers so that they develop the mindset that sees people as somebody. Everybody has value, everybody is contributing to the main core society. They are not somebody who brings a problem or brings the needs only. They also bring their cultural values, their rich experiences and then they can learn from these people from these families. So that’s what I’ve been doing in my pre-service course. And that’s why I did my pre-service learning program, to bring them out of their comfort zone, and I also developed the master’s course with my colleagues. So that has been what I’ve done.

6 STEPing into Deficit Thinking Jeff Bale, Katie Brubacher, Elizabeth Jean Larson and Yiran Zhang

Asset-based approaches as a response to deficit thinking about multilingual learners are ubiquitous in educational and applied linguistic research. The resource orientation (Ruíz, 1984, 2010) behind this asset metaphor has long been critiqued (e.g. Bale, 2016; Petrovic, 2005; Ricento, 2005) as often reinforcing the material and ideologic dynamics that lead to linguistic discrimination in the first place. Our study provides extensive evidence of this dynamic: despite explicit curricular and pedagogical commitments in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s (OISE) teacher-education program to asset-based orientations on linguistic diversity and multilingual learners (see Chapter 1 for more discussion of the program), teacher candidates continued to exhibit deficit thinking about their future students. We again stress that this is not a personal failing of individual candidates or individual teacher educators, nor is the point to evaluate some ways of thinking as good and others as bad. Rather, in this chapter we are interested in the contradiction between candidates’ generally positive dispositions toward multilingualism and their future multilingual learners and the master of teaching (MT) program’s stated commitments on the one hand, and the reprisal of deficit orientations that appear throughout the data on the other. This conceptual slippage manifested in the data collected for this study in several ways. Most prominent was in relation to STEP: Steps to English Proficiency (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015). STEP is a resource provided by Ontario’s Ministry of Education to guide the placement, assessment and instruction of students whom it refers to as English language learners (ELLs). In Chapter 4, we introduced STEP as part of the suite of ministry documents that regulate English language education in Ontario. In this chapter, we focus specifically on how STEP was appropriated in the MT program at OISE, and how teacher candidates made sense of this assessment framework. Our analysis reveals that when candidates took up STEP as a placement, assessment and instructional tool – that is, when they used STEP as it was designed – their thinking about and instructional planning for multilingual learners repositioned 137

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these learners in terms of what they could not do in English, both ignoring what they could already do in their other languages and underestimating their actual abilities in English. Our analysis begins with a reflection written by Katie from the research team, in which she discusses how she came to understand STEP as an experienced English as a second language (ESL) and English language development (ELD) teacher in Ontario, and what she learned about STEP as a researcher on this project. From there, we discuss how STEP was appropriated by the MT program and in the Supporting English Language Learners course in particular. As the chapter turns to an analysis of teacher-candidate learning about STEP, we begin with a discussion of candidate responses to the Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Language-Inclusive Teaching (PeCK-LIT) test we developed, and then continue by introducing two focal candidates and their learning related to STEP. Vignette: Engaging with STEP as a Teacher and Researcher

Katie Brubacher As detailed in Chapter 4, STEP has a range of purposes. According to the Ontario Ministry of Education (2015: 4), STEP is ‘a framework for assessing and monitoring the language acquisition and literacy development of English language learners across The Ontario Curriculum’. As a teacher with 19  years of experience working with multilingual learners in Ontario schools, I have been exposed to different iterations of the STEP document. Several years before the ministry published STEP in 2011, draft versions were presented to myself and other teachers during in-service professional development for our feedback. I also saw an early version of STEP presented by researchers at a national conference. When the final copy was published and then subsequently implemented in my school district, I was surprised to be presented with a document that did not reflect earlier versions I had read in the past. For example, in one iteration of STEP, for which I gave feedback, the use of metaphors was part of STEPs  5 and 6. I remember reflecting that this was a curriculum expectation, so students would be expected to create metaphors regardless of their STEP placement. Despite oversights like this, I supported STEP; I found it easy for classroom teachers to use because it was similar to the language arts curriculum. Furthermore, the researchers I saw present STEP at a conference were people whose expertise I respected and from whom I had learned a lot. In the years after STEP was released, much of the professional development sessions I attended incorporated training on how to

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place multilingual learners on the STEP document. This happened at province-wide training sessions led by the ministry and at sessions sponsored by my school board. This training often involved watching a video of a multilingual learner being interviewed, and then working with a small group to discuss where the student should be placed on the oral language observable continua. Over the years, these interviews were complemented by samples of students’ writing, which we learned to assess and place on the STEP during additional in-service training. With respect to how STEP is used in schools, larger school boards in Ontario typically have assessment centers that first welcome a newcomer student and then place them on STEP. However, the assessment center’s STEP placement is only a recommendation, as STEP is supposed to reflect work the student does in classrooms across the curriculum. In this way, it is a working document. At school, I then work with homeroom teachers to determine students’ official placement. Much of my training with STEP and my work with teachers have been about where to place students on the continua. I have not received any training on how to use it for instructional purposes, even though that is listed as one of STEP’s primary purposes. Further, STEP is a document I am expected to consult when making decisions about whether to recommend a student for psychological testing as part of the referral process for special education. As a team, we examine which observable continua on STEP the student is not progressing on, and then come up with goals and strategies to move the child forward. If those goals are not met, the child may be referred for further testing. I have also used STEP extensively when modifying assessment criteria and report card comments for multilingual learners. The assessment criteria for content come from the respective curriculum documents and their stated objectives, but are then modified by STEP descriptors for each of its six assessment levels. For example, one curriculum expectation for Grade  6 mathematics (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020: 246) reads: ‘C1.4 create and describe patterns to illustrate relationships among whole numbers and decimal numbers’. If a multilingual learner is working at a STEP 3 for reading (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2012: 1), one relevant descriptor would be: ‘Read and follow instructions consisting of a few steps for a variety of tasks’. As the ESL teacher, I would collaborate with the subject-area teacher to combine the curricular expectation for math with the STEP descriptor for reading to create specific assessment criteria and/or reporting descriptions for the evaluation of that student.

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This was why I was surprised to hear during an interview I did as part of this project that the STEP document I was using and promoting in my school was not the well-researched document I thought it was. In my interview with Sylvia, a leader in ESL in the province, she discussed the insider knowledge she had gained in her contributions to creating STEP. According to Sylvia, although this development took place over 10 years, the actual version of the document now being used in schools was compiled in one month. Sylvia was part of a writing team for the final version of STEP that met over one summer. After the earlier, research-based version of STEP was submitted to the ministry, Sylvia’s group was told to rewrite everything. The new mandate was to align STEP with the language arts curriculum. Sylvia was among the few members of this development team with ESL teaching experience. Some members of the team were not sure if they had ever taught multilingual learners, while others were more experienced with literacy instruction. Indeed, only a handful of people were part of this quick revision process. In addition to these questions about the qualifications of the team tasked with revising STEP, Sylvia questioned how this revised document was validated. As Sylvia reflected on the substance of the revised STEP currently in use in Ontario, she did feel that this final version is a good entry point for classroom teachers. However, as an ESL teacher and teacher-leader in the province, Sylvia found the original, researchbased version of STEP to be more useful. Yet, that earlier version was also very detailed and in-depth, which some people involved in the revision process thought was too demanding. Here, Sylvia touched on a common challenge in curriculum and assessment development, as there is often a disconnect between research and what is deemed feasible for teachers to digest and accomplish in the classroom. As such, Sylvia stated that classroom teachers might prefer the current version. This preference is important, as it connects directly with one of STEP’s stated purposes: for classroom teachers to use as a guide for instruction, not only for specialists to analyze language acquisition. Overall, Sylvia does believe that STEP provides some guidance on how to program and assess multilingual learners. Our study, however, revealed the many ways in which this guidance might actually be doing the opposite of its stated intentions of creating a more inclusive environment for multilingual learners. We now delve into how the MT program took up STEP in its curriculum, how teacher candidates understood this assessment framework and how it influenced their understanding of multilingual learners.

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STEPing in the Supporting English Language Learners Course

An important contradiction in STEP and how it is appropriated throughout the province is that school boards are not required to use it. As we discussed in Chapter 4, STEP emerged as part of the government’s solution to a political conflict over the potential misuse of provincial funding for ESL/ELD programs. Whatever the issues with how STEP was developed, as Katie noted above, the ministry dedicated significant time and resources to creating this assessment framework and ensuring that many teachers in Ontario know how to use it. And yet, it remains a resource offered to boards to use; while boards must use some formal process for identifying students who might need English language support and tracking their proficiency over time, it does not have to be STEP. The place of STEP in teacher education, by contrast, is more explicit and prescribed. As introduced in Chapter 1, the impetus for our study was a major overhaul of Ontario’s teacher-education policy that took effect in 2015. As part of this revision, all teacher candidates must learn about linguistic diversity and supporting ELLs (and French language learners in the province’s Francophone schools). To facilitate the implementation of the policy, the provincial organization responsible for certifying teachers and regulating teacher education issued an Accreditation Resource Guide (Ontario College of Teachers, 2017: 5). As stated in the guide’s introduction, it is oriented to enforcement and compliance: ‘This guide is designed for the use of accreditation panels who will be seeking evidence of sufficiency and currency with the required core content outlined in the regulation, and by programs undergoing accreditation’. The resource guide is organized by each of the specific topics that teacher-education programs must address in their curriculum, with additional detail about the scope of each topic and examples of evidence that might be used to demonstrate how programs address it. Indeed, each of these descriptions begins with reference to the provincial legislation that authorized this overhaul of Ontario’s teacher-education policy. We read this reference as a discursive move not only to legitimize the reform overall, but also to reinforce the notion that these changes are mandates. In the section on ‘Supporting English Language Learners’, the resource guide describes the knowledge, skills and dispositions that teacher candidates must develop in their teacher-education program. It summarizes this knowledge base as a series of bullet points that reflect widely accepted dimensions of supporting ELLs: asset-based approaches, celebrating cultural and linguistic diversity, using technology to support instruction and effective communication with families and caregivers. (Recall that in our interviews with teachers, teacher leaders and teacher educators as discussed in Chapter 5, they mentioned most of these same themes as central to what teacher candidates must know and be able to do.) In naming these dimensions, nowhere does the resource guide cite scholarly or practitioner

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research, or name any specific model for supporting ELLs in the classroom. By contrast, the resource guide does name two specific items that comprise part of the knowledge base for supporting ELLs: the ESL and ELD curriculum in Ontario for English language education, and the STEP assessment framework. In the former case, this requirement is consistent with the general expectation that teacher-education programs familiarize candidates with the Ontario curriculum. In the latter case, by naming STEP explicitly, the resource guide implies that programs must address a resource that the ministry does not, in fact, require all school boards to use. In the 2014–2015 academic year, the MT program was deeply involved in revising its curriculum to comply with the province’s new policy. In spring 2015, Antoinette, Julie, Jeff and a fourth colleague met with a former department chair and MT program administrator. The purpose of this meeting was to begin developing a new course about linguistic diversity and supporting students we were calling ELLs. At this meeting, the former chair distributed photocopies of the two-page overview of this topic from the resource guide. He informed us that the course would have the same name as listed in the guide (i.e. Supporting English Language Learners), and that our task was to use this excerpt to inform our discussion about course content. He then left the meeting, and the four of us began sketching out the kinds of knowledge, skills and dispositions we thought mattered most for such a course. While at no time did we explicitly refer to the information in the resource guide as ‘requirements’ to follow, in the end STEP did comprise a significant portion of the course design. Across the 15  sections offered each year, STEP is the main topic in at least two class sessions (out of 12 total). In addition, two of the three common assignments across all course sections directly incorporate STEP. The ‘ELL Case Study’, for example, is based almost entirely on STEP. Candidates follow STEP’s initial assessment process to interview a multilingual student, and then analyze the student’s oral language from the conversation, as well as some of their written work, to practice placing them on STEP’s rubrics, called Observable Language Behaviors. Candidates then discuss which instructional strategies would best support the student based on this STEP placement. Another course assignment that incorporates STEP is the unit-plan assignment, which most often serves as a culminating assessment for the course. In this case, candidates work in small groups to design instruction in which they demonstrate how they would attend to linguistic diversity and support multilingual learners. Candidates are asked to create specific profiles of multilingual learners to help make their instructional planning more concrete. They include these profiles in the final unit plan, as well as in a presentation of their plan they give during class. Typically, candidates base the profiles on the students from their case-study assignment, or on multilingual learners they have worked with in a practicum placement. Either way, the assignment prompts candidates to use STEP as part of introducing the multilingual learners they imagined when planning instruction.

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Figure 6.1  Profile of Mohammed

As an example, Figure 6.1 is taken from one group’s unit plan in a junior/intermediate (J/I; Grades  4–10) section of the course. The figure is based on a slide from the group’s presentation to their peers in class. Mohammed was one of the multilingual learners this group had in mind when planning their unit. The three descriptions of Mohammed’s English proficiency are based on, but not necessarily direct quotes of, STEP’s Observable Language Behaviors for Oral Language and Writing (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015). These descriptions reflect the argument we presented in Chapter 4, namely that STEP underwrites a hierarchy in Ontario schools with English as the sole desired outcome of multilingual learners’ education. Students’ other languages – when mentioned at all – are construed as markers of limited English proficiency, used to shore up gaps in multilingual learners’ knowledge of English. Consistent with this argument, and irrespective of candidates’ actual attitudes toward multilingualism and their future multilingual learners, when the candidates in this group introduced their classmates to Mohammed, they focused only on what he could do in English. They noted Mohammed’s ability to use compound sentences and conditional verb forms correctly, and placed him at a STEP  3, that is, roughly in the middle of STEP’s 6-point scale. Despite these details about what Mohammed could do with English, their summative assessment was that Mohammed had ‘little knowledge’ of the language. Moreover, besides describing Mohammed as ‘a Syrian refugee’ and offering a timeline that suggests he was one of the 30,000 Syrians allowed to enter Canada in 2015, the group offered no information about Mohammed’s proficiency in other languages or his previous learning in school. Our analysis in this chapter might focus solely on specific instances such as this of how candidates profiled multilingual learners as they designed their unit plans, dissecting potential limitations in their thinking. Such analysis can matter; however, what is both more interesting and more important is how this kind of deficit thinking – which erases Mohammed’s other abilities while mis-hearing and then devaluing what he can do in English – often

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appeared alongside candidates’ generally positive attitudes to multilingualism and to their future multilingual learners. As we have noted elsewhere, we observed this contradiction as often among multilingual candidates as candidates who described themselves as monolingual speakers of English. In this chapter, our analysis of these contradictions draws on two major data sources from the project. We begin with a discussion of candidate responses to the PeCK-LIT test we designed as part of this study. Because STEP was such a key part of the Supporting English Language Learners course, several tasks on this test made explicit mention of STEP, and required candidates to respond based on their understanding of this assessment framework. We address two such tasks in this chapter. We then introduce two focal participants from the case-study portion of the project, tracing how STEP shifted their thinking about multilingual learners in particular to better understand these contradictions in deficit thinking and how they emerge. STEPing in the PeCK-LIT Test

Our purpose in designing the PeCK-LIT test was to understand at the program level what teacher candidates learned about multilingualism and supporting multilingual learners. These insights would then complement a close analysis of how individual candidates learned based on data from the course-based case study. The PeCK-LIT test is based on the Deutsch-als-Zweitsprache Kompetenzen test (Köker et al., 2015) developed in Germany. We adapted some tasks from the German original and created others from scratch. In both cases, PeCK-LIT tasks reflect the Ontario curriculum or authentic scenarios in Ontario classrooms. The items associated with each task were specifically designed to better understand candidates’ knowledge, skills or dispositions with respect to multilingualism and supporting multilingual learners. Most items asked open-ended questions, which candidates typically answered in one to three sentences. As indicated in Table  6.1, the PeCK-LIT test has two Table 6.1  Overview of the PeCK-LIT test administration Test version Test given to which teacher candidates Test A • 5 tasks • 17 items

Year 1

Test B • 5 tasks • 18 items

Year 2

Test given in which P/J (Grades K–6) term(s) Fall 2018

Fall 2019 and winter 2020

J/I (Grades 4–10)

I/S (Grades 7–12)

307 total 125

Winter 2019

Total number of responses

54

128

104 total 55

32

17

121 total 51

0

70

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versions. We had originally intended to use these two versions on a pre/ post basis to trace how teacher-candidate learning changes over the two years of the MT program. However, given the differences in each version, and the considerable difficulty in administering this instrument within an extremely complicated program, we instead treated candidates’ responses as distinct snapshots of their thinking. The PeCK-LIT test also included demographic questions about candidates’ multilingual practices and their experiences with language learning in school and with language teaching before entering the MT program. We used this information for correlational analysis. Although some background variables showed significant relationships with test scores, these relationships were not consistent across all items on the PeCK-LIT test. (See the Appendix for more information on the design and analysis of this test instrument; Larson [2023] presents a validation study of this test instrument.) Several tasks across both versions of the test included items that referred to multilingual learners at specific STEP levels. In this way, these items expected candidates to draw on their understanding of STEP to inform their responses. Our discussion here focuses on two of these tasks and the related items. Because we had over 500  responses to the PeCK-LIT test, we present a few examples to represent themes in candidates’ responses. We also include brief demographic information for each respondent. The first of the STEP-related tasks presented candidates with a common lab assignment from a Grade 11 biology course, in which students use microscopes to examine animal and plant cells and then produce a written lab report comparing these cell types. The task refers to multilingual learners at the beginning level of English language learning, noting that they all speak Mandarin as well. Figure 6.2 reproduces the task from the PeCK-LIT test. The task then presents two items for consideration. The first was designed to reveal candidates’ disposition toward including all student languages in instruction. Item  B1.1 asks: ‘As students complete the various steps of the writing process, would you allow them to use their home language(s)? If so, describe how you would support them in doing so? If not, why not?’ The second item then references STEP directly. Item A1.2 reads: The lab requires students to consult additional resources (such as their course textbook or web-based resources) when writing up their lab report. How would you accommodate the STEP 1 and 2 students in this process?

In this second item, we were interested in understanding which specific pedagogical strategies candidates have learned in the MT program to support multilingual learners at the earlier stages of English language acquisition.

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Figure 6.2  Grade 11 biology Task 1 from Version A of the PeCK-LIT test

There were two clear patterns in candidates’ responses to Item A1.2. First, most candidates suggested that students refer to resources written in another language in preparing the lab report. We understand these responses in part as candidates having been primed by Item A1.1, insofar as it asked respondents to consider using what we were still calling ‘home languages’ as we designed this test instrument. Second, most responses to Item A1.2 picked up on our use of the word ‘allow’ from Item A1.1 to describe how they would include all student languages in their instruction. Examples included: Allowing them to consult their additional resources in their home language but require them to translate/summarize the reading in English. – Intermediate/senior (I/S); grew up with English only; learned French in school; ESL teaching experience

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They may use translating resources, research in their own language as long as it is provided to me in English so I can verify correctness. – I/S; grew up with English only; reported no languages learned in school; no language teaching experience I would allow them to use web-based resources in Mandarin as long as the page can be translated to English, so I could verify the resource. – I/S; grew up with English and Tamil; learned French and Tamil in school; worked in an ELD class and supported ELL students on standardized test preparation

In reflecting on how we designed and conducted this research, we recognize the problems with this PeCK-LIT test item. Item A1.1 was written in a way that suggests whether or not multilingual learners draw on all of their linguistic resources to engage the curriculum is primarily a choice that the teacher gets to make. While this is not the stance of our research team, the process of data analysis has helped us to see this problem in the wording of the test item. As such, it is not especially surprising to see candidates reproduce this notion of teacher control over multilingualism in their responses to Item A1.2. However, the examples shared above are consistent with many responses to Item A1.2 that indicate the extent of teachers’ control over language use. Not only are teachers positioned in these responses as permitting students to draw on all of their languages to complete this lab report, as opposed to students initiating that choice, but also, these responses require students to translate the multilingual resources they refer to so that teachers can verify their accuracy. In addition to being extremely difficult, and potentially transforming what was intended as support into a chore or a burden, this requirement presupposes that non-English resources are not valid until a teacher says they are, and that multilingual learners are not capable of deciding for themselves which multilingual resources relate to the topic of this lab and which do not. This notion of translation was present in many candidate responses, even if it was not always associated with surveillance or control. For other candidates, translating resources from other languages was construed primarily as part of learning English, not as a process of using all linguistic resources to learn content. Examples included: Still, I will allow them to consult Chinese resources to finish the task, then ask them to do the translation work after […] Also, I’ll make it clear to them beforehand that they can’t rely on the Chinese materials all the time. It’s just a phase to help them follow the class. Progress has to be made and seen. – Primary/junior (P/J); born and raised in China; learned English in school; has ‘taught English to primary students in China as an English learner’

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If the students required looking up specific words or phrases in their mother tongue, they are free to do so, however they should not be translating the entire section because that defeats the purpose of learning another language. I think giving them the option to look it up is definitely important. – I/S; grew up with English and Arabic; attended schools with English as instructional language; learned English, French and Arabic in school […] I don’t know if I would consider allowing them to look up sources in their home language and then working on translating some of their points, this is just something I have never done and I wonder if it fulfills the needs of the project but not their English language learning needs. –J/I; grew up with English only; learned French and Spanish in school; no language teaching experience

These responses, and many others like them, reflect candidates’ concerns about student progress, and what progress means at all. In some cases, progress means learning English. This then positions other languages either as a temporary fix or as something that might in fact impede the English language learning process. In other cases, candidates suggested that learning English was in fact more important than learning the content. That is, demonstrating an understanding of plant and animal cells in multiple languages might be less important than learning English itself. What is noteworthy about the responses to Item A1.2 is that, although this item was designed primarily to ‘test’ candidates’ skills in naming pedagogical strategies to support multilingual learners at STEPs 1 and 2, their responses ultimately revealed complicated and complicating stances on the relationship between multilingualism and content learning. The second example from the PeCK-LIT data comes from an item associated with a task on Test B. This task was designed for a Grade 10 history class, in which the teacher and a co-worker are planning instruction to address the history and legacy of residential schools in Canada. The task was based on a lesson plan created as part of the ministry’s Think Literacy initiative, designed to help all secondary-level teachers integrate literacy instruction into their lesson planning (see http://www​ .edugains.ca/newsite/literacy/thinkliteracy.html). Figure  6.3 reproduces this task from the test. The third and final item related to this task asked candidates to consider how they would adjust the evaluation criteria for this final assessment based on students at two different levels of STEP. Item B3.3 reads: The culminating assessment asks students to write a 2-page stance paper in response to the critical question: ‘Should the government compensate Indigenous people for the way they were treated in residential schools? If so, what would be fair compensation for this historical wrongdoing?’ What

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Figure 6.3  Grade 10 history Task 3 from Version B of the PeCK-LIT test

differences would there be in the Success Criteria for this assessment to support a student at Level 2 on the STEP scale versus a student at Level 5?

A prominent theme that surfaced in the analysis of the responses to this item was an assumption that once a student reached STEP 5 (i.e. the penultimate assessment level on STEP), they would no longer require targeted support from the teacher. Examples of this stance included: At STEP level 2, there would be ESL support for the project, it might require writing in the home language, providing sentence frames/fill in the blanks, and allow research in the home language. At the level 5 STEP, I would have the student complete the assignment the same as other students, but ensure I modelled back any grammatical and syntactical issues. – P/J; grew up with English, French, Spanish and Indonesian; used English and French in school; has prior experience teaching English as a foreign language; has taught FSL in practicum placement and as a tutor At step 5, this should not be too much of an issue, as students are approaching grade level. However, at level 2, I think the success criteria should be modified to using simple sentences or even visuals to get their point across. – P/J; grew up with English only; learned French in school; has experience tutoring French The success criteria for [STEP level 2] students would focus on their selection of the information, words, phrases and ideas provided by the teacher, while [STEP level 5] students would have success criteria that would be general to all students in the class. They would most likely have the same success criteria as their non multilingual peers. – I/S; grew up with English only; used English in school; has taught in ESL classes during practicum

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These responses, and many others like them, indicate a stance that once multilingual learners are defined as advanced ELLs, they are no longer entitled to modifications or accommodations in lesson planning. These responses are also consistent with ideas raised in Chapter  4, in which we discussed our interviews with ESL teachers and teacher leaders in Ontario. Participants stated that many teachers assume that once ELLs are sufficiently advanced, then teachers no longer need to address multilingualism in their classrooms. Moreover, and similar to responses to Item  A1.2, many candidate responses suggested that modifying assessment criteria to include all student languages is appropriate only for beginner-level learners. Examples included: To support a Level 2 student on the STEP scale, they would be able to include their L1 in their explanation. The success criteria would include being able to identify their opinion and formulate basic sentences related to their opinion. To support a Level 5 student on the STEP scale, they should be able to identify their opinion and support it with details as well as write the entire explanation in English, and form complex compound sentences. – P/J; grew up with English only; used English and French at school; has experience tutoring French Level 2 would be more hands-on, working with peers and teachers using graphic organizers to be very scaffolded from initial ideas, to basic sentence construction to final paper, moving between their L1 and English. Frequent teacher support and revision/feedback. The word count could be lessened. L5 is a bit more independent, could use some levels of peer editing, but should be okay to identify information and ideas. Scaffolding could be available for entire class as a benefit, but L5 student is likely to not use their L1 as much as Level 2 student. – I/S; grew up with English and some Italian; used English, Italian and French in school; no language teaching experience

In terms of the rubric we developed to score individual responses to test items, both these responses were scored quite high, insofar as they each named several specific strategies for designing evaluation criteria based on their knowledge of the STEP assessment framework. However, it is the substance of these strategies that confirms widely held stances among teacher candidates, namely that the inclusion of other languages in instruction is a temporary accommodation designed to support beginning-level learners of English. By contrast, once a student is more advanced in English, language-inclusive strategies are withdrawn by the teacher, or, as the last response suggests, the students themselves will have stopped using their first language (L1) on their own.

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Taken together, these responses suggest that candidates have appropriated specific messages in respect of the STEP assessment framework: ‘success’ for multilingual learners is defined in terms of academic English only. Insofar as other languages are used in the classroom, they are temporary resources for beginning users of English to use, not to be relied on too heavily lest they become a crutch or otherwise impede the English language learning process. STEPing with Teacher Candidates

The PeCK-LIT test data analyzed above provide us with perspective on what teacher candidates had learned about multilingualism and multilingual learners at a program-level perspective. The course-based data from the ethnographic case study generated richer insights into how this learning took place. In this section of the chapter, we introduce two teacher candidates whom Katie interviewed for the project. For each candidate, Katie begins with a brief profile of their background, experiences with multilingualism and professional goals. We then focus on their engagement with the STEP assessment framework. Isabella

Isabella was a teacher candidate in the P/J (Grades K–6) section of the course. Because she planned to move to Spain to teach after completing the program, Isabella was already thinking of herself as an international teacher in multilingual settings. Isabella also had a strong interest in environmental justice and drama, and was part of a specialized cohort in the MT program focusing on sustainability education. Isabella grew up in Manitoba speaking English, and learned Spanish later as an adult. For her undergraduate thesis, Isabella taught in Ecuador for nine months at a Quechua/Spanish bilingual school. This work was part of her research on how intercultural bilingual schools incorporate Indigenous languages. Isabella recalled her experiences teaching at the school, stating that she had strong feelings about incorporating Indigenous languages and had found ways to translanguage in Ecuadorian schools. Indigenous language rights became an important aspect of Isabella’s social justice stance. However, this did not click with her as a pedagogical stance in Ontario until she took the Supporting English Language Learners course. She was not sure why, and reflected that maybe it was because there are only small groups of ELLs in a class here, whereas in Ecuador, the whole class were bilingual learners of Quechua and Spanish. Nevertheless, throughout the case study, we saw Isabella thinking and working through her stance on multilingualism in her future practice. At one point, she participated in a multilingual drama that re-enacted a portion of a wordless picture book, The Arrival. In this activity, candidates were asked to take images from the book, and then create and narrate a

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story. Isabella’s love of drama came forth as she dramatized the actions of the story, while her classmates narrated the story in Mandarin and English. Here, we saw Isabella’s openness to collaborate with peers in a public enactment of multilingualism using languages that she – and presumably others in her cohort – did not know. Isabella also reflected on language and power in a post that she was assigned as part of the course. In this reflection, she began to critique the language practices she observed during her practicum. Instead of students’ linguistic repertoires being included in her associate teacher’s classroom, Isabella discussed how they were relegated to the school’s international languages (IL) program (briefly introduced in Chapter  1), which she refers to as ‘opportunities to take minority languages’. Isabella wrote: As an emerging educator, I feel I have a responsibility to teach using a multilingual education approach. This is highly beneficial for ELL learners academically, but also crucial in preventing the perpetuation of marginalizing power relations. As someone new to teaching I currently feel I lack some of the strategies to do this effectively. When teaching in my practicum at [name redacted] I found that there were options to take minority languages, but the value of these languages was not seen beyond these classes. Furthermore, my [Associate Teacher] told me that these classes are very underfunded and lack teacher training. I want to explore the obstacles faced by multilingual education and to find some ways to start bringing multilingual education into the classrooms I work in. I will try and utilize local resources to support the community context and establish relationships between my learners and the community. The article showed examples of how to do this without knowledge of the students first language by allowing the creation of multilingual texts and stories. Going forward I will continue to examine the critical consciousness of my teaching practice and my daily life. I can acknowledge my power structures, but how do I go about sharing and changing these power structures ELL learners face?

The school in which Isabella completed her practicum has one of the few IL programs in this particular board in which language instruction takes place during the school day, not after school or on the weekends. As such, there is enormous potential for IL educators to partner with other teachers at the school to integrate the learning of/in English, French and the IL. Yet, as Isabella learned while on practicum, space, money and time for each of these languages were allocated in a way that reinforced the racialized hierarchy we have addressed throughout this book, with English and French on top. Isabella understood that this is about ‘power structures’ and hoped to challenge these ideas in her future practice. Isabella was beginning to understand that English is used more broadly in

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the classroom whereas the rest of the students’ linguistic repertoires are relegated to the margins in underfunded language learning spaces. Isabella began to put some of these insights into practice in the final unit-plan assignment for the course. Working with a small group, she created a multilingual word wall as part of the unit (Figure 6.4). Isabella was not alone in taking up word walls as a language-inclusive teaching strategy; there are dozens of them in the work we collected from the ~130 participating candidates in this study. The frequency of this strategy confirms previous research (e.g. Regalla, 2012) that candidates are not only often quick to take up multilingual approaches to vocabulary, but also struggle to move beyond these strategies. This example of a word wall is also consistent with many found in our data in how they visualize the relationship between English and other languages present in the classroom. That is, using this word wall, multilingual learners would have to get up close to read the Punjabi and Arabic words on it. English is still at the center and the main focus. In fact, it appears as if Punjabi and Arabic were added after the word wall was completed, as there does not always appear to be enough space for these terms, and they are written off to the side or at angles. We might read this word wall to suggest that the primary resource to understand key English language vocabulary are the visuals; these are meant for broad, public consumption in the classroom. By contrast, Punjabi and Arabic can be read as secondary resources directed only at the speakers of these languages to support their own individual learning, rather than as a resource for everyone in the classroom to learn with and from.

Figure 6.4  Isabella’s multilingual word wall

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Figure 6.5  Profiles of Sasha and Jaspreet

As we would expect of novice teachers, some of Isabella’s learning was more consistent in how it envisioned including all student languages, some of it not. However, this all changed when it came to STEP. As described above, candidates were expected to create profiles of multilingual learners and to use STEP as one aspect of each profile. In her group, Isabella was tasked with creating these profiles. Figure 6.5 is taken from the group’s presentation to the class, in which they described two multilingual learners, Sasha and Jaspreet, around whom they designed their unit plan. In these profiles, Isabella included the other languages that Sasha and Jaspreet speak. However, these languages were not considered as part of students’ prior knowledge. Instead, they were linked to their respective countries of origin. This association not only suggests that these languages belong there, and not also in an Ontario classroom, but it also suggests that these languages belong to Sasha and Jaspreet’s past, literally to their origins. Finally, what is noteworthy about these profiles of Sasha and Jaspreet is that they are not solely based on STEP. That is, Isabella took care to provide a more holistic picture of these two students, so as to provide better context for how the group designed their unit plan. And yet, this holistic picture also clearly separates English from the other languages these students know, and only describes what they can do in terms of English. The second part of describing Sasha and Jaspreet was a group effort, not solely Isabella’s work. Figure  6.6 is taken from the group’s presentation to class, in which they reproduced STEP’s Observable Language Behaviors chart for reading at the Grades  1–3 level. On the chart, the group highlighted where they placed the two students; Sasha’s placement is outlined in light gray, Jaspreet’s in dark gray.

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Figure 6.6  Placing Sasha and Jaspreet on the STEP levels for reading

For Sasha working at a STEP 2 in general, her ‘L1’ is seen as a tool she uses to demonstrate understanding. But for Jaspreet, working at STEPs 4 and 5, there is no mention of her other languages. Instead, terms such as ‘approaching’ or ‘early grade level’ are used to describe her ability to understand texts in English only. In other words, if Jaspreet were to use Punjabi or Hindi in class, a teacher might then view this as evidence of her being a more beginning-level student in need of remedial support, and not an experienced English learner who also uses other languages for effective and meaningful grade-level communication. During the unit-planning process, Isabella was observed with her classmates while designing a lesson plan. The lesson plan included two common curriculum expectations for language arts, namely using stated and/or implied information to respond to a given text. As the candidates discussed how to design instruction for Jaspreet and Sasha, Isabella suggested that they have the students read texts in their own languages as a modification. The suggestion was connected to an idea that if the students could read texts in their other languages, they would be able to engage in the more complicated – but also grade-level – task of using implied information to inform their responses. As they discussed their plan, the candidates referred to ministry documents, including the Ontario language arts curriculum and STEP. After consulting these documents, the candidates decided not to use multilingual texts. Instead, they decided to use English-only texts. They also decided to change their expectations by having students focus only on stated information in the texts that students would interact with in

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the unit plan. Instead of focusing on texts that would allow multilingual learners to read between the lines and understand the larger context, the group opted to simplify the language arts expectation to remove understanding implied information from the expectations. Despite Isabella’s openness to using multiple languages to meet grade-level, ageappropriate learning objectives, engaging with STEP and other ministry documents shifted both her thinking and that of her peers into a focus on English only, and led to lowering their expectations for what multilingual learners can do. Planning and assessment are integrally intertwined. As Katie described in the vignette that opened this chapter, teachers in Ontario are expected to know how to identify relevant curriculum expectations, and to apply STEP descriptions of learners’ language use to adapt those expectations as they plan for instruction and assessment. Recall from Chapter  5, as well, how Sabrina and the other teacher educators we interviewed argued that this process needs to be explicitly taught to teacher candidates. This is why it is particularly unsettling that when Isabella and her peers had such opportunities to practice designing instruction in this way, that is, to ‘marry’ Ontario curriculum documents with the STEP assessment framework, as Sabrina described it, they decided to drop multilingual texts in favor of simplified content expectations. In the process of brainstorming with and interpreting these documents, candidates decided to assess the student on stated information they could discern from English-only texts, denying the student the opportunity to use all their languages to practice making inferences with multilingual texts and demonstrate their ability to do so. In this way, the assessment of content, that is, of what the student is learning in the classroom, was negatively impacted by this language assessment tool. Luciana

Luciana was a J/I (Grades  4–10) teacher candidate with math as her subject area. Luciana planned to teach in a publicly funded Catholic school board in Ontario. By the time she was interviewed for this research, Luciana had already successfully made her way into a competitive teaching market, having been hired for one board’s list of occasional teachers. Originally from Mexico, Luciana is now a permanent resident of Canada who had also lived in Texas in the United States. Her mobility moving back and forth to Mexico was a significant part of Luciana’s identity. Luciana had taught children at an English language institute in Mexico in what she described as a very structured program with a focus on spelling and vocabulary, not games. The owner of the school was American and required them to speak English all the time, even with three- and four-year-olds. Teachers would speak to these young learners in English, but they would play and sing in Spanish. Although the policy

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in Luciana’s school was English-only, translanguaging was the norm, especially with the younger children. Here, we saw Luciana start to critique her previous school’s approaches to language based on the learning she had done in the Supporting English Language Learners course around translanguaging. Luciana is herself multilingual, and the mother of multilingual children attending Ontario schools. During classroom discussions, at times she referred to her children’s experiences in local elementary schools. In this way, she brought multiple lenses to her assignments and course discussions. When her children were born, her family was in Mexico; at that time, Luciana worked as a substitute teacher in Grade 3 English language classes. Thus, prior to starting the MT program, Luciana already had many language teaching experiences in international contexts and personal experiences with her own children, which allowed her to connect the language-inclusive pedagogies she was learning in the program with her previous experience. According to Luciana, public schools in Mexico are not very good, so you send your children to private schools, many of which are English-medium or bilingual schools. She felt that her experiences in these schools made working in a multilingual environment very natural for her. In terms of her own multilingualism, she described herself as speaking Spanish, attending to the different varieties she and her family used such as Argentine, Castilian, Cuban and Spanglish, as well as French and English. Luciana represented this awareness visually in her ‘My Plurilingual Journey’ assignment (as shown in Figure 6.7) by indicating and reflecting on her own mobility and that of her family, and its impact on her (linguistic) life. Luciana regularly contributed to class discussions. Her words were often connected to her emotions and were personal. For example, during her interview with Katie, she reflected on an activity at the beginning of the course, wherein the class had to take part in a 20-minute lesson that was entirely in Hebrew. She recalled how hard this activity was for her and how it made her feel very lonely. Luciana also stated that the activity helped her understand how difficult it is for students who do not know English to be in an English-only environment. While observing Luciana during class, she could often be heard challenging candidates to look at multilingual children from different perspectives. For example, during a small-group discussion about student behavior, she insisted her peer reconsider sending a multilingual student to the office or having a police presence in the school. Taking all of this into consideration, it was interesting to watch Luciana interact with STEP during a classroom activity. The instructor had the candidates watch a video of a multilingual student speaking in English, and then asked the candidates to place the student on the oral language behaviors continuum. Figure  6.8 presents the portion of the rubric that Luciana and her classmates were using that day.

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Figure 6.7  Luciana’s plurilingual journey

As with other language behavior continua in this assessment framework, this excerpt for oral language only incorporates students’ other languages, referred to as ‘L1’, at STEPs  1 and 2. As Luciana and her group began considering the video they had just watched in terms of this rubric, she told the group she heard the boy in the video using compound sentences when talking about his grandfather. Here, Luciana was referring to a STEP 3 descriptor (see Figure 6.8). Luciana continued by stating that she thought he was almost at a STEP  4 in that he could express what he was saying. Prisha, a peer in her small group, responded by stating that because the boy ‘fell back on his L1 structure’ when he was speaking, he was only at a STEP 3, but working toward a STEP 4. Here, we can see how STEP acted as a tool for devaluing students’ multilingualism. While Luciana was using STEP to see the student’s growth in English, Prisha took her cue from STEP by relying on the use of other languages to keep the boy at a lower proficiency level. That is, not only did candidates’ comments – Luciana’s

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Figure 6.8  STEP excerpt for oral language behaviors continua (Grades 4–6)

included – focus primarily on what this boy could or could not do in English, but also, his ability to use different languages to express himself led some in Luciana’s group to hear this child as a less proficient speaker of English. After Luciana finished this course, she participated in an interview with Katie. During the conversation, she discussed her experiences with placing students on STEP, such as the one described above. Luciana expressed the frustration she felt with this document and the activities they had completed in relation to it. In particular, she began to question the purpose of tracking multilingual learners in the first place. Referencing the presentations that candidates had to make on their unit plans in the final class sessions, Luciana wondered: I don’t know if this is an idea, but, and it really jumped out to me at the end when we were presenting the unit plans. When they described the classrooms, they would be like, we have a STEP 5 and STEP 6 student. Why would you bother? And I know they exist, you know. But why would you bother addressing a STEP 5 and STEP 6 student in your classroom? Like what’s the difference?

One way to read Luciana’s questions is related to the stances revealed above from the PeCK-LIT test data, namely that once multilingual learners have reached a more advanced level of English, then teachers no longer need to attend to their language practices. But we contend that Luciana was making a different, far more critical point. She continued with questions about why they as teacher candidates were being asked to evaluate and track students whose English was what she described as ‘basically fine’. She described this approach to assessing language as ‘nitpicking’, ‘obsessing’ and ‘classifying’ students.

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In this part of the conversation, Luciana referred both to her own children and how they invent and play with all kinds of words in Spanish, and to Katie’s son, assuming he does the same in English. She continued, I love their made up words and I never correct them. And then at some point, they’ll lose them. And then that’s fine. Now I feel that’s part of language acquisition anyhow, like your own first language. And so if you do that in, like when you’re acquiring a second language, I feel like it’s, it’s not fair that you can’t do that, you know?

Luciana continued by referring to how her own proficiency in English has been assessed repeatedly throughout her life, be it for permanent residency in Canada, part of her schooling in Mexico or the standardized language tests required for entrance into graduate school in North America. Reflecting on these experiences of testing, she stated: It just, it just bothers me all that. You know, you get classified into you are, I don’t know, this level or this level and your differences [are] minimal, and it could just be paying attention or picking the right answer, or, I guess that’s why. Yeah, I guess that’s why it bothers me that you would bother to, like, you, you would actually make up, classify them differently.

Luciana concluded this part of the conversation with these insights: I feel like you’re, like you’re judging, or you’re… I don’t know if judging is the right word, but you’re marking somebody on the way they speak. And then if you hear another person in a different situation, who’s not an English language learner, you might find the same things that, then they’re not marked or judged differently. You know, so that difference is the part that, like, makes me wonder, you know. That’s just it. It’s not, it’s like everybody here feels discriminated. Right? Everybody is the oppressor, but I don’t want to say it that way. I want to frame it that way. But it feels like you have to jump like an extra hoop, like through an extra hoop, you know, constantly.

Luciana’s concerns about the STEP assessment framework and how she was being asked to use it provide powerful examples of both raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) and the ideological and structural process of Lingualisierung (Rösch, 2019). Despite some differences in how Flores, Rosa and Rösch arrived at these theoretical premises, common to them is a dual process. On the one hand, speakers of a dominant language are positioned to evaluate the language practices of minoritized and racialized people; Flores and Rosa (2015) theorize this social position as that of the white listening subject. On the

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other hand, the language practices of minoritized people are perceived primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of their social position as racialized or migrant subjects. Consequently, their language is not considered in objective terms of what is said or written, but rather is misheard as deficient, even as ‘deviant’ (Flores & Rosa, 2015: 151) and in need of teacher intervention. Luciana names this ideological process as she describes how ‘you might find the same things’ said by some people ‘marked’ as English learners and some who are not, but that this language is ‘judged differently’. As Luciana herself has experienced in the many instances in which she has had to prove her proficiency in English, ‘it feels like you have to jump… through an extra hoop, you know, constantly’. Moreover, Luciana’s frustration with the STEP assessment framework and how she was being asked to use it help us to better understand how teacher candidates learn to inhabit this social position of the white listening subject. As Daniels and Varghese (2020: 57) argued, teacher education often functions as an ‘institutional listening and perceiving entity that embodies the hegemony of Whiteness’ (emphasis original). It is a venue in which teacher candidates face pedagogical dilemmas in their novice practice, improvising and negotiating their way through these dilemmas as they learn how to teach. However, the ideological and material resources that teacher candidates use – or better, are required to use – to navigate this learning are not neutral. As Daniels and Varghese (2020: 60) stress, teacher education ‘often invizibilizes, centers, and normalizes Whiteness and the subjectivities of White teacher educators, teachers, and preservice teachers’. Not only are the racial and linguistic subject positions of their future multilingual learners subordinated to this hegemonic whiteness, but so too are those of racialized and/or multilingual teacher candidates. In this way, teacher candidates – even and especially racialized and/or multilingual candidates – learn to inhabit this social position and perform the kinds of institutional listening that link whiteness to proficiency in a particular kind of English. Conclusion

The data presented in this chapter provide rich evidence of what this learning looks like and how it takes place. In each example of data shared in this chapter, candidates faced specific, practice-based dilemmas associated with assessing the language practices of multilingual learners. These dilemmas were connected to the STEP assessment framework, a ministry resource that played a significant role in mediating teacher-candidate learning in the Supporting English Language Learners course. What is particularly significant about these data is that they reveal how white listening subjects perceive the language practices of multilingual learners even when their multilingualism is acknowledged and considered in planning or carrying out instruction. Indeed, candidates’ responses to

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these practice-based dilemmas suggest that learning to inhabit the social position of a white listening subject means assuming the authority to decide when students are allowed to draw on all their linguistic resources to learn school content. It means insisting that teachers have access to English language translations of the multilingual resources that students might draw on in order to ‘verify correctness’ – and that multilingual learners themselves are responsible for providing these translations. This kind of institutional listening might allow for language-inclusive teaching, but only for beginner-level learners of English. To carry on with such teaching might stymie the learning of English. Once multilingual learners are proficient enough in English, then teachers no longer need to provide targeted support. However, as Luciana stressed to us, this does not mean that the language practices of advanced speakers of English are no longer marked as deficient. As a result, not only is English reinforced as the primary learning goal for multilingual learners, but it is also a goal that some learners will never be perceived as having attained. These data also present us with powerful evidence of how it is that teacher candidates learn to take on white institutional listening. Because the primary instrument used to introduce candidates to assessing the language practices of multilingual learners was so deeply shaped by English-only assumptions, candidates’ interactions with this instrument often interrupted their emergent learning about language-inclusive teaching practices. Interacting with the STEP assessment framework led candidates to focus their analysis of the language produced by real multilingual learners primarily in terms of English. This often meant ignoring what multilingual learners could do in other languages, or keeping those languages separate from English and English language learning. At other times, candidates associated these learners’ use of other languages to suggest they were less proficient in English. In this way, candidates’ engagement with the STEP assessment framework revealed itself to be less about them learning to assess language practices in any objective way, and more about learning to ‘classify’, to ‘judge’, even to ‘nitpick’, as Luciana described it. These data suggest that candidates not only misheard the English that multilingual learners actually produced, perceiving it as less proficient than it actually was, but they also used this assessment as evidence to lower the learning expectations for multilingual learners. This kind of learning took place within a teacher-education program and in a required course about linguistic diversity that have explicit orientations to asset-based approaches to teaching. This kind of learning was observed among candidates who themselves were multilingual and speakers of racialized languages. As such, the kind of learning we observed suggests how deeply embedded raciolinguistic ideologies and processes of Lingualisierung are in teacher-education institutions and society more broadly.

7 (Un)Learning Translanguaging Pedagogies Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Katie Brubacher, Jennifer Burton and Wales Wong

To conclude this sociolinguistic sketch of my classroom I just want to comment on a quotation from García et al. (2017) that I found particularly impactful. They describe the translanguaging corriente as ‘the dynamic and continuous movement of language features that change the static linguistic landscape of the classroom that is described and defined from a monolingual perspective’ (García et al., 2017: 21). I just love the idea of the translanguaging current hitting against the firm monolinguistic bank of the ‘river’ and actually changing it. Callie, I/S teacher candidate for English and Social Sciences

Vignette: Making Sense of Translanguaging

Jeff Bale In winter 2017, I taught the Supporting English Language Learners course for the first time. This was the academic year in which this new required course was first offered. To get the course going, the instructional team had spent considerable time discussing which teaching resources and texts might best support teacher-candidate learning. At about this time, The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning (García et  al., 2017) had been published. This text struck me as a serendipitous opportunity to orient my section of the course more explicitly on an approach to multilingualism that not only included all student language practices, but also centered multilingualism in relationship- and community-building and in instruction so as to challenge the hegemony of English in school and to contribute to democratizing the classroom. I was fortunate in teaching this particular cohort of future secondary teachers that winter. Like most cohorts in the master of teaching (MT) program, and like the other two I have worked with, the majority of this group was multilingual and included several multilingual candidates who immigrated to Canada as 163

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children or teenagers. Additionally, our 12  weeks together were broken up by a month-long teaching practicum; this provided me with multiple opportunities to connect the core ideas of the course, translanguaging included, to real classrooms and the multilingual learners in them. For example, I asked candidates to write two posts during the practicum. The first asked for a description of the linguistic diversity in the classrooms in which candidates were placed. In their posts, many candidates reported that they had not paid attention to the language practices of their students in previous practicum placements, and likely would not have this time unless they had been assigned to do so. I also asked candidates to post overviews of a lesson they had taught in which they used some of the instructional strategies for supporting multilingual learners we had discussed in class. I suggested, for example, that they try framing their lessons around specific content, language and translanguaging objectives, as García et al. (2017) define them. Before candidates returned to campus for our final class sessions, I assigned them another discussion post to reflect on their experiences while on practicum, and how these experiences extended or complicated their learning about translanguaging and about multilingual learners. Most candidate responses were consistent with a point we have made throughout this book, namely that candidates held generally positive attitudes toward multilingualism in general and multilingual learners in particular. Moreover, as Callie’s post in the epigraph to this chapter demonstrates, many candidates integrated nuanced, careful readings of course texts to express their dispositions and ambitions. Several candidates wrote in moving ways about their experiences on practicum. In her post, Tina, a Muslim South Asian candidate who grew up in Ontario with Gujarati, Kachi, Hindi, Urdu and Swahili in addition to English, wrote: The main thing I came to appreciate was the leveraging [of] student language knowledge to assist content learning. The students were already doing this, and helping each other keep up with the material by speaking in their L1’s. However, seeing this in action helped me see how powerful it really is. It also allowed me to see the solidarity between students, and it was touching. Also, I learned that addressing language learning as part of their challenge, and validating that challenge, served to instill the student’s faith with me. On my last day, one of the students came up to me and thanked me appreciatively for touching base with him. It made me realize that opening up the conversation has the potential to prompt a conversation or question in the future. There’s less discomfort.

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Alicia reflected on similar experiences. Alicia was born in Canada, where she grew up with English and Hokkien. Just before Grade  1, she moved to Malaysia, her parents’ birth country, where she attended both Malay- and English-medium schools. After high school, she spent an extended time in Wallonia, Belgium, before returning to Canada for her post-secondary studies. Alicia wrote of her final practicum placement: One instance stuck out to me in the science class. The students had just learned about circuits and were playing with Snap Circuits (a learning kit with which students build circuits). Two Spanish-speaking students in the class who sat next to each other were building circuits and translanguaging, switching between Spanish and English with ease. Prior to this practicum, I would not have been able to identify the process of translanguaging as I was able to at that moment. Seeing it reinforced the idea that incorporating students’ linguistic (and/or cultural) background in the classroom can be beneficial to their learning.

Other candidates expressed similarly positive attitudes toward including all student languages in the classroom, but encountered what they described as unexpected challenges to doing so. For one candidate, the challenge came from the associate teacher (AT) to whom they were assigned. ‘My AT’s response was something along the lines of “OK there buddy, good luck with that. I want nothing to do with that”’. Callie, the candidate quoted in the chapter epigraph, who described herself as speaking only English, also wrote about the difficulties she encountered: I tried to practice translanguaging but I ran into problems based on the courses I was teaching. I was teaching a Grade 12 Law class full of socially-minded individuals, so asking students to work in their home language groups seemed racially reductive. My students already worked comfortably in mixed language groups [and] their friend groups were mixed language. I conferenced with all my students to find out their language preferences and they seemed disinterested in using their home languages. Perhaps this is a reflection of the monoglossic hegemony of English in schools though.

Callie was not the only candidate to raise concerns that translanguaging approaches to teaching might reinforce racial divides in the classroom. Another candidate wrote in their postpracticum reflection:

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I worry about the racist undertones of the ideas behind translanguaging (grouping based on home language, the tone of the STEP program question sequence). I would like to unpack these ideas a little further to ensure that students are treated equitably in trying to do this work.

These posts were consistent with my experiences in whole-group discussions, in which candidates sometimes worried that strategies that center multilingual learners and their language practices might in fact (re)create racialized divisions in class. Specifically, the idea of organizing students into temporary same-language groups to support a given learning objective was understood by several candidates in this cohort as racial segregation. In addition to these concerns about whether some translanguaging instructional practices may in fact be racist, some candidates argued that this approach to multilingualism is not appropriate for Ontario classrooms. Directly after raising their concerns about translanguaging’s ‘racist undertones’, this same candidate concluded: Based on my practicum experience, I also think that perhaps translanguaging might not be as useful in Canada as it is in the United States, and would like to hear about the experiences of the others in our class.

Dan agreed. After describing an incident in which his students laughed at him when he invited them to use all their languages to complete an assignment, he concluded: This practicum largely strengthened my belief that Translanguaging is not a perfect fit for Ontario schools. Many of the bilingual students I encountered and talked to (and there were many) expressed a stronger desire to improve their English skills than to practice and share their home languages with the class. Many experienced bilinguals especially (which was the majority of students I was working with) often had more confidence in their reading and writing abilities in English than in the language in which they may never have received any formal education.

Donna, who described being spoken to as a young child by her parents and nonna almost exclusively in the Calabrese variety of Italian, drew the same conclusion in her post: Basically, I think that the translanguaging pedagogy is highly specific to the US context, and I think this is significant because

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Canada (especially Toronto) has a very different experience with bilingualism. Therefore my question is: what other ELL pedagogies are out there? I am interested in seeing what they have to offer, and whether they would be more applicable to a Toronto classroom.

The responses I have described here capture the complicated, and at times also contradictory, ways in which teacher candidates in our study understood and took up the invitation to consider language-inclusive teaching strategies generally, and translanguaging specifically as a way of theorizing and enacting such strategies. In this chapter, we examine these contradictions in how teacher candidates came to understand translanguaging pedagogies over the course of the MT program. We begin with a brief overview of our project’s understanding of translanguaging, and how we use it to make sense of the data we report here. The chapter then presents an analysis of several tasks from the Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Language-Inclusive Teaching (PeCK-LIT) test to explore at a program level how teacher candidates appropriated languageinclusive teaching strategies. Connecting Translanguaging to Our Project

Throughout this book, we have used a generic term to refer to theoretical and practical approaches to language-inclusive teaching in mainstream classroom settings. The need for a more general term connects both to the project’s origins and to the instructional reality of the Supporting English Language Learners course at the heart of the project’s ethnographic case study. As we designed the project, we did not explicitly frame our analysis in terms of translanguaging. Similar to our early deliberations over terminology (English learner, bilingual learner, something else, as discussed in Chapter  3), we intentionally took an agnostic approach to the various frameworks in circulation for understanding multilingual classrooms, and how teacher candidates should learn to engage this multilingualism as they learned how to teach. With respect to the course, leveraging student languages in classroom instruction is one of its learning objectives. This goal not only reflects our obligation to orient teacher candidates on Ontario curriculum and policy documents regarding English as a second language (ESL) education (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of the contradictory messages in these documents regarding students’ full language repertoire). But also, course instructors each have their own pedagogical, professional and political commitments to including all student languages in the classroom and supporting teacher candidates to learn what this work means. At the same time, few of the course instructors orient their teaching around

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translanguaging specifically. In fact, most sections of the course use Coelho (2016) or Cummins and Early (2015) as the core texts (in addition to other research-based and practitioner-oriented texts). Written by leading Canadian scholars of the educational experiences of English learners in Canadian schools, both books adopt asset-based orientations to language-inclusive teaching strategies, but are not tied to the theoretical propositions behind translanguaging. In fact, Cummins and Early (2015) distinguish their approach from that of Ofelia García by clarifying their terminological preference for English language learner (ELL) over emergent bilingual. Our study was never designed as an evaluation of ‘how well’ candidates learned to support English learners or ‘how well’ we ‘implemented’ this new course. Lest our analysis becomes a measure of how faithful candidates’ words and deeds were to translanguaging as a theory of multilingualism, it would have been inappropriate to frame the entire study with a translanguaging lens. In this chapter, however, we do. As the opening vignette is meant to demonstrate, teacher candidates who participated in this study responded to and took up political and pedagogical propositions about multilingualism and leveraging students’ entire language repertoire in complex and, at times, contradictory ways. We argue that a translanguaging orientation to language-inclusive teaching can help us clarify the terms of these contradictions, and begin to see a way out of them. Building on this, in the next paragraphs we outline our understanding of translanguaging and describe the analytical framework we used to make sense of the data reported in this chapter. Following García and Li (2014), this research understands translanguaging as a way of conceptualizing the expanded complex practices of multilingual speakers. Translanguaging is more than a theory, in that it is a political stance that disrupts what is happening in schools. It is a liberating practice for multilingual children in schools. García (2017) and Li (2022) further argue that translanguaging pushes back against monolingual, English-only practices that work to colonize minoritized multilingual learners. A translanguaging approach to the classroom involves three complementary domains of stance, design and shifts (García et al., 2017). García et  al. (2017) state that a translanguaging stance understands multilingualism as a resource for supporting students as they engage with and comprehend texts and content, providing opportunities for students to develop linguistic practices for academic contexts, making space for students’ multilingualism and ways of knowing and supporting students’ socioemotional development and bilingual identities. In practice, Deroo et al. (2020) has found that integrating field and course learning is essential to developing a translanguaging stance; however, focusing on stance alone can present an over-idealization of what you can actually accomplish with translanguaging in the classroom.

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Design, on the other hand, has to do with instruction and assessment, and how language and cultural practices are integrated into the translanguaging classroom (e.g. grouping of students, elements of planning, objectives, culminating projects, design cycle, pedagogical strategies; García et al., 2017). A translanguaging design invites students to utilize their language repertoires across different modalities and in different subject areas (Tian, 2021). It makes the translanguaging corriente, which García et al. (2017) describe as the flow of students’ linguistic repertoires in the classroom either under the surface or in strong waves, not only visible and audible in the classroom, but also an explicit source of learning. Finally, translanguaging shifts refer to teachers and their flexibility in responding to student language practices during the course of a lesson and/or assessment in the many moment-by-moment decisions that teachers make all the time. Among multilingual learners, these shifts are often the norm rather than the exception. Translanguaging shifts are a fundamental element of multilingual learners’ critical multilingual awareness, allowing learners to access cognitively demanding content (Henderson & Ingram, 2018). From this perspective, the onus is then on teachers both to create space for themselves and to make translanguaging shifts happen in the classroom, so as to provide rich learning experiences for multilingual learners. In applying this understanding of translanguaging theory to interpret the data presented in this chapter, we draw on the analytical framework presented in Rajendram et al. (2022). This framework builds on a matrix first developed by Van Viegen and Zappa-Hollman (2020: 176) for use in post-secondary settings, wherein instructors might ‘observe, act and reflect on implementation of plurilingual pedagogies in the classroom and move from teaching based on monoglossic to heteroglossic ideologies’. The matrix that Van Viegen and Zappa-Hollman (2020) propose synthesizes Cenoz and Gorter’s (2017) distinction between spontaneous and intentional translanguaging; Lewis et al.’s (2012) distinction between classroom (planned and unplanned) and universal translanguaging; and other distinctions made in the literature between teacher- and studentdirected or pedagogic and non-pedagogic forms of translanguaging (Jones, 2017; Paulsrud et al., 2017). For our analysis of the unit plans, lesson plans and PeCK-LIT responses, Rajendram et al. (2022) developed a multi-dimensional framework that incorporates similar distinctions. The dimensions they identified were informed by the project’s research questions, and by what the research and literature on translanguaging have suggested to be important characteristics of translanguaging pedagogy for supporting multilingual learners. Table 7.1 presents the five dimensions of this adapted framework, along with brief descriptions of each dimension. Regarding the third and fourth dimensions in this framework, Rajendram et  al. (2022) note that in many cases, and perhaps predictably,

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Table 7.1  A framework for analyzing teacher-candidate orientations to and practice of translanguaging pedagogy Dimension 1: Monolingual and translanguaging orientations We use the term monolingual stance to refer to language norms where the ‘native speaker’ is used as the benchmark or the belief that mastering a language is necessary for communicative competence. A monolingual stance excludes home language use in the classroom. Following García et al. (2017: 50), we use a translanguaging stance to refer to a ‘mindset or framework’ that teachers adopt and draw upon to create a translanguaging classroom which informs the way educators view multilingual learners’ language and cultural practices. Dimension 2: Translanguaging as a temporary scaffold toward English-only and as a resource for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment We use the term translanguaging as a temporary scaffold toward English-only to refer to a ‘stance that solely includes translanguaging as a way to transition students to English’ (Kleyn & García, 2019: 73). We use the term translanguaging as a resource for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (Burton & Rajendram, 2019) to refer to a situation in which educators ‘view all linguistic features and practices of any given student as a resource in general and specifically for their learning’ (Kleyn & García, 2019: 73), and integrate students’ diverse language practices into the curriculum, classroom pedagogy and assessment to create a multilingual ecology (Van Viegen & Zappa-Hollman, 2020). Dimension 3: Teaching-directed translanguaging and student-directed translanguaging Teacher-directed translanguaging is when the teacher initiates, designs and directs activities incorporating the use of multiple languages in the classroom, whereas student-directed translanguaging is when multilingual learners independently initiate and choose how they use their diverse language practices to complete classroom activities (Jones, 2017). Dimension 4: Intentional and spontaneous translanguaging Intentional engagement with translanguaging refers to the intentional design and implementation of specific instructional strategies which activate students’ full linguistic repertoires, while spontaneous engagement with translanguaging refers to the unplanned, spontaneous, moment-by-moment discursive practices of multilingual learners that naturally occur inside and outside the classroom (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017). Dimension 5: Supporting monomodality and multimodality Teachers using a monomodal approach treat the modalities of reading, writing, listening and speaking as discrete skills in their learning goals, pedagogical practices and assessment. Teachers adopting a multimodal approach use a more fluid approach to literacies, going between and beyond linguistic structures and systems, and integrating various interconnected modes such as linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial (Li, 2011).

data coded as ‘teacher directed’ can often also be coded as ‘intentional’. Nevertheless, these dimensions remain conceptually distinct to allow for the fact that multilingual learners also plan for translanguaging and do not simply use their full language repertoire in spontaneous ways. Likewise, and in keeping with García et al.’s (2017) notion of translanguaging shifts, any analytical framework for understanding translanguaging must also include space for teachers’ spontaneous use of translanguaging strategies as they shift in response to the flow of a given lesson. In adapting the original matrix, Rajendram et  al. (2022) not only added two further dimensions, but also changed ‘or’ to ‘and’, since the data from our project rarely produced unidimensional thinking or practice with respect to including all student languages in instruction. Instead of dichotomizing the extremes of these continua or implying that one

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end of a continuum is necessarily preferred over the other, the intent is to focus on the nuances and complexities to help teacher candidates reflect on their own orientations and pedagogical practices related to translanguaging. Translanguaging and Candidates’ Shifting Subjectivities

With this understanding of translanguaging in mind, the chapter presents findings from the PeCK-LIT test data to consider how teacher candidates came to understand language-inclusive teaching (see the Appendix for more detailed information about this instrument). We discuss tasks and related items from both versions of the test, namely, the version Year 1 candidates were invited to complete in the first months of the MT program (fall 2018), as well as the version that Year 2 candidates were invited to complete near the end of the program (in winter 2019 and winter 2020). Considering candidate responses at these two different points in time reveals powerful insights about how they learned to think and act like teachers, and what the consequences of this shift in subject position might mean for their future multilingual learners. In the following discussion, we take you through two tasks from each version of the PeCK-LIT test. These tasks and related items emerged in our data analysis as particularly meaningful because they do not explicitly mention multilingualism or prompt for candidates’ stances toward it. Nor do they ask candidates about translanguaging or other languageinclusive teaching strategies. In this way, the genericness of these tasks and related items gave space to candidates, but did not explicitly require them to discuss their understanding, attitudes toward and/or potential uses of language-inclusive teaching strategies. And yet, it is precisely their understanding, attitudes toward or potential uses of language-inclusive teaching strategies that revealed themselves in these responses. The findings we present here are based on a content analysis of the open-ended responses to these tasks. We first used deductive analysis to code a candidate’s response for whether or not it mentioned a languageinclusive strategy. Among those responses that mentioned a languageinclusive strategy, we used inductive analysis to identify various types of strategies mentioned (e.g. multilingual resources, translation tools, contrastive analysis, peer support in same-language groups and affective dimensions of language-inclusive teaching). In a final interpretive step, we then used the framework presented in Rajendram et  al. (2022) to consider where these various types of language-inclusive strategies would be placed in the five dimensions of their framework. We also tabulated frequencies for both the deductive and inductive analysis; we report these frequencies as we discuss the tasks and related items, and provide a summary of these frequencies in Table  7.2. As with previous discussion of candidate responses to the PeCK-LIT test, we include brief descriptions

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Table 7.2  Comparison of Year 1 and combined Year 2 responses to selected PeCK-LIT test tasks Items

No. of responses with languageinclusive teaching strategies/total responses received (% of total responses)

Dominant patterns in responses

Year 1 responses (fall 2018) Red River Rebellion Grade 8 – history (Task 2)

How would you scaffold this task…?

50/307 (16.3%)

How might you accommodate an ELL with the research component…?

151/307 (51.1%)

King of the Forest Grade 6 – English language arts (Task 4)

What accommodations can be made… to support academic language development?

61/307 (19.5%)

Multilingual resources; translation tools

Year 2 responses (winter 2019 and winter 2020) Arlene and Ken-Shou Grade 5 – math (Task 1)

What type of tasks/ activities would you use to support… all their language skills?

23/225 (10.2%)

n/a

The Discombobulator Middle grades – English language arts (Task 4)

What kinds of peer learning activities would you use…?

29/225 (12.9%)

Peer support/ grouping

of the candidate with each response quoted here, based on the responses they provided to the demographic items on the test instrument. Recall as well that preliminary/junior (P/J) refers to candidates seeking certification for Grades  K–6, junior/intermediate (J/I) for Grades  4–10 and intermediate/senior (I/S) for Grades 7–12. Analysis of Year 1 responses from the PeCK-LIT test

The version of the PeCK-LIT test for Year  1 candidates included a task about a Grade 8 history lesson (see Figure 7.1). The task describes

Figure 7.1  Grade 8 history Task 2 from Version A of the PeCK-LIT test

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a hypothetical assignment related to the Ontario curriculum, in which students are asked to use multimodal resources to research a key moment of Indigenous resistance to Canadian settler-colonialism. The task was then followed by three open-ended items. The first of these asked candidates to describe, ‘How would you scaffold this task so that your students have the academic language and skills necessary to complete the assignment?’ Of the 307 candidate responses we received, 50 (16.3%) made explicit mention of language-inclusive teaching strategies. In presenting our analysis of these responses, we start with the outliers, that is, the responses we argue reflect a careful, nuanced understanding of the multilingual possibilities in the task described, as well as care for the well-being of their future students. For example, one candidate paid close attention to the affective dimensions of this hypothetical assignment. They wrote: I would definitely put the students in different groups. If there are a group of non-native English speakers, I would put them in a group first. The reason for this is because some people may not feel comfortable speaking out for clarification on an English term if the rest of the group seems to understand. By putting people who do not fully understand English together, but who understand some aspects of English more than others, I hope to make everyone comfortable enough to contribute. Then I would require each group to research a different aspect of the rebellion. Then they would share their findings with each other. Once they are done, I would assign them to different groups to create the drama. These new groups would have only one person who did research into a specific aspect, so it forces everyone to participate, listen, and contribute to the recreation. – I/S; grew up with English and Chinese; learned Latin and Ancient Greek at school; previous experience teaching adult ESL

Another candidate wrote about connecting Métis histories of resistance with other anti-colonial struggles in parts of the world that students might have more direct knowledge of. They wrote: I believe this task should begin with a discussion about how this event can be paralleled to other significant events in different countries that would relate to the students’ backgrounds. For example, in discussing the attempts of colonizing India as a parallel to said task can help orient students regarding the issues of colonization and imperialism within Canada. Furthermore, I would encourage discussion into why Metis would have responded in this manner and how they may be feeling to additionally support their actions. – I/S; grew up with Gujarati; learned in English only at school

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In four cases, candidates made direct connections between the multilingualism of this historical event and the multilingualism of the future classroom in which they might teach this lesson. In one such response, the candidate wrote: I would first provide a chart with key vocabulary words in English, French, Mitchif (Métis French) [sic], and empty columns to include students’ own native languages, that way they can understand the vocabulary more by making comparisons and contrasts across languages. Next, I would ask the students if they need help/clarifications on the task. I would also try my best to provide the primary sources in multiple languages to better prepare them to complete the task. – I/S; grew up with Persian and English; learned French at school

The last sentence in their response points to the language-inclusive teaching strategies mentioned far more frequently in candidates’ responses. Indeed, drawing on multilingual resources that students might use in their research (15 of the 50  responses that mentioned any language-inclusive strategies) and allowing them to use translation aids (21 of 50  responses) were the two most frequently named strategies in responses to this item. In the third item related to this task, we asked candidates: ‘How might you accommodate an ELL with the research component of this question? Provide at least one accommodation’. This question was more specific than the first in naming ‘an ELL’. Perhaps as a consequence, a much larger proportion of responses – 157 out of 307 (51.1%) – made explicit mention of language-inclusive teaching strategies. However, virtually all of these 157  responses named translation tools or multilingual resources that students could draw on in their research. In only seven responses was a different strategy named (i.e. having students work together in same-language groups during the research phase of the assignment, and making direct connections between this historical event and similar histories in other countries and/or cultures with which students are familiar). Candidates’ descriptions of how they would include translation tools and multilingual curricular resources reflected all of the contradictions of these teaching strategies as we discussed them in Chapter 6. To provide a few examples here, 72 responses mentioned multilingual resources that students might use for the research phase of this assignment. However, these resources were often quickly followed by the qualification that they must then be paired with English language texts. We read in these responses candidates’ concerns that multilingualism in the classroom should not be allowed to interrupt the learning of English. In this way, these responses reflect both a monolingual orientation to translanguaging pedagogies, and

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a scaffolding approach to translanguaging that focuses primarily on transitioning students to English. Examples of such responses include: can research in their home language so long as they can translate to english for report – I/S; grew up with English only; learned French and Spanish at school; previous experience teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Thailand Allow them to research in their own language but present ideas in English – J/I, grew up with English only; learned French at school I would pair the ELL student with an English student who can help them. I would also let them draw from 1 resource in their home language, though they would also need English resources. Additionally, they can use a dictionary when working in class. – I/S; grew up with English only; learned French at school; previous experience teaching ESL and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test prep

Not every response that mentioned multilingual resources clarified whether their use would be teacher or student directed. Among those that did, about half stated that the teacher would be responsible for providing these resources, while the other half put this responsibility on the multilingual learners themselves. The shifting of this responsibility to students is even more noteworthy given that the question was framed solely in terms of the teacher providing an accommodation. Similar to a point made in Chapter 6, we underscore this shifting of responsibility to students to suggest that not all student-directed translanguaging is necessarily ‘good’. That is, expecting students to initiate and be responsible for bringing all their language practices to bear on an instructional task can also transform this translanguaging approach into a burden or a chore. Finally, while a few responses discussed multilingual resources primarily in terms of helping students understand the content and meaning of the lesson on the Red River Rebellion, most discussed these resources as a scaffold to support students in expressing their understanding of this historical event in English. This stance toward language-inclusive teaching strategies was even more clearly evidenced in the 94 responses that mentioned student use of translation tools, or using multilingual resources specifically to help students translate key vocabulary into English. In this way, these responses presented another direct connection between monolingual orientations toward translanguaging and viewing translanguaging pedagogies

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Figure 7.2  Grade 6 English language arts Task 4 from Version A of the PeCK-LIT test

primarily as a transition to English. At the same time – and in keeping with the commitments of this book to root our analysis in a self-reflective

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manner, and to avoid analysis that seeks to name some teacher-candidate thinking and practices as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’ – we note here that these responses parallel the ‘accommodation’ frame that was present in the test item itself. This test item did not ask candidates to think beyond an accommodationist stance, and indeed, very few responses did so. Another task on this version of the PeCK-LIT test for Year  1 candidates reproduced a poem from a Ministry of Education resource to prepare students for the Grade  6 standardized test of English language literacy. After presenting the poem in full, the task presents a written response that one multilingual learner gave to a comprehension question about the poem (see Figure 7.2). The task is then followed by three open-ended questions. The second of these again uses the language of ‘accommodations’ to ask, ‘What accommodations can be made to this assignment to support Juanita with her academic language development? Provide at least two accommodations’. Of the 307 responses from candidates to this version of the test, 60 (19.5%) mentioned specific language-inclusive teaching strategies they would use to accommodate learners like Juanita. Similar to candidate responses to the first two items discussed above, using translation tools and multilingual resources was mentioned most frequently (in 39 and 16 responses, respectively). The following responses are typical of the rationales and level of detail candidates provided for using these strategies: Allow her to use a translator to understand words she is not familiar [with]. Provide her with an already translated poem. – P/J; grew up with English only; learned in English only at school Provide a side by side translation of the poem as well as support pulling specific lines of the poem to explain and provide evidence for her answer. – J/I; grew up with Arabic and English; learned in English only at school

We read these responses and many others like them as consistent with the themes we discussed earlier, namely framing other languages primarily as a scaffold to learn English more efficiently. Further, again connecting to a theme we discussed in Chapter 6, these responses not only reflected teacher-directed translanguaging strategies, but also viewed teachers as having the authority to decide when translanguaging pedagogies might support the learning objectives in a given lesson. However, not all responses that named translation or multilingual resources reflected these stances toward including all student languages. One I/S candidate who grew up with English and French at home but learned in English only at school wrote:

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Juanita is typically a name with Spanish roots and as such, I will suggest trying to rephrase the question in Spanish, allowing her to read the poem in Spanish (if possible), answer in Spanish, then attempt to answer again in English. Hopefully this will result in a deeper understanding and development of the English language for her and an ability to perform the exercise.

A P/J candidate raised only with English but who learned French and Mandarin in formal settings suggested: She can be given shorter passages at a time so that she can focus on understanding each section and become familiar with the vocabulary and its meaning before moving on. She may be offered a translated version to review as well in order to allow for understanding.

Responses such as these were less common, but nevertheless reflect knowledge among some candidates of how translation and multilingual resources might be used to deepen multilingual learners’ understanding of lesson content, and not merely as an expedient bridge to English. These responses assumed that teachers needed to plan for and initiate translanguaging pedagogies, but discussed doing so in ways that reflected the resource approach to translanguaging described in Table 7.1. These outliers underscore the frequency with which candidates framed translation tools and multilingual resources primarily as a way to develop multilingual learners’ proficiency in English. Analysis of Year 2 responses from the PeCK-LIT test

The candidate responses we include in this discussion are from two administrations of the Year 2 version of the PeCK-LIT test. In the winter 2019 administration, we received 104  responses; for these candidates, there is no Year  1 data with which to compare their answers, because they started the MT program before this test instrument was completed. The second administration includes responses we collected in late fall 2019 and winter 2020 (for ease, we refer to this second iteration simply as winter 2020). This spread in time suggests some of the complications in data collection, insofar as we had to rely on our MT colleagues’ generosity to create time in their courses for us to administer the test. The responses from this second iteration of the test, however, come from the same cohort of teacher candidates who responded to the Year 1 version discussed above. We offer these details to underscore that we cannot treat an analysis of Year 1 and Year 2 responses on a pre-post basis. Instead, we discuss Year 2 responses as a whole in this section, before moving on to a comparison of the Year 1 and Year 2 responses. The first task from the Year 2 version of the PeCK-LIT test discussed here relates to a Grade  5 lesson in mathematics (see Figure  7.3). The task introduces candidates to two multilingual learners, provides some

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Figure 7.3  Grade 5 mathematics Task 1 from Version B of the PeCK-LIT test

background on each and then reproduces both oral and written answers each student has given during math instruction. The task is then followed by three items (one closed and two openended). The third of these items asks, ‘Thinking now of Arlene and Ken-Shou, what type of tasks/activities would you use to support the development of all their language skills? Make suggestions for both students and provide your reasons’. Different from the items in the Year  1 version of the test discussed earlier, which referred to ‘academic language and skills’ and ‘accommodation’, respectively, this item asked about supporting ‘all their language skills’. Despite this broader framing, far fewer responses mentioned specific language-inclusive teaching strategies. Among the winter 2019 responses, only 8 of 104 candidates (7.5%) mentioned language-inclusive strategies, while among the winter 2020 responses, 15 of 121 candidates (12.4%) did so. Also different from the Year  1 responses, no strategies were mentioned with any greater frequency than others. Instead, candidates made reference to contrastive analysis, peer support, the affective benefits of including all student languages, as well as translation tools and multilingual resources for math instruction. Although there were considerably fewer responses among Year  2 candidates that referenced language-inclusive teaching strategies, those that did were typically more detailed and included references to specific rationales or concepts that candidates likely would have encountered in their MT program coursework. Examples of such responses include: Following universal design for learning, it would be prudent to explicitly teach vocabulary prior to engaging in lessons - especially when considering subject-specific content. This explicit instruction can also include aspects of grammar which would help English language learners in their language learning journey but also reinforce concepts that native English

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speakers may or may not know. Anchor charts referencing to both above points would act as a third teacher. Having dictionaries or areas where students can independently reinforce their learning (e.g. multilingual books) will also contribute to an emotional sense of wellbeing and belonging which may [result] in more L2 usage in the classroom. – P/J; winter 2020; grew up with English only; learned Spanish at school; previous experience teaching Spanish, EFL in Korea and ESL in Canada Translanguaging strategies might be useful to discuss grammatical structures in language. For example, allowing the students to translate the sentences to and from their L1 will allow a syntactical comparison and lead to a discussion for direct instruction. – P/J; winter 2020; grew up with English only; learned French at school For both students I would try to employ a plurilingual approach to my lessons by allowing them to make connections between their first language and English. Arlene looks like she needs help with speaking, so first I would assign her tasks that allow her to write down her answers before saying them aloud, and eventually moving towards speaking independently. For Ken-Shou, he needs support in building his vocabulary regarding more technical terms, which can be done by providing him with images, definitions, and explanations of terms that he would need to be successful. – I/S; winter 2020; grew up with English and Polish; learned French at school

Noteworthy among these responses is the presence of terminology more specific to language and language learning (‘grammatical structures’, ‘syntactical comparison’, ‘translanguaging strategies’, ‘a plurilingual approach’), as well as attention paid to different modalities of language use and learning. Additionally, these responses and others like them suggest an understanding of support for multilingual learners that goes beyond a one-off response to get through the lesson. Instead, they indicate knowledge that supporting multilingual learners with specific language-inclusive strategies is a long(er)-term responsibility of the teacher. The references in these responses to students’ other languages also framed them less as a scaffold for learning English and more as an object of study alongside English to learn about language per se, or what García et  al. (2017) refer to as general linguistic performance. Finally, these responses include different balances between teacher- and studentdirected translanguaging. In the first response cited above in particular, the candidate not only creates space for students to initiate the use of multilingual resources, but also, by having anchor charts and specific

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Figure 7.4  Middle-grade English language arts Task 4 from Version B of the PeCKLIT test

areas of the classroom set up in advance, the candidate seems aware of the spontaneous ways in which multilingual learners might decide to draw on multiple language practices during instruction. The other task from the Year 2 version relevant to this analysis is a different poem from the Grade  6 test preparation booklet provided by Ontario’s Ministry of Education related to the province’s standardized test of English language literacy (see Figure  7.4). This task has several parts. It begins by framing the purpose of the poem in conducting a

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classroom-based assessment of multilingual learners’ language proficiency. After presenting the poem, the task describes a question the teacher asked in response to reading the poem, and how two multilingual learners engaged in the activity. The task is then followed by three open-ended questions. The third of these asks, ‘What kinds of peer learning activities would you use as a teacher to encourage Fatima and her peers to learn from each other? Give two examples of such activities’. Similar to the responses from the first item discussed earlier, fewer responses to this item mentioned any specific language-inclusive teaching strategies as compared to Year 1 responses. Among the winter 2019 responses, 14 of 104 (13.5%) mentioned strategies to draw on all student languages, while 15 of 121 (12.4%) of the winter 2020 responses did so. In this case, responses from both iterations of the test mentioned languageinclusive peer-support strategies more frequently (e.g. pairing Fatima with other speakers of Nuer or Arabic). We attribute this frequency in part to the fact that the item specifically mentioned ‘peer learning activities’. Nevertheless, we observed considerably fewer connections to languageinclusive strategies in response to this item than among Year 1 responses. Also similar to responses from the first item, although there were fewer responses here that named specific language-inclusive teaching strategies, those that did were more detailed in what these strategies would be and how they might support the multilingual learners referenced in the item. Students could work with a partner to dramatically recreate a scene from the poem in the form of a tableau. Fatima could be paired with a friend she works well with, somebody who speaks her language, or with a student who is very proficient in English. The students could be asked to pick 5 difficult words from the text and make translations of them in different languages (their L1 or other languages). They could then get together in [a] small group of 4 and share their discoveries. – P/J; winter 2020; grew up with English only; learned French at school; previous experience as a bilingual educator at a Toronto museum Fatima seems to be relatively comfortable with her oral language, so collaborative learning strategies such as think-pair-share and group work would support her well. I also think that incorporating multilingual poetry into the classroom would allow Fatima and Raul to become experts and translators in the class. – J/I; winter 2019; grew up with English only; learned French, German, Latin, Ancient Greek and Chinese in formal settings; previous experience teaching EFL in China

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Perhaps pairing Fatima with someone who spoke her L1 but also understood English well would be helpful. One activity we could use could be shared reading within a group of 3-4, and after each paragraph have the person reading share their feelings/thoughts/relate to what they just read. Another one could be for students to pick their favourite word from the poem, and present it to their group - why is it their favourite? What is the definition? how do they relate to it? – I/S; winter 2019; grew up with Hindi and Punjabi; learned in English only at school

The richness of these responses includes attention to multimodal strategies to support student learning (e.g. dramatizing the poem and using tableaus). Additionally, candidates described instructional choices that would make the language-inclusive teaching strategies they named more public, and not simply something that multilingual learners do for and by themselves. Finally, and connected to a theme discussed in Chapter 5 with our analysis of interviews with teachers and teacher educators, candidates described the use of language-inclusive teaching strategies in ways that ‘would allow Fatima and Raul to become experts and translators in the class’, that is, positioning multilingual learners not as students who need extra help with a given assignment, but rather as experts with special knowledge from which everyone in the class can benefit. Comparing Year 1 and Year 2 responses

The previous sections describe responses that candidates made to two different versions of the PeCK-LIT test administered near the beginning and near the end of the MT program, respectively. Table  7.2 presents a summary of that discussion, focusing on the number of candidate responses on each test version that mentioned specific language-inclusive teaching strategies, what percentage of the total these responses comprised and whether there were dominant patterns in the responses. As discussed above and summarized in Table  7.2, we found that Year  1 candidates mentioned specific language-inclusive teaching strategies more often than Year  2 candidates. On the surface, this finding might seem counterintuitive. For one, the MT program as a whole adopts asset-based, social justice-oriented approaches to understanding diversity broadly, both in terms of how it attracts candidates to the program as well as how it prepares them for future classroom practice. For another, the program has a required course on Supporting English Language Learners. Despite the intellectual and political diversity with which instructors of this course frame multilingualism and what it means to include student languages in instructional practice, all sections of the course explicitly address language-inclusive teaching strategies. Nevertheless, the pattern is clear that as candidates neared the end of

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their program, they had less to say about language-inclusive teaching strategies in practice. This difference is more noteworthy because, as a reminder, we intentionally chose tasks and related items for this analysis that did not explicitly prompt candidates to consider language-inclusive teaching strategies. We argue that this provides more meaningful insights into the extent to which candidates considered student multilingualism as an instructional resource. Beyond the question of frequency, a second interesting pattern relates to the types of strategies addressed in responses. Although Year  1 candidates mentioned specific language-inclusive strategies more frequently, they typically focused on translation aids and multilingual resources as ways to support multilingual learners. As the analysis above argued, in most cases, candidates framed these two strategies from monolingual perspectives, and described them primarily as scaffolding tools to move multilingual learners to English more efficiently. By contrast, although Year 2 candidates mentioned language-inclusive strategies less frequently, they described these strategies in richer, more detailed ways that reflected a more nuanced mix of teacher- and student-directed translanguaging, planned and spontaneous translanguaging, as well as explicit attention to multimodal translanguaging practices in the classroom. We introduced the analysis of PeCK-LIT test data by stating that it provided powerful insights into how teacher candidates learn to think and act like teachers. We argue that these contradictory, perhaps counterintuitive patterns in the test data reveal that learning to think and act like teachers meant in large part learning to leave language-inclusive teaching strategies behind. These responses indicated that as candidates’ subject positions shifted over the course of the entire program from ‘student of teaching’ to ‘novice teacher’, supporting multilingual learners increasingly meant relying on English-only strategies. As Britzman (2003: 4) argued: ‘Much about the experience of learning to teach is negative: what to avoid, what not to do, and what not to become’. Recall the one candidate from Jeff’s cohort in winter 2017 cited above, who wrote, ‘My AT’s response was something along the lines of “OK there buddy, good luck with that. I want nothing to do with that”’. The message was clear: teachers don’t do this, but you can try if you want. While this is only one explicit message of ‘what not to do’, the PeCK-LIT test data suggest that, collectively, candidates had received similar messages, and had learned to avoid language-inclusive teaching strategies altogether. What makes this shift more apparent is the extent to which Year 1 candidates on their own (i.e. without specific training to be teachers generally or teachers of multilingual learners specifically) decided that translation aids and multilingual resources seemed reasonable ways to support multilingual learners. That is, and to play with the notion of spontaneity that has come to describe how translanguaging practices flow in multilingual classrooms, we might consider this a spontaneous

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approach to supporting multilingual learners, something logical, obvious, easy to carry out, even with some of the ideological limitations in how candidates framed these specific teaching strategies. The shift apparent in these data suggests that candidates are not building on these spontaneous approaches to language-inclusive teaching strategies and learning to think more critically or intentionally about them. Rather, in the program and the related practicum placements, candidates seem to be learning to avoid such practices and, instead, to use English only to support multilingual learners. These findings provide compelling evidence to substantiate the arguments that Daniels and Varghese (2020: 57) make about how ‘Whiteness and standardized English (in the US context) are powerfully intertwined and mutually constitutive, thus shaping the “conditions of possibility” (Rosa 2019: 5–6) for teachers and teacher educators’. As teacher-candidate subjectivity shifts and begins to inhabit the position of ‘teacher’, these data suggest that candidates are also learning – or perhaps are consolidating previous learning – that being a teacher means supporting multilingual learners using English only. The fact that this learning is equally present among racialized and multilingual candidates themselves only underscores the extent to which whiteness and the hegemony of English collaborate to foreclose opportunities for candidates to learn about, explore and practice translanguaging pedagogies and the stances that inform them.

8 Practices and Principles of Change Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Antoinette Gagné, Katie Brubacher, Wales Wong and Jennifer Burton

Introduction

In May 2022, one of the largest school boards in the Toronto area, indeed one of the largest in Canada, announced initiatives to address anti-Black racism within its English as a second language (ESL) programs (Raza, 2022). As part of these efforts, the board committed to introducing translanguaging pedagogies in its classrooms. One senior board administrator described this attention to translanguaging as ‘a significant shift … Most of our educators are having a better understanding of using the language, using the pieces of [students’] identity to their strength and to their benefit’ (cited in Raza, 2022, n.p.). Furthermore, these initiatives aimed to correct a long-standing practice of enrolling Black students in ESL programs based on misperceiving their ‘accents’ as evidence of a deficiency in English. These initiatives resulted from tireless advocacy and protests by Black and Muslim students, parents and community members, challenging the board to address racism in its schools. Their efforts led the Ministry of Education to intervene in fall 2019, by calling an inquiry into racism – specifically anti-Black racism – in this board (see Chadha et al., 2020). The inquiry and its findings were unequivocal. Not only did it find widespread practices of anti-Black racism in the board’s schools, policies and central administration, but also, its findings echoed almost verbatim the evidence of anti-Black racism in Toronto-area schools that researchers and activists had been documenting since at least the 1960s (see Aladejebi, 2021; James & Turner, 2017). For example, the report discussed at considerable length the long-standing practice of streaming Black students into programming considered lower track, and the role that teachers’ racial stereotypes play in the streaming process. It also documented the extent of explicitly racist language used by staff and students within its schools. However, the report did not consider the intersection of these two forms of racism, that is, how teachers’ racialized perceptions of Black language practices have led to Black students regularly being placed in 186

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ESL programming. In the two years since the report was published, it is precisely this intersection that is now being addressed in policy and practice. The board’s senior administrator responsible for anti-racism discussed how this intersection between anti-racism initiatives and the board’s ESL programming came to light. In response to a ministry directive requiring the board to conduct a diversity audit of all its programs, this senior administrator clarified that ESL programs are now part of such a review. She stated, ‘part of that [audit] would be assessments charting student progress’. Referencing the streaming of Black students into ESL programs, she continued, ‘We’re attending to those biases and those manifestations of racism that are standing in the way of students doing well, so they end up being placed where they need to be placed so they can get on with their schooling’ (cited in Raza, 2022, n.p.). These initiatives are just getting started as we complete this book. As such, time will tell what change these efforts will bring to improve the experiences of Black and other racialized multilingual learners in this board. For example, it seems obvious why the board understands the streaming of Black students into ESL programming as racist and seeks to end this practice. However, it is not (yet) clear how the board understands translanguaging pedagogies as part of broader anti-racist initiatives. Nevertheless, we open this final chapter with these developments as they underscore the major themes articulated throughout this book. On the one hand is the stability and ongoing reproduction of a hierarchy of racialized and minoritized languages – and the people who speak them – in Ontario. This hierarchy not only organizes school life, but also directly shapes the material and ideological contexts in which teacher candidates learn how to teach and learn how to work with multilingual students. On the other hand, the learning contexts onto which this hierarchy is mapped are constantly changing. The major thread running through this book is an effort to make sense of these (dis)continuities, so as to identify which kinds of change can challenge, if not also overcome, the stability in the racial and linguistic ordering of Ontario schools. Indeed, the impetus for this very study was an instance of change. As detailed in Chapter 1, the province initiated a major reform of its teachereducation policy in 2015, requiring all programs to support teacher candidates in learning about ‘English language learners’ (ELLs) through curricular and practical experiences. In Chapter  5, we discussed how teacher-education programs in the province understood this mandate, and how it was taken up in their curriculum. In Chapters 4, 6 and 7, we reported from multiple perspectives how our own program at the University of Toronto made sense of this change. In creating a new course on Supporting English Language Learners that all teacher candidates must complete, the program opened up new opportunities for candidates to consider multilingual learners as part of their future classroom practice.

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Throughout this book, we have examined this change not as a linear process of implementation, starting with the province’s decision ‘at the top’ and documenting its impact ‘on the ground’. Rather, we have framed our interpretation as one of policy appropriation: how teacher candidates and teacher educators have made sense of and brought this policy to life in relation to various policy and curriculum documents; in relation to program and university or school board structures; in relation to themselves and their own experiences with multilingualism, with multilingual learners, with their peers; and in relation to hegemonic ideologies, such as the hierarchy of racialized and minoritized languages that we have argued exists in Ontario. By framing the interpretation in this way, our aim was to avoid an analysis that grouped people or their ideas and practices into fixed categories of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Not only does this kind of descriptive approach to analysis tell us what we probably already know – or at least it tells us what we want to hear – but it also forecloses opportunities to consider more carefully what kinds of change we do need and how to realize them in teacher education. To be clear, we have critiqued some ideas and practices we found in the data, at times quite sharply. Indeed, a goodly portion of the analysis in this book has documented the reproduction of hegemonic whiteness, and the idealized forms of academic English associated with it, through teacher education. However, the purpose of these critiques has been to move beyond merely describing what we observed, and instead to explain how the racial and linguistic ordering of schools can interrupt, and at times even foreclose, opportunities for change. Similar to the distinction between description and disruption made by Chang and Viesca (2022), we argue that these explanations help us better understand, both in theory and in practice, the kinds of change we want to see for multilingual learners in Ontario schools. We underscore the contradiction between stability in the hierarchy of racialized and minoritized languages and the extent of and attention to change in our analysis of teacher-candidate learning not only to recall the big ideas in this book, but also to frame expectations for what this concluding chapter can and cannot do. This contradiction prevents us from arguing for one or two fixed solutions that can resolve it. Rather, in this closing chapter, we revisit the main findings we have presented in this book, and respond to them with a discussion of guiding principles and a suite of teacher-education practices that flow from them. We treat these practices and principles as opportunities to gain awareness of, and to begin to challenge, the co-naturalization of language and race that so deeply shapes teacher-candidate learning about multilingual learners. Along the way, we include brief perspectives from various members of the research team, in which they reflect on the main arguments introduced in this book and what it means for them to enact teacher education in ways that center multilingual learners and challenge racism.

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Principles of Change

The analysis we have presented throughout the book has relied on Daniels and Varghese (2020) and Rösch (2019) to make sense of our study’s findings. These essays were produced in different contexts (i.e. the United States and Germany), and they share different intellectual reference points. Nevertheless, they each take seriously the relationship between racism and language, and what this relationship means for teacher education and teacher-candidate learning. By extending Flores and Rosa’s (2015) notion of white listening subjects to theorize teacher education as a form of white institutional listening, Daniels and Varghese (2020) provide a powerful framework for understanding how the social categories of race and language collaborate to produce the material and ideological conditions in which teacher candidates learn how to teach. Moreover, their reading of Britzman (2003) is an important reminder that teacher-candidate thinking and practice are not fixed, but are contingent responses to specific problems of practice. We have drawn on their arguments so as to avoid presenting our participants’ thinking and practice with respect to multilingual learners as static, even when we have argued at times that their thinking and practice are part of reproducing a hierarchy of racialized and minoritized languages in Ontario schools. For its part, the Rösch (2019) essay also centers on the relationship between racism and language. However, it is working within different analytical and disciplinary traditions, specifically renewed attention in critical German-language scholarship to (neo-)linguicism. The essay teases out different dimensions of linguicism, introducing the term Lingualisierung to theorize the social process that essentializes individuals and groups based on the single characteristic of language. This form of discrimination is important for Rösch’s analysis, but so too are forms of privilege that accrue to those who speak – and who are perceived as speaking – a dominant language. This attention to privilege is characteristic of Rösch’s argument to resist binary or static thinking about how racism and language interact. It has informed our efforts to better understand why participants in our study who themselves are speakers of racialized languages in Canada at times also reproduced deficit perspectives about multilingual learners. Both essays share assumptions in their critique of how race and language collaborate to shape the conditions in which teacher candidates learn how to teach. As important, they are ultimately committed to change, that is, to challenging, indeed overcoming raciolinguistic and lingualisierende ideologies and practices. In both essays, the authors view reflective thinking and reflexive practice as key strategies for this change. However, as Lackner (2022) has argued, it is the ‘stuff’ upon which teacher candidates should reflect where the two essays begin to diverge. For Daniels and Varghese (2020), their vision of change starts

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with teacher-candidate subjectivities. If teacher education often works to reproduce whiteness as a taken-for-granted norm, then centering raciolinguicized teacher subjectivities is necessary to challenge hegemonic whiteness in teacher education. At the same time, the specificity of teacher-candidate subjectivities means it is not possible to simply produce a list of ‘best practices’ for teacher education. They argue: …we call for a kind of teacher education that asks teachers to consider the consequences of whatever they do for the particular subjectivities in the room. What might it mean to enact a particular practice in light of who we are and who our students are—and in particular, our gendered, classed, raciolinguicized, and intersectional subjectivities? Rather than a teacher education program that centers practices and asks teachers to consider the interaction between a practice and his or her subjectivity as an afterthought, we argue for teacher education that centers teacher subjectivity as defining of practice itself. Who we are—who we are in relationship with and how we are seen and heard—shapes what we do, and being reflective and critically reflexive of this, needs to be at the core of teaching. (Daniels & Varghese, 2020: 61; emphasis original)

By contrast, Rösch (2019) argues against an approach to reflexive practice that starts with the identity positions of teacher candidates themselves. For Rösch, connecting reflexive practice to candidates’ identity positions risks flattening their deliberations over linguicism into binary categories of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’. Rather, Rösch (2019: 188; our translation) suggests that reflexive perspectives be based on content that is ‘independent of teacher candidates’ and instead relates to the subjects that candidates are learning how to teach. As examples, she lists using curricular materials produced in the countries from which (im)migrant families in a given school have emigrated, or analyzing international comparative assessments of student achievement that include countries that have been more successful than Germany in combating social inequality. Rösch does consider the specific knowledge that multilingual teacher candidates have, and what role it plays in reflexive teacher-education practices. However, she stresses that these students should ‘not be reduced’ to being competent in ‘migrant languages’. That is, their insights are not only important because of their ability to speak minoritized languages. Rather, they should also be ‘considered as experts in all relevant languages—including German’ (Rösch, 2019: 188; our translation). We do not treat their arguments as ‘sides’ one must choose. In fact, the vignette that opens this book is an example of a learning opportunity for teacher candidates premised on both essays’ contentions: connecting empirical studies of the experiences of racialized and language-minoritized students to teacher-candidate subjectivities as the starting point of a course called Supporting English Language Learners. Rather, we

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highlight this distinction in how Rösch (2019) and Daniels and Varghese (2020) envision change because the data from our project offered different – and, we contend, complementary – ways to engage this notion of raciolinguicized subjectivities in teacher education. In the next section, we highlight several practices of change emerging from our study that supported teacher candidates in understanding and beginning to challenge the collaboration of race and language in shaping the schools in which they will teach. PERSPECTIVE: ENGAGING RACIOLINGUICIZED TEACHER SUBJECTIVITIES Shakina Rajendram One of the main principles for change that has guided my work with teacher candidates is that centering multilingual learners in our teaching cannot be done without engaging who we are, and our own multilingualism, in the endeavor. The same essentialist and binary thinking which appears in many policy and curricular documents usually surfaces in the early conversations I have with teacher candidates in my sections of the Supporting English Language Learners course. When asked what multilingualism means to them, and who they think multilingual learners are, many candidates’ responses allude to the existence of fixed and binary categories such as monolingual vs. multilingual, ELLs vs. non-ELLs, mainstream vs. ESL, first language (L1) vs. second language, and native vs. non-native. In my practice as a teacher educator, the first step in unpacking, challenging and deconstructing teacher candidates’ understanding of these categories is to urge them to consider the complexities and intersectionalities in their own linguistic, racial and social identities. Taking up Daniels and Varghese’s (2020) call for teacher subjectivity and reflexivity to be centered in teacher education, I ask teacher candidates to reflect on the languages in their lives and how those languages interact with each other, the plurality of multilingualisms that they have encountered, their experiences, challenges and successes as language learners, and how language shapes their ideas about race and vice versa (Alim et al., 2016). These questions have prompted reflections such as these: • • • •

‘It’s hard to say what my first language and second language are because I’ve always spoken both English and Arabic at home’. ‘Growing up, I wasn’t sure where I belonged. It felt like I had to choose my Korean side or my Canadian side’. ‘I used to think I was a monolingual. Now that I realize how many languages are in my family, I’m not sure anymore’. ‘I moved to Canada when I was nine. I had learned English for many years in my home country, but I was still put into ESL’.

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• •

‘I speak three languages fluently but I wouldn’t be considered a native speaker of any of those languages’. ‘Before I started my practicum, I was told by my associate teacher (AT) that there were no ELLs in the class. On my first day, I was surprised to find out that half the students speak at least two languages’.

These reflections have served as the starting point for candidates in understanding the heterogeneity of their own and their learners’ multilingual identities and repertoires, problematizing binary categories which reduce racialized multilingual learners to their proficiency in English, discussing how learners’ multilingualism is positioned and supported (or not) in schools, and critically reflecting on their prior assumptions about language, language learning and language learners. Once my teacher candidates become critically aware and reflexive of their personal subjectivities (Daniels & Varghese, 2020) as well as the challenges facing racialized multilingual learners in schools, the ‘how to’ of teaching multilingual learners follows quite naturally. As Rösch (2019) suggests, equipping teacher candidates with the specific pedagogical content and language knowledge that they will need as future teachers of multilingual learners can be done through the use of content and material related to the learners and the subjects they are preparing to teach. However, I have found that only using content that is ‘independent of teacher candidates’ (Rösch, 2019: 188; our translation) runs the risk of depersonalizing their learning, or creating the impression that teacher candidates can learn how to support multilingual learners in an objective manner, independent of their biases and subjectivities. Teacher candidates’ personal identities are very much intertwined with their professional work in the classroom, and they bring their histories, lived experiences with race and language, and ideas about teaching and learning into their work with learners. As Daniels and Varghese (2020) argue, who teacher candidates are and what they have seen and heard (and I would add, what they have thought, felt and done) shape how and why they think, act and teach in the way they do. Below, I share narratives from two teacher candidates, Marcela and Subi, who were prompted to reflect on their past experiences with language, and how these relate to their future work with multilingual learners. Marcela wrote: I am a Romanian immigrant, having arrived in Canada ten years ago. Thus, I am an English language learner myself and, as such, I have a shrewder understanding of the many challenges faced by the Ontario students whose first language is not English… Using English as an English language learner in an English-speaking country was a very different experience from learning English as

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a foreign language… I experienced this striking distinction firsthand, when I moved to Canada… I was ever so self-aware of the shortcomings in my command of English, my pronunciation, and my accent. I felt I could never be as intelligent, complex, refined and subtle when I express myself in English, as I was when I communicated in my home language. I share with my multilingual students their questioning of their own identity and many of their struggles. When students are negotiating their identities in the process of learning, teachers are also defining their identities as educators… Ideally, our identity expands and grows with our new roles and changing life situations. Unfortunately, in reality it often happens that our core, original identity is bruised or even broken by the imperative to adjust to the new contexts and new languages. To become a wellrounded individual, with inner strength and strong emotional roots, that should not happen. How do we, as educators, encourage the healthy integration of the new language and the new identity so as to ensure the growth of the individual, rather than their diminishing or devaluation? How do we support our English language learners in a differentiated manner, without furthering their marginalization? The search for answers to these questions and the tension brought by them motivate and guide my professional journey. Subi wrote: Due to the oppression of my people back home which led to the civil war, Tamil culture, Tamil people, and the Tamil language has always been a target, even to this day. My first language is a very important aspect of my identity. A ​ t home, my parents have never shied away from speaking about issues related to the civil war in Sri Lanka. Knowing the injustices that my people face at the hands of the government, and the attempts at blatant erasure of our culture and our language has always made me want to learn Tamil and raise my children in a Tamil speaking household. I strongly feel that it is important to carry the language to the next generation. I remember when I was growing up [in Canada], teachers would always remind students to speak only in English. Any time someone would speak in their first language, teachers would warn them, and this led to other students policing ELLs as well, reminding them to only speak English, even when the teacher wasn’t there… Just as my mother tongue is close to my heart, I recognize that

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many of the ELLs who I may teach will feel the same way about their culture, language, and identity. It is important for me to not only use their L1 as a tool to help them learn English, but to also show that their L1 is important on its own and has a place in society at large. Approaching language learning in the classroom with a translanguaging lens will inform my teaching to achieve this goal. What teacher candidates’ reflections such as these have shown me is that it is necessary that candidates examine how their approach to supporting multilingual learners may be influenced by their experiences with language, multilingualism and race. At the same time, to avoid reducing the identity positions of teacher candidates to the binary categories of ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’ as Rösch (2019: 188) warns, any retrospection and introspection needs to lead to an openness to shifts in their subjectivities and teacher identities, and a centering of multilingual learners in their practice. Practices of Change

The practices of change we offer in this section emerged from the data in our study, and flow from the guiding principles discussed above, namely centering raciolinguicized subjectivities in the learning process. However, we do not pretend that these practices are fully formed or otherwise ‘perfect’; nor do we claim that these are the only practices that matter or that are possible. Instead, we situate these practices in relation to the major findings from our study as reported in previous chapters, and demonstrate the opening, the potential for transformative learning we observed in and through these practices of change. Consistent with the reflexive stance we have taken throughout the book to think about our own research and teaching in critical ways, we understand that the practices we introduce below will continue to change based on our own learning, and on how teacher candidates represent what they have learned from these activities. Me Maps and learning from multilingual learners

In Chapter 4, we identified an important contradiction in how multilingual learners are imagined to be. We analyzed teacher-educator and teacher-candidate understanding of multilingual learners in light of policy and curriculum documents governing English language education, of their experiences working with multilingual learners and of their experiences as multilingual educators themselves. This analysis revealed the role that language plays in (re)producing racial hierarchies in Ontario. Yet, we also noted compelling insights from teachers and teacher

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educators about framing multilingual learners as experts, from whom teachers and teacher candidates can and should learn. In particular, we highlighted the case of one teacher and the deficit perspectives present throughout her comments about multilingual learners. However, once she began to discuss what she had learned from multilingual learners about their lives, we identified how her thinking began to change. This notion of positioning multilingual learners as experts and as teachers themselves constitutes an important practice of change. In our project, this practice of change was connected most directly to Me Maps that multilingual learners created. By engaging with Me Maps in the Supporting English Language Learners course at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), teacher candidates came to see the breadth and depth of learners’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge, strengths, skills, experiences and needs. After watching the Me Map videos, teacher candidates completed various activities, such as researching the learners’ home countries, languages and cultures; assessing learners’ oral language, reading and writing proficiency; making recommendations for individualized strategies and accommodations to support the learners; and creating holistic profiles of the learners. Teacher candidates also engaged in several activities to create Me Maps based on their own lives, for example, with a plurilingual portrait activity (Busch, 2018), as seen in Figure 8.1. Teacher candidates who engaged with Me Maps and the pedagogical activities related to them remarked that getting to know themselves and their learners better helped them to see that there was so much more to multilingual learners than their ‘ELL’ status. Natalia, a teacher candidate who was a newcomer to Canada when she was young, asserted the

Figure 8.1  Teacher candidates’ plurilingual teacher portraits

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importance of viewing multilingual learners more holistically instead of assigning them to categories based on language: With the students, we kind of box them up, we’re like, you know, ‘Yes, they are ELL learners and this is their L1’…You can’t evaluate a person’s intelligence of academia based on just the languages they speak. When it comes to your learners, this is what I’ve learned, you have to really take every single thing in account.

Similarly, for Samira, who had been labelled an ELL in school, Me Maps helped her develop a fuller sense of multilingual learners’ identities. She noted, ‘When they start talking, you start learning things about them that are from their home environment or their culture. And that adds so much depth to their identity’. Brenda, the teacher candidate we introduced in Chapter 2, remarked that she is now able to look at other aspects of the learners’ identities beyond their ELL status: ‘I’m looking at their strengths and interests rather than just the fact that they’re ELLs… Oftentimes, teachers are focusing on the fact that they are just ELLs, but there’s so much more than simply that title of being an ELL’. Having seen the wide range of knowledge, skills, interests and experiences represented in learners’ videos, Mira commented that ‘I would see it now from a more positive light, like it’s an added value to be an ELL’. Other teacher candidates explained how Me Maps helped them to debunk some of the negative stereotypes or narrow descriptions of multilingual learners that they had heard or read about, and to ‘humanize’ the learners. According to Mina, I think it [watching the videos] helps to just humanize their needs… we just talk so much about, you know, like differentiated learning for ELLs, and like the specific needs, but we never actually get to meet who these learners are except for other than our practicum. We read about it on the news, the statistics, so it’s just nice to put a real human face and body into these needs…. This helps to show us that these learners aren’t just numbers, that they do have interests and they do have strengths… It’s important to focus on that asset-based perspective, because otherwise it can be really easy to tokenize their experiences and then, it could also funnel into more stereotypes.

On the same note, Desmond, an international teacher candidate from China, spoke about the common stereotypes that he had heard about learners from China, and the importance of getting to know each learner personally: I also always hear people talking about some stereotypes on people from Chinese background. One of the most common stereotype is Chinese

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people are shy… But actually there should be a platform like Me Mapping to let outside people to know more about Chinese people, because for some of them, let’s say Carissa [who created a Me Map for the project]… if you try to give them more time, talk with them, probably you’re going to see, you’re going to know more about them in terms of their personality. So, I think it’s kind of like, debunk people’s stereotype… she’s different from what people think of her.

For Justin, a teacher candidate who was born and grew up in Canada speaking English only, watching the videos of learners during the course was the first time he had exposure to multilingual learners with refugee backgrounds. He noted that this brought him the awareness that such learners were not defined by that background or experience: When I watch these videos, it was for me the first time I had exposure to students from that [refugee] background. And one thing I learned is they’re not defined by that experience. They’re not defined as a refugee. It’s just one part of their background and they have so much more going for them. They have so many interests, so many passions. Rema [who created a Me Map for the project, is a] very outgoing, energetic, enthusiastic, young girl, and she’s not defined by that background. Another thing I got from the video was that many of these students are multilingual. They’ve learned multiple languages in their home country, and in Canada they’re learning English and French, and maybe other languages.

Justin’s realization that multilingual learners were, in fact, plurilingual and pluricultural learners who could not be defined by one linguistic or cultural background was representative of the experiences of many teacher candidates who engaged with Me Maps during the course. The Me Map videos created in this project did not capture the full extent of the diversity that exists among multilingual learners in Canada. However, they provided various pedagogical affordances for teacher candidates to learn from multilingual learners beyond – and often in contrast to – the descriptions and categorizations of such learners as found in ministry policy and curriculum documents. This is an important difference to underscore: learning about multilingual learners, or learning from them. We have noted, for example, the various ways in which the STEP assessment framework for English language proficiency is taken up in practice, both in school boards, in teacher-education programs in Ontario generally and in the Supporting English Language Learners course specifically. With respect to the course, we described elsewhere how STEP forms the basis of a case study that candidates must complete about a multilingual learner; how course instructors use videos of conversations with multilingual learners and samples of their written work to learn how to place those learners on

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STEP and choose appropriate teaching strategies in response; and how candidates use STEP to produce unit plans as their culminating assessment for the course. What makes learning about multilingual learners different is that it is filtered through a teaching resource that positions English as the desired outcome for multilingual learners. In other words, STEP not only imagines multilingual learners to be in a certain way, but it also projects what they are expected to become. As we have argued throughout this book, these expectations not only shaped teachercandidate learning, but interrupted their emergent thinking and practice with respect to language-inclusive teaching. By contrast, the kind of learning from multilingual learners we advocate here starts with those learners themselves, how they present themselves to be, and how they want to be understood. It is from this starting place that two important learning opportunities emerge. First, teacher candidates can learn to plan and develop instructional strategies that are based on multilingual learners’ expanding linguistic and cultural repertoires as those learners describe them. Second, teacher candidates can learn to engage formal curriculum, assessment and policy documents from the perspective of multilingual learners, not from the perspective of these documents and how they imagine multilingual learners to be. In this way, and similar to Seltzer’s (2022) proposed activities for close readings of curriculum documents, teacher candidates can learn to engage formal ministry documents critically as they learn how to work with multilingual learners in the classroom. Supporting a more holistic understanding of translanguaging

A second set of practices of change that emerge from this study relates to the potential of translanguaging pedagogies. In Chapter  7, we identified a paradox in how teacher candidates come to understand translanguaging as a theory and the pedagogies informed by it. As candidates entered our teacher-education program, we noted the extent to which they named language-inclusive strategies (e.g. translation tools and using multilingual teaching resources) as ways to support multilingual learners in the classroom. Whatever the limitations in candidates’ understanding of these strategies (i.e. using other languages to get to English faster), they seemed open to drawing on students’ entire linguistic repertoire at least as a resource for learning, if not (yet) as an explicit learning outcome in and of itself. By contrast, as candidates gained more experience in the program and in the classroom through various practicum placements, they seemed to have learned that supporting multilingual learners in practice means working with such learners in English only. The evidence suggests that the further teacher candidates moved toward being a teacher, the further they moved toward Englishonly perspectives and practices.

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As we presented those data, however, we were careful to stress that not all teacher candidates shifted their thinking and practice in this way. In fact, we shared compelling insights from teacher candidates as they neared the end of the program about which kinds of translanguaging pedagogies they might use in the classroom and why. In the following discussion, Shakina begins by reflecting on several practices she has developed in her work in the Supporting English Language Learners course that have helped teacher candidates to develop a more holistic understanding of translanguaging in both theory and practice. The section then continues with a discussion of practicum placements and how teacher candidates learned to push their thinking about translanguaging forward. We close the section by addressing the challenges that candidates faced in terms of translanguaging approaches to assessment, and present alternatives based on reinterpretations of extant assessment policies governing Ontario schools. Translanguaging as modelled in curriculum resources

Shakina Rajendram As we have noted throughout the book, many teacher candidates demonstrate an openness toward using students’ languages. However, they are often unsure about how to bring translanguaging into their teaching in pedagogically effective ways; recall, for example, the vignette that opened Chapter  7 and the doubts candidates expressed about translanguaging as theory and as practice. In the sections of the Supporting English Language Learners course that I have taught, I have learned more about the conditions that bridge the gap between translanguaging stance and pedagogy (García et al., 2017) and create a more holistic understanding of translanguaging among teacher candidates. Specifically, teacher candidates have benefited from seeing examples of how translanguaging can be seamlessly integrated into unit and lesson plans designed around the Ontario curriculum expectations. In my sections of the course, I introduce teacher candidates to the Translanguaging in Curriculum and Instruction: A CUNY-NYSIEB Guide for Educators (Hesson et  al., 2014). This guide provides examples of various translanguaging strategies (e.g. multilingual research, translanguaging with multi-genre writing, cognate charts and vocabulary inquiry across languages) and how they can be used to help multilingual learners address the learning standards articulated in the New York State curriculum. I ask teacher candidates to engage with the translanguaging strategies presented in the guide by thinking about how they can be adapted for Ontario classrooms and taught across grade levels and subjects. Brenda, a teacher candidate in one of my classes whom we introduced in Chapter  2, was particularly interested in the multilingual research

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Table 8.1  Brenda’s graphic organizer incorporating multimodal translanguaging strategies Habitat: Animal: Media type

Write in your own words (home language)

Habitat: Animal: Write in your own words (English)

Write in your own words (home language)

Habitat: Animal: Write in your own words (English)

Write in your own words (home language)

Write in your own words (English)

Video Online article Book/dictionary Radio/podcast

strategy from the CUNY-NYSIEB guide. She incorporated this strategy into a Grade  4 science lesson that she designed on the topic of Understanding Life Systems Habits and Communities. In her annotations of the lesson, Brenda explained: Through this lesson, students will have the opportunity to see how being multilingual has a real-life value, as it can give them a wider scope of information to better understand the world around them, view issues from multiple perspectives, and bridge connections across different sources (Hesson et al., 2014). Ultimately, encouraging the growth of students’ multilingual identities can help students to become more critical of their information consumption.

In the lesson, Brenda planned for students to work in groups of two or three ‘to strengthen their research skills from a multilingual, multimedia perspective’. Multilingual learners would research their chosen habitats and animals using various multilingual, multimedia resources such as podcasts, documentaries, articles and artwork, and they would record their learning in the graphic organizer in Table 8.1. This teaching resource contrasts with another unit plan, described in Chapter  2, which Brenda created with a small group. There, multilingual resources were also provided, but framed as an accommodation for specific learners to use on their own to meet the learning objectives. Here, by contrast, the lesson that Brenda designed individually after seeing the exemplars in the CUNY-NYSIEB guide demonstrated her expanding knowledge about how to incorporate translanguaging strategically and intentionally into lessons based on the Ontario curriculum, as a resource for all learners. By making space literally on this graphic organizer, Brenda demonstrates how she would make space figuratively in the classroom for multiple languages and modalities.

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Figure 8.2  Identity text created by Preena’s group

Translanguaging as modelled by teacher educators

Shakina Rajendram I believe that teacher candidates benefit from seeing a translanguaging pedagogy modelled by their instructors in their teacher-education courses. Therefore, in the classes I teach, I always model to my teacher candidates how to teach using a translanguaging pedagogy by designing translanguaging activities in which they participate as learners. After experiencing translanguaging activities first-hand, many teacher candidates have found creative ways to adapt and include them in their own lesson plans. For example, in one of my classes, I asked students to work in small groups to create identity texts with a translanguaging component. Figure 8.2 is taken from a group I Am From identity text created by a teacher candidate in the primary/junior division, Preena, and her two group members.​ Preena adapted this identity text activity for a Grade  3 procedural writing unit plan that she developed in her small group. The culminating task for the unit was ‘an identity text [for learners] to share cultural practices with peers and thereby learn others’ practices to create a more accepting and knowledgeable classroom environment’. Preena and her group planned for all learners to create a multilingual procedural identity text ‘for the purpose of teaching peers how to do an activity (e.g. dancing, cooking, playing sports) that pertains to the student’s culture and background’. Preena’s group ‘hope[d] that students will be able to see their cultural practices reflected positively through this form of identity text while concurrently building their writing skills, including research, drafting and revising, editing, and finally, publishing their work’. The group incorporated various translanguaging strategies that I had modelled in class into their unit plan to scaffold the identity text project, as shown in Figure 8.3.

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PERSPECTIVE: MODELLING THE POTENTIAL AND VULNERABILITY OF BRAVE SPACES Jennifer Burton In 2021, I was invited to lead a series of workshops for teacher candidates as a teaching assistant in a teacher-education program in Ontario on supporting multilingual learners in K–6 classrooms. The workshops were part of an initiative that aimed to address the lack of diversity and equity in the teacher-education curriculum. When I introduced teacher candidates to the STEP framework, one student responded: ‘can I really ask English language learners where they are from and what languages they speak?’ For me, this question highlighted the inherent invisibility of multilingual learners’ diverse linguistic resources and helped me better understand how schools reproduce linguistic and racial order. It also underscored the discomfort and tension to really ‘go there’, that is, to discuss the relationship between language and racism that Jeff narrated in the opening vignette in Chapter 1. I have considered how conversations about language, multilingualism and race are often fraught with anxiety and fear of doing or saying the ‘wrong’ thing; sometimes, it might feel safer to not do or say anything at all. I also recognize that being able to opt out of difficult conversations comes from a place of privilege. Working on this research project over the past three years has helped challenge my thinking and expand my perspective to better understand the inextricability of language and race, and to examine how racism is reproduced in language policies and practices. I sit in my own discomfort doing this work to examine my role in these processes and my responsibility to do something different. Doing critical anti-racist work in language education evokes feelings of discomfort, anxiety and fear, and addressing racism can be emotionally charged (Kubota, 2021). From a place of curiosity, I attune to the emotions that surface in this learning and unlearning process. In thinking with Rösch (2019) about the openness required to shift subjectivities and teacher identities, and Sensoy and DiAngelo’s (2017) caution to notice our defense reactions, I am drawn to the concept of brave spaces (in place of safe spaces) proposed by Arao and Clemens (2013), who question the appropriateness of safety as a reasonable expectation for honest conversations about social justice. To better prepare for dialogue on issues of power, privilege and oppression, Arao and Clemens (2013) argue that an emphasis on courage is needed in place of the illusion of safety. This shift encourages students to ‘be brave in exploring content that pushes them to the edges of their comfort zone’ (Arao & Clemens, 2013: 143). What this currently looks and feels like for me in my teaching practice as a language educator (and soon-to-be future teacher educator) is creating

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Figure 8.3  Translanguaging strategies incorporated into Preena’s unit plan

spaces for students to take risks by modeling my own vulnerability and blind spots as a continued commitment to a broader social project of linguistic and racial justice. Translanguaging and multi/plurilingual identities

Shakina Rajendram While teacher candidates benefited from engaging in translanguaging activities as learners in the course, it was often when they came to value their own multilingual identities that they took up a translanguaging stance and saw translanguaging as more than just a teaching tool. Mira, whom we introduced in Chapter 4, told us that prior to taking the course, she did not see the value of a translanguaging pedagogy. She said,

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‘Before, I had a negative attitude toward it [translanguaging]. I thought that this is, like, unproductive… [I] came with preconceived ideas that we should think of and speak one language at the time’. This reflection stood out to me as particularly relevant, considering that Mira grew up in Lebanon speaking Arabic, attended French-medium schools there, where she also learned Spanish, and then attended English-medium post-secondary institutions, including the master of teaching (MT) program at OISE. During the course, Mira engaged in translanguaging activities which encouraged her to think about her own rich linguistic repertoire, and the role that languages had played in shaping her identity. After identifying the many competencies she had in Arabic, French, English and Spanish, Mira came to the realization that ‘we should be proud that we speak like different languages. It’s not something that we should hide’. Whereas Mira was hesitant to call herself multi/plurilingual at the beginning of the course, she demonstrated newfound confidence in her plurilingualism and reflected on how ‘being plurilingual helped me in shaping my teacher’s identity’. Embracing a multi/plurilingual identity also opened Mira up to the importance of translanguaging for fostering plurilingualism among all learners and ‘planting the seeds of the importance of being plurilingual for, like, even Anglophone kids here in Ontario’. Mira also began to see translanguaging more holistically, not only as a resource for language learning, but as a way to develop subject knowledge, support socioemotional learning and affirm diverse identities. For one of her assignments, Mira created a science lesson plan which included a translanguaging strategy called the dual-language showcase. Mira reflected on the benefits of this showcase as follows: Finally, I am fully aware that this activity can foster emergent writers’ biliteracies. On the other hand, by including students’ home languages, emergent bilinguals can develop a deeper and broader understanding of the unit content and the issue that is arising (how can we maintain a healthy environment ?). At the end, this activity may also have a positive effect on students’ social-emotional learning as it can promote their selfidentity and self-esteem as my students’ different languages and identities are highly valued in the class and school. Through this activity all students regardless of their English language proficiencies will be heard.

In Mira’s unit plan assignment, she and her group members designed translanguaging objectives, resources and activities that would position multilingual learners as language experts, and show possibilities for translanguaging to lead to critical language awareness and be transformative for the whole classroom.

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Translanguaging and practicum placements

Katie Brubacher As suggested throughout the book, candidates’ experiences in and reflections on their teaching practicum played a central role in shaping their thinking about translanguaging possibilities. However, as the vignette that opens Chapter 7 noted, candidates are often not sure where to begin in trying out translanguaging pedagogies in practicum settings. In addition, they can face opposition and/or indifference from their ATs or from students themselves. These experiences are consistent with previous research that has demonstrated how practicum settings that do not model positive strategies for engaging multilingual learners can reinforce teacher-candidates’ negative attitudes toward language learners and linguistic diversity in general (Deroo et al., 2020; Sugimoto et al., 2017). Nevertheless, when candidates kept their focus on learning from multilingual learners, they were able to expand their thinking and practice of translanguaging pedagogies, even in practicum settings that may not have expressly endorsed such teaching. Fie, a teacher candidate in a primary/junior (Grades  K–6) section of the course, reflected on her experience of trying out translanguaging pedagogies during her practicum. Fie migrated to Canada from China as an adult, but spent four years as an education coordinator in Alberta prior to coming to OISE. She described herself as still being an ELL. She started learning English in Grade 7 and then chose to major in English at university. In addition to Mandarin, she can read and write in French. In her interview with me, Fie said that she felt unprepared to teach students who are beginning to learn English. Nevertheless, Fie reflected on how she can use community supports and school staff to support with translanguaging: I think I’m very comfortable doing it via Mandarin of course, because I know how to speak Mandarin. So that’s the one, like, I can definitely help the kid who speaks Mandarin to do this bilingual text. But as for other kids, I will try to help them, but I need to think of other strategies like: how can I check if they write, that the things they write are right or wrong, or if they are something that you want them to, like, to portray, or something? So we have to build up a system or like a supporting system, like involve the parents, involve other kids, involve other schools, like professionals from other teachers, like who can speak other languages to help us to build this community that we can help the ELL learners.

Fie asks several questions that we have become accustomed to hearing from many teacher candidates, namely: if I do not know the students’ languages, how can I teach them using their languages? However, instead

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of allowing this question to limit her thinking, Fie keeps her focus on multilingual learners, parents and professionals who might also be able to serve as resources if she as the teacher is not always able to. During her practicum, Fie did not always have a positive experience with her ATs, and struggled to find examples of how they used translanguaging in the classroom. In response to a question about the most meaningful experience working with multilingual learners during her practicum, Fie recalled that it was when the AT gave her the opportunity to try out translanguaging pedagogy in the classroom. Fie described an activity that started with a simple question but led to a rich discussion of metalinguistic awareness and the sharing of multilingual experiences. She recalled: So what I did was like, I just asked them this one simple question, what kind of languages do you speak at home? And, or what languages do your parents or grandparents speak? Those simple questions can really… flourish into all kinds of things that the kids start to talk about. For example, there’s this Spanish kid who talks about, like, at home they speak Spanish and how, like, the similarities and differences between English and Spanish, and they, like, the CIO or TIO and like CION in Spanish, when you try to like transfer it into English you put changing to TION in English. This metacognitive awareness of two languages is very powerful. And my AT [associate teacher] was like, too eager to, to wait to share her experience in Japan. And she was able to speak Japanese actually, because she was teaching in Japan for five years…. And she even talked to, like, come up with a, like, a conversation with the other students to talk in Japanese for five minutes. So like, when you ask those simple questions, what languages that you, your parents or your grandparents speak at home or anywhere, there will be lots of interesting ideas and interesting things going on in the classroom. So that’s a very meaningful activity for me. Because I definitely feel that they feel proud when they stand up and talk in a different language with a teacher, with me or with other students. And they feel like they are very proud. I can speak two sentences in Spanish… they’re super proud of themselves when they say that.

By asking ‘simple questions’, the rich translanguaging already happening in this classroom ‘flourished’ and became a fruitful basis for learning – not only for the students in that classroom, but for Fie as well. Translanguaging and assessment

Shakina Rajendram, Wales Wong and Jeff Bale When we discussed with teacher candidates the potential challenges they might face in implementing translanguaging lesson plans in their

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future classrooms, assessment came up as a recurring issue. Among the important questions teacher candidates raised were ‘But how do we assess multilingual activities?’, ‘Does translanguaging work with the STEP assessment?’ and ‘What if parents insist that we focus on English to prepare their children for standardized assessments?’. While teacher candidates demonstrated enthusiasm for the translanguaging activities they had learned in the Supporting English Language Learners course, the issue of assessment raised their concerns about the feasibility of translanguaging pedagogies in the Ontario educational system. Being a former elementary school and ESL teacher, Shakina recognized that no matter how much teachers push back against English-only instruction in their pedagogy, until assessment catches up with the research on translanguaging, teachers would continue to face the dilemma of how to teach multilingually while preparing learners for assessments that only account for what they can do in English. In response, Shakina modelled for teacher candidates how they could reinterpret assessment tools from the ministry such as STEP (see Chapters 4 and 6 for background information on STEP) in order to identify what learners can do in all the languages they know and further develop their multilingual competencies. In their ‘ELL Case Study’ assignment, teacher candidates are asked to select a learner from their practicum or the Me Mapping website, and to assess the learner by placing them on the STEP continuum. Shakina adapted this assignment by encouraging teacher candidates to conduct multilingual assessments, for example, by getting learners to read and respond to bilingual storybooks, or to translate a passage in English into their home language or vice versa. Candidates initially worried how they would be able to assess what learners said or wrote in a language they did not understand themselves. To address this concern, Shakina encouraged them to work in pairs with someone who spoke the same or a similar language as their selected learner, to leverage Google Translate and other translation tools, and to learn how to assess transferable language and literacy skills (e.g. skimming a text for information, reading fluency and phonemic awareness). In addition to using STEP, Shakina also asked teacher candidates to suggest what types of additional assessment activities, materials and instruments they could use to obtain a more comprehensive assessment of the learner’s multilingual proficiencies. Based on what they discovered about their learner from these multilingual assessments, teacher candidates made specific recommendations for translanguaging strategies and activities to support the learner’s ongoing multilingual development. One teacher candidate who participated in this work is Michael Valentini (who gave us permission and encouraged us to use his real name). In his case-study assignment, Michael assessed the learner’s multilingual proficiencies by asking her to listen to an audio clip of Chicken Little in Italian, read the text in Italian (https://www.theitalianexperiment.com/

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stories/chicken-little) and then narrate the story back to him in English. As he explained in his study, ‘the purpose of the task was to provide a low stress entry into evaluating the learner’s reading and listening skills in both English and Italian’. In his assessment of the learner, Michael demonstrated a recognition for what she could do not only in English, but also in all her languages. For example, he suggested that While she may have taken some breaks in her sentences here and there just to better think of which words would be appropriate in that sentence, I don’t believe that’s indicative of a lack of proficiency, if anything it shows careful thought being put into her sentence structures… She shows us that her vocabulary is quite diverse… She is able to use familiar words in English, French and Italian to express meaning in different ways.

Building on his assessment of the learner’s multilingual competencies, Michael recommended using translanguaging strategies such as a ‘concept detective activity, where students present and translate key course concepts in their home languages to create an accessible and helpful guide within the class’, and multilingual I Am From poems that allow ‘students to critique the image placed onto them by teachers and other educators as someone who doesn’t understand or isn’t trying enough, when the contrary is the case’. Michael’s example demonstrates his growing awareness of the limitations of monolingual assessments and the value of adopting a translanguaging approach to pedagogy and assessment. Assessment was also a concern for candidates as they moved into their practicum placements. In this case, though, candidates were not always referring to assessing language (on STEP, for example), but rather to assessing content in ways that conform with the Ontario curriculum expectations. In addition to curriculum documents for each of the subject areas, the ministry has implemented Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario’s Schools, First Edition Covering Grades 1 to 12 (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010) as a formal assessment policy. Every school that follows the Ontario curriculum must refer to Growing Success in its planning and implementation of assessment practices. The challenge for all teachers, but certainly for novice teachers and those still in teacher-education programs, is learning to reconcile multiple content- and language-assessment frameworks while also making space for multilingual learners to draw on all their languages as a source for learning. The Growing Success document is comprehensive, presenting broad theories of assessment, a discussion of Ontario’s performance standards, technical assistance on using report cards and handling credit recovery for secondary students, as well as specific approaches to assessment for ELLs and students with special needs. Similar to other ministry documents analyzed in this book, this document both reflects and reinforces

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the dominance of English (and French in the counterpart Faire croîte le succès document) even though it rarely names the language itself. In its respective sections on learning skills and habits, performance standards and assessment for/as/of learning (see Black et  al., 2003), none of the hundreds of bullet points or rubric descriptors presented specify in which language(s) these skills, standards or assessments are to be demonstrated. That student learning is to be measured in English only is so obvious, it need not even be stated. The section in Growing Success dedicated to ELLs reveals contradictions similar to those we identified in the ministry’s curriculum document for ESL and ELD (see Chapter 1) and in the STEP assessment framework (see Chapters  4 and 6). On the one hand, Growing Success (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010: 77–78) does recommend specific accommodation and modification strategies for teaching that employ multilingual learners’ full linguistic repertoire as a resource, including: ‘strategic use of students’ first languages; use of adapted text and bilingual dictionaries; [and] use of dual-language materials’. On the other hand, the assessment strategies it describes evaluate student learning in English only. For example, the document only offers three accommodations for assessment (viz. extra time, alternatives such as portfolios and using simplified language for assessment instructions), none of which include the use of students’ other languages to demonstrate content learning. Moreover, the document offers two examples of how to modify curriculum expectations for ELLs as a basis for assessment in the ways described by Sabrina in Chapter 5 and Katie in Chapter 6. Table 8.2 presents the curriculum expectation and suggested modification for assessment for Grade 8 English language arts and Grade 9 math, respectively, as suggested in the Growing Success document. In the final column, we reinterpret these modifications from a translanguaging perspective. The assessment modifications from Growing Success presented in Table  8.2 reinforce the assumption that students produce work in English only. That is, they function as add-ons such that learners can understand the content, rather than fostering multilingual learners’ use of all languages to deepen their content knowledge. As the last column in Table 8.2 shows, amending these modified curriculum expectations to support this kind of learning isn’t difficult. With just a few extra words, we were able to maintain the spirit of the original curriculum expectation while also creating space for learners to use all of their languages to access that content and deepen their understanding of it. As García et al. (2017) stress, multilingual learners are already doing this. Even if ministry documents fail to make these connections between content assessment and multilingualism, we have demonstrated how easy it is for teacher educators to do so and model a translanguaging approach to assessment for teacher candidates.

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Table 8.2  Curriculum expectations and modifications versus translanguaging in/as assessment Grade level and subject area

Curriculum expectation (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010: 78)

Modification (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010: 78)

Translanguaging in/as assessment

Grade 8 English language arts

(Students will) write complex texts of a variety of lengths, using a wide range of forms

(The student will) write patterned short texts using specified forms

(Students will) write complex texts in languages they know and patterned short texts in languages they are learning, using a wide range of forms

Grade 9 math

(Students will) describe trends and relationships observed in data, make inferences from data, compare the inferences with hypotheses about the data and explain any differences between the inferences and the hypotheses

(The student will) identify and demonstrate trends and relationships observed in data, make an inference from the data, and show [their] thinking

(Students will) use all their languages, including English, to describe trends and relationships observed in data, make inferences from data, compare the inferences with hypotheses about the data and explain any differences between the inferences and the hypotheses

Consistent across all these practices of change related to translanguaging that we have presented in this part of the chapter is starting with and/or centering the experiences of multilingual people. In some cases, the multilingual learners in question are school students, in others we refer to teacher candidates and teacher educators. Nevertheless, it is from this starting point that we observed significant changes in teacher-candidate thinking and practice. This is not to suggest that theory and reflective stance-building are not still vital components of teacher-candidate learning. Rather, our analysis of these translanguaging practices suggests that centering multilingual learners’ lived experiences with language is a powerful foundation from which candidates can engage with theory, and reflect more explicitly and critically on a translanguaging stance. Program and policy coherence

One of the central findings in the extant literature on preparing teacher candidates for multilingual school settings is the question of coherence. In most cases, coherence has been understood in relation to the teacher-education curriculum, and how coherence (or the lack thereof) shapes teacher-candidate learning (e.g. Cochran-Smith et  al., 2015). This question also appeared throughout our data. Sandra, a teacher educator we introduced in Chapter 5, advocated for a both/and approach to how the teacher-education curriculum should address multilingual learners: both through required, stand-alone modules or courses, and with attention to multilingualism infused throughout the program. Moreover, an early publication from this project explored program coherence in relation to the diverse personal, academic and professional experiences of the instructional team that teaches the Supporting English

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Language Learners course (Bale et al., 2019). Instead of seeing this diversity in opposition to coherence across the 14 or 15 sections of the course taught each year, we argued that these diverse experiences can lead to a kind of coherence that is programmatically and pedagogically richer. However, this study has also revealed a different dimension to the question of coherence that has not yet been widely addressed in the literature on teacher-education and multilingualism, namely the question of policy coherence. As discussed in Chapter 4, there exists a suite of policy, curriculum and assessment documents governing ESL and English literacy development (ELD) programs in Ontario that position multilingual learners in contradictory ways. Whatever commitments exist in some of these documents to think of multilingual learners as more than ‘ELLs’ and to support them in sustaining their language and cultural practices as they add English, we argued that the STEP assessment framework for English language proficiency trumped these statements in two ways. Not only does STEP explicitly position non-English languages as evidence of incomplete acquisition of English, but it also frames English as the sole learning outcome for multilingual learners. In addition, the teachers and teacher educators who participated in this study often discussed the politics of labels, noting the siloing effect that these policy, curriculum and assessment documents had in terms of shaping how multilingual learners are imagined to be in Ontario schools. These findings raise the important question of what coherence across language-education policies could and should look like. To orient this discussion of the question of coherence, we introduce two perspectives written by members of the research team. First, Antoinette reflects on her experiences in the MT program as it has worked to establish program coherence around the goal of racial justice. She enumerates a number of important initiatives the program has undertaken in the last two or three years, with attention to multiple levels of program coherence (i.e. curriculum, admissions, staffing, professional learning for program faculty and so on). Katie then addresses the question of policy coherence based on her 20  years’ experience as an ESL/ELD teacher in Ontario schools. PERSPECTIVE: PROGRAM COHERENCE AND RACIAL LITERACY – MOVING TOWARD RACIAL JUSTICE IN THE MT PROGRAM Antoinette Gagné As one of the original course developers and instructors of the Supporting English Language Learners course, as well as the course and curriculum development lead for most of the time since the course has existed, I have experienced significant shifts in what matters in the MT program. The change in focus from 2015 has reflected events in

212  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Canadian society, including the findings and recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the ever more visible legacies and ongoing manifestations of white-supremacist, settler-colonial violence, as well the manifestations of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous and anti-Asian racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in Ontario school boards where there is also a teacher diversity gap. As described in Chapter 1, an important mechanism for change in the MT program was the curriculum mapping process. This process began in 2017 and spanned three years. The work included developing program expectations connected to the vision of the MT program and its ‘deep commitment to all learners and the building of a more just, equitable and sustainable world’ (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, n.d.b). The multiple curriculum-mapping consultations prompted several changes to the scope and sequence of the MT program components to address the heavy workload and concerns regarding the well-being of teacher candidates, as well as the need to prioritize the placement of courses such as Anti-Discriminatory Education taught by Black, Indigenous and other racialized instructors at the very beginning of the 20-month program. In 2021, the Supporting English Language Learners course was moved to straddle the final two semesters of the five-semester program to ensure more consistent delivery of the 14 sections of the course offered each year. These structural changes began in 2020 and have been implemented gradually over two years. In addition, multiple sets of recommendations and initiatives addressing anti-racist and decolonial work in general, and anti-Black racism in particular, have contributed to program coherence around racial justice. For example, we have referenced the work of the MT Racial Inclusion Committee (MTRIC) throughout the book. One important recommendation the committee made was that all MT course syllabi include a statement describing how the course connects to anti-racist and decolonial practices, and how those practices are to be enacted in the course. Additionally, the MT Black Student Advisory & Advocacy Group amplified the recommendations made by the MTRIC. They called on the MT program to: • • •

Institutionalize the expectations of instructors’ uptake in addressing anti-Black racism, how it is reflected in their syllabus, in content and instruction. Implement ongoing opportunities to prepare TCs to directly confront anti-racism, anti-oppression and power dynamics in their learning and in their teaching. Develop critical reflexive skills for all members of the MT community.

Practices and Principles of Change  213

•

Be a leader in anti-Black racism education within the field of initial teacher education by radically reimagining what teacher education can and should be and by implementing this work in practice.

Moreover, Dr Nicole West-Burns facilitated a professional development series for MT faculty and staff in winter 2021 titled Disrupting and Dismantling Anti-Black Racism. Taken together, the work of the MTRIC, the MT Black Student Advisory & Advocacy Group and the professional learning Dr WestBurns facilitated led to a new set of guidelines for orienting all MT courses on anti-racist and decolonial work. In the Supporting English Language Learners course, these guidelines took the form of the statement reproduced below. All course instructors now integrate this statement into their syllabus: Statement on Anti-Racism and Racial Justice Education in the Supporting ELLs Course In our course, we will discuss how current educational systems, structures, policies, programs and practices produce inequities and inequalities for multilingual learners, with careful attention to the intersections of language, race, and colonialism. We will name the power relations underlying the constructions of ‘official languages’ in relation to Indigenous and minoritized languages in Canada as a settler-colonial state, and challenge and resist English linguistic imperialism and the deficit framing of multilingual learners. Anti-racist and decolonial practices will be enacted in this course in the following ways through course activities and assignments: •

•

•

Course assignments will ask you to consider the diverse identities of multilingual learners through an intersectional lens to demonstrate a commitment to social justice, anti-racist and decolonial pedagogies. As your learning about multilingualism cannot be separated from your own lived experiences with racial and linguistic diversity, we will ask you to reflect critically on your own identities and experiences, and develop knowledge of self through an intersectional lens, with a focus on language as a source of power, privilege or oppression. Other activities and resources used in the course will bring to the foreground the voices and scholarship of historically marginalized authors and scholars.

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In addition to these curricular changes, the MTRIC’s recommendations have led to other significant program changes. Starting in 2021, the MT Admissions Committee renewed their focus on enhancing the diversity of the applicant pool and increasing access. For example, the MT Program Access Pathways for Black Educators initiative aims to connect existing and new initiatives in outreach, admissions, program experiences and mentoring to build an intentional pathway to guide entry into the teaching profession. Furthermore, the MT Student and Instructor Handbooks were updated in 2021 to include guidance on university procedures and the relevant offices on campus for reporting experiences of racism and other kinds of discrimination. In January 2022, a working group was formed to review the OISE Standards of Professional Practice, Behaviour and Ethical Performance for Teacher Candidates to create a shared understanding, precision and transparency of notions of professionalism, and how they align with expressed commitments toward racial justice and equity. The MT program also created a full-time staff position for a coordinator of diversity, equity and student experience to support teacher candidates, course instructors and staff, as well as a new faculty position for Leadership for Racial Justice in Teacher Education to begin in July 2022. Finally, in September 2022, new and returning teacher candidates began the year with a keynote speech given by Professor Yolanda SealyRuiz on the critical literacy of race in urban teacher education. SealyRuiz (2021: 282) argues for the development of racial literacy in urban teacher education so that teacher candidates learn to be ‘interrupters of inequality’ by understanding that the intersection of race and class influences educational outcomes for students. She adds that candidates must have multiple opportunities to develop racial literacy across their teacher education program to ‘propel them to action regarding their role in the educational spaces they enter and occupy’ (Sealy-Ruiz, 2021: 289). The instructional team for Supporting English Language Learners has taken up Sealy-Ruiz’s work by naming specific interaction norms in the course outline, reproduced below. These norms are informed by the kinds of processes that Sealy-Ruiz (2021) describes as foundational to the development of racial literacy. Course Interaction Norms We will pay attention to group-level power dynamics by discussing and negotiating classroom interaction norms in the course to ensure a safe and respectful space for learning. We will provide choice in terms of who you work with for your group assignments.

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We will provide multiple means of engagement and demonstration of participation in both course activities and assignments. We will strive to interrupt bias by ‘calling out’ to prevent further harm and ‘calling in’ to explore deeper, make meaning together, and find a mutual sense of understanding across our differences (Haslam, 2018: 1–2). We encourage you to refer to Sensoy and DiAngelo’s (2017: 4) guidelines for engaging constructively in course interactions: • • • •

Strive for intellectual humility. Recognize the difference between opinions and informed knowledge. Let go of personal anecdotal evidence and look at broader societal patterns. Notice your own defensive reactions and attempt to use these reactions as entry points for gaining deeper self-knowledge. Recognize how your own social positionality (such as your race, class, gender, sexuality, ability-status) informs your perspectives and reactions to your instructor, peers and the individuals whose work you study in the course.

Although I have searched for words related to language in the various MT program documents and reports, I have failed to find any except when language is included as part of lists of various dimensions of our identity. However, I am hopeful that spaces are opening up across the MT program to understand the centrality of languages in our lives and how our languages intersect with various forms of discrimination in teacher education, K-12 schools and in Canadian society more broadly.

The developments in the MT program that Antoinette discussed suggest the scope of work and the long-term perspective required to move toward program coherence centered on racial justice. The initiatives that Antoinette describes range from sustained, targeted professional learning opportunities for all program faculty and staff; rethinking the structure and content of the program’s curriculum; (re)creating policies and procedures for how the program operates; creating dedicated staff and faculty positions; and moving orientation events for new candidates away from logistics and toward learning opportunities centered on the program’s goal of fostering racial justice. These initiatives are both promising and important, and they mark a significant shift in the program’s focus. At the same time, Antoinette’s final note recalls a point argued in Chapter 3, namely the highly

216  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

siloed way in which critical anti-racist and critical language education is taken up in teacher education. We noted this siloed thinking in the extant literature, as well as in our own research in the MT program on whether and how language and race/racism were connected. The promising work that Antoinette described suggests that there is still important work to do to challenge this siloed way of thinking as the MT program seeks to orient the program on racial justice. These challenges are a powerful reminder of the fundamental complexity of teacher education and the need to problematize that complexity in explicit ways (Chang & Viesca, 2022). PERSPECTIVE: TRANSLANGUAGING TO THE STEP OF MULTILINGUAL PRACTICES Katie Brubacher In this research, three main policies influenced the participants’ understanding of and approaches to working with multilingual students: the STEP language assessment framework, the ESL/ELD policy framework and curriculum documents for specific subjects. STEP was the most pervasive, showing up in many different parts of our data. STEP was a new policy document that was met with much excitement and research over many years, as Sylvia, an experienced ESL lead, reflected on in Chapter 4. It was meant to bring accountability and consistency in order to advocate for more funding to support multilingual students across the province. However, a translanguaging pedagogy appears to be at odds with what STEP is setting our teacher candidates to do with multilingual students. In the process of placing the children on STEP, our research documented how teacher candidates took on the role of white listening subjects (Flores & Rosa, 2015), looking for errors in the children’s ways of speaking that would differentiate them from the ‘native speaker’. As an observer of teacher candidates’ experiences in the teachereducation classroom, I was often struck by how candidates’ discussions about multilingual learners became about what the students lacked. When working with STEP, candidates and instructors often framed multilingual learners as lacking English. The policy, an attempt to quantify students’ language learning, often led to teacher candidates framing students’ use of language as deficient. At times, I saw racialized candidates cringe during these whole-class discussions or comment on STEP as a problematic document during interviews. Multilingual learners were seen as a problem that needed to be fixed, and this was hard for some candidates to listen to. At times, this led to intense break-time conversations between candidates with debates about how students’ English usage should be understood. STEP highlighted a linguistic ordering that the ministry expected teacher candidates to monitor and

Practices and Principles of Change  217

enforce while teaching in Ontario schools. In many ways, STEP limited the ability of candidates to take up new learning around translanguaging in their practice and pedagogy. Why this linguistic ordering? Part of it could just be what comes with having a leveled language assessment. It is meant to compare multilingual students to idealized ‘native-speaker’ forms of English. This comparison then leads to perceptions of students’ language as not matching the indicators on the rubric, and thus as deficient. There is also a widespread perception that funding is tied up in STEP. Identifying and tracking students are connected to the formulas that determine teacher allocation. This animates a perception that teachers might have a vested interest in keeping ELL numbers high(er). What might language assessment look like instead? What if there were an assessment framework that aimed to look at what students can do with all of their languages? Currently, STEP refers to the students’ language usage as L1, framing it as a crutch to get to English. Beyond STEP 2, even this approach to L1 usage disappears. I could imagine a framework that continues to promote and sustain students’ language practices beyond this idea of being a beginner English user, similar to the suggestions offered in Table 8.2. I could imagine a version of STEP that centers students’ multilingualism as an important contribution to the classroom. STEP could be a document that encourages teacher candidates (and teachers) to examine how their own practices can reproduce racial and linguistic ordering and potentially even do some of that work along with their students. Candidates could work toward creating classrooms where all students participate in multilingual activities. Regardless of their length of time in Canada or English usage, students could complete math word problems using all aspects of their linguistic repertoire, produce multilingual poetry and stories, create newscasts and drama presentations pulling from many different languages and promote language equity throughout the school. In these ways, the students’ multilingualism could become a vital part of the classroom environment that everyone learns from. When a new student enters that space learning English, their current language practices are already present in that classroom and valued. They are not a remedial add-on. The media report that opens this chapter (Raza, 2022), which focused on Black students’ experiences in Ontario schools, included interviews with Black high-school students in Toronto-area schools and their experiences as racialized multilingual students. Lidia Tewodros retells the story of her Grade 3 experience of being placed into ESL, despite being a strong reader and speaking English fluently. She is left with only one possible conclusion: her teachers and school labeled her as an ESL because of her accent. For her, this labeling is an example of racist and

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discriminatory practice. In Chapter 4, we discussed the province’s ESL/ ELD policy framework and how it defines who an ELL is. That definition is broad, including speakers of Indigenous languages, French and English language varieties deemed non-standard in Canada. The stated intent of this expanded definition was to challenge narrow definitions of ‘ELLs’ as only recently arrived migrants. However, in its attempt to cover almost everyone and everything, the framework has left racialized communities with many questions about why they are being labeled as ESL. Lidia’s experience, and those of other students mentioned in Raza (2022), reflects the kind of white institutional listening Daniels and Varghese (2020) theorized. No matter the intention of the policy framework’s expanded definition of ‘ELL’, in practice it has operated to hear racialized students as deficient and place them in programs they neither need nor want. Lidia’s experience raises another question, namely: if ESL is a stigmatized label, then is it a label we should be applying to anyone? For myself, as a practicing teacher, I have found fighting the stigma of the ESL label to be relentless and disheartening. In general, English is often used as a gatekeeper for success in schools (King & Scott, 2014). The ESL label signals to students that they are not seen as successful in the education system. Any work we do with multilingual students must be viewed through an enrichment and equity lens and not seen as an additional barrier preventing often racialized students from accessing rich curriculum experiences. As an experienced ESL teacher in Ontario elementary schools, I stopped using the term ESL many years ago. This is something the ministry should consider doing as well, by explicitly naming and understanding students as multilingual with a complex linguistic repertoire, as opposed to English language learners who need language development. However, as we saw in Chapter 6 with Isabella, this goes beyond the ESL/ELD policy framework and includes the language arts curriculum document (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006). As with all curriculum documents, language arts reflects Ontario’s Education Act, which only allows English or French to be used to teach the curriculum (with a few important exceptions). In other words, there is only so much a policy document for multilingual students can do when teaching the curriculum is restricted in these ways and children are not permitted to be taught in important parts of their linguistic repertoire.

In their manifesto on language and the education of racialized bilinguals, García et al. (2021) raise important questions about the potential of language rights. They situate their argument by acknowledging the

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inspiration they have taken from scholars who have worked to defend language rights. But they also stress the need to focus on the rights of racialized people and to question whether languages can or should be perceived as discrete entities that can be the target of rights in the first place. While not dismissing language rights per se, they argue: …regardless of the broader structural changes that the future may or may not bring, the decolonial perspective that we adopt makes us take note that a different world is already here—a world made by racialized bilinguals themselves as they engage with their own knowledge systems and cultural and linguistic practices. (García et al., 2021: 4)

In one way, the findings shared in this book are consistent with this argument. Recall the powerful lessons that Tina and Alicia learned by paying greater attention to the rich translanguaging practices that students in their final practicum placement were already doing, or the transformative learning that Mira described as she reconsidered her own multilingualism and what it means for her as a future teacher. None of this powerful learning required major shifts in policy; it all still happened despite the restrictions in Ontario to teach the curriculum in English and French only, and despite the contradictions present in the policies that govern language education broadly (described in Chapter  1), and ESL/ ELD programs in particular (described in Chapter 4) in this province. However, the evidence from this study also made clear the extent to which formal policy documents, such as those Katie reflected on above, not only shape teacher-candidate thinking about multilingual learners, but also interrupt their emergent stance and practice with respect to language-inclusive teaching. In this way, we are reminded of how much formal policies matter. This is not only because of symbolic questions of representation, or what these policies do or don’t permit. Rather, formal policies matter because of the direct role they play, as documented in this study, in shaping teacher-candidate thinking and practice. Similar to our argument in this chapter about centering multilingual learners in teacher education, we argue that it is multilingual learners and the world they have already made, to borrow from García et  al., that should form the foundation for language and education policy. As documented throughout this book, multilingual learners did not consider their language repertoire in terms of proficiency, but rather in terms of affinity. They did not construe their language repertoire as neatly divided between how they used language at school and how they used language in other parts of their life. Whether or not they were invited or allowed to, multilingual learners used all of their languages to learn content. It is this reality that should form the basis of language-education policymaking.

220  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Conclusion

In the conclusion to their article laying out a raciolinguistic perspective on language and race, Rosa and Flores (2017) argue: We are not simply advocating linguistic pluralism or racial inclusion, but instead interrogating the foundational forms of governance through which such diversity discourses deceptively perpetuate disparities by stipulating the terms on which perceived differences are embraced or abjected. (Rosa & Flores, 2017: 641)

We have found much inspiration in these words, and also recognize how daunting, even intimidating they can feel. The stability and longevity of the racialized hierarchy of languages that we have argued exists in Ontario can often feel immutable. The preponderance of the evidence from this study – that despite generally positive dispositions toward multilingualism, despite stated program values and aims, and despite required learning about ‘supporting English language learners’, teacher candidates often learned how to reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies about multilingual learners – can feel particularly overwhelming. As well, if we remain at the level of interrogation (which, in teacher-education parlance, often takes the form of reflection) without exploring more intentionally what actions to take, the challenges in preparing teacher candidates to work with multilingual learners can feel insurmountable. Thus, we return to Fie’s insight shared above: that asking a simple question in a classroom about which languages students and their families speak can open up all kinds of opportunities for learning. This isn’t the only pedagogical move that can matter. As we have argued throughout this chapter, there are numerous possibilities for acting differently as teacher educators preparing future teachers to work with multilingual learners. At their core, all of these pedagogical moves share the same commitment: to center multilingual learners and their experiences with language and learning. It is learning from multilingual learners, as opposed to learning about them, that serves as the foundation upon which teacher candidates learn how to teach. As we argued above, we do not pretend that the practices of change shared in this concluding chapter are alone ‘solutions’ to the ‘foundational forms of governance’ that Rosa and Flores refer to. Nevertheless, we argue that they hold the potential to move teacher-candidate learning beyond reflection and toward concrete actions that challenge the collaboration of race/racism and language in shaping school life. Rösch (2019) described it like this: In sum, reflection can be an important foundation for critiquing linguicism as well. But it cannot remain the only practice [in teacher

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education]. Instead, and more important, part of reflexive praxis is the development of alternatives and the courage to try them out, even though we have to recognize that [these alternatives] themselves are not free from ‘pure’ critique and also can be critically appraised. (Rösch, 2019: 184)

This has been the spirit and intent of this closing chapter: to offer several alternatives that emerged from this study that work to center multilingual learners and challenge racism in teacher education, and hopefully inspire a bit of courage in you, the reader, to try them out.

Appendix: Overview of the PeCK-LIT Test and Additional Analyses Elizabeth Jean Larson

Test Design

The PeCK-LIT test was designed in the spring of 2017 by six members of the larger research team. While the tasks and items for both versions of the PeCK-LIT test (Test A and Test B) were designed at the same time, they were administered to different year groups, with Test A being for teacher candidates (TCs) in their first year and Test B for TCs in their second year. All PeCK-LIT test tasks and items were based on the developers’ understanding of the construct of Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Language-Inclusive Teaching (PeCK-LIT), based on the DaZ-Kom framework (Köker et al., 2015). Both DaZ-Kom and PeCK-LIT consist of three dimensions: content area register, multilingualism and pedagogy. Table  A.1 contains a breakdown of the dimensions of PeCK-LIT. For further information regarding the construct of PeCK-LIT, see Larson (2023).​ The PeCK-LIT test designers wanted to create a measure of PeCKLIT that was appropriate to the Ontario K-12 context and thus covered a variety of disciplines. They amended some tasks and items from the DaZKom (which was specific to math classes at the lower-secondary grade level in Germany) and created new ones. Design team members worked individually to draft different tasks and their items, then worked in pairs to review these drafts. Finally, the larger group reviewed the drafts in an iterative process to ensure that they were appropriately capturing the dimensions of PeCK-LIT. They piloted the items in 2017 and edited them for administration in 2018. PeCK-LIT Test A consists of five tasks and a total of 17 items, and PeCK-LIT Test B consists of five tasks and 18 items. Each item measures a dimension of PeCK-LIT: content area register (CAR), multilingualism (M) or pedagogy (P). In PeCK-Lit Test  A, 13 items are open-response and four are yes or no. Tasks vary based on discipline, grade level and number and types of items attached to them. Tasks 2, 3 and 4 were based on the German DaZ-Kom test and amended for K-12 Ontario school 222

Appendix: Overview of the PeCK-LIT Test and Additional Analyses  223

Table A.1  Dimensions, sub-dimensions and facets of PeCK-LIT Dimension

Sub-dimension

Facet

Content area register

Syntax

None

Semantics

None

Second language acquisition

Translanguaging

Multilingualism

Locally constructed language development milestones (e.g. STEP) Formal and informal methods of language learning Development of academic language

Pedagogy

Viewing ELs’ home language as a resource to be respected and valued

None

Respecting and advocating for students’ linguistic diversity

None

Scaffolding

None

contexts. Tasks 1 and 5 were created by the PeCK-LIT test design team. Table A.2 shows a breakdown of the PeCK-LIT Test A tasks and items.​ In PeCK-LIT Test B, 13 items are open response and seven are yes or no (yes/no). Tasks vary based on discipline, grade level and the number and types of items attached to them. Tasks 1, 2 and 5 were based on the German DaZ-Kom test and amended for K-12 Ontario school contexts. Tasks 3 and 4 were created by the PeCK-LIT test design team. Table A.3 shows a breakdown of the PeCK-LIT Test B tasks and items.​ Test Administration

In the first term of their master of teaching (MT) program (fall 2018), 308 J/I, P/J and I/S TCs took the PeCK-LIT Test A. The test was administered during their course on Educational Research at varying times based on instructor schedules. This varied administration was appropriate as the PeCK-LIT tests are not a measure of their learning only in the Supporting English Language Learners course, but rather their PeCK-LIT at that time in the program. Due to the variation in timing, some (n = 77) TCs took PeCK-LIT Test A after their first four-week teaching practicum (November 2018). The administration of PeCK-LIT Test B was somewhat more varied. In winter 2019, 103 TCs took the PeCK-LIT Test B. In fall 2019, 31 TCs took Test B, and an additional 90 TCs took this version in winter 2020. TCs who took PeCK-LIT Test B in fall 2019 and winter 2020 belonged to the same graduating class, while those who took it in winter 2019 belonged to a previous graduating class. In total, 224 TCs took the PeCKLIT Test B over the course of three administrations.

P/J

English

English

Task 4: King of the Forest (answer questions about a poem)

J/I

I/S; J/I

Grade level

Grade 3

Grade 6

J/I

Grade 8

Grade 11

P

CAR CAR P

5.1

5.3

P

4.3

5.2

M P

4.1

P

3.6

4.2

CAR M

3.4 3.5

CAR CAR

3.2 3.3

CAR

2.3 3.1

M

2.2

P P

2.1

1.2

Dimension M

Item no. 1.1

a

Education Quality Accountability Office (EQAO) is an independent agency in Ontario that administers standardized tests in Ontario schools.

Task 5: Waiting for the Tulips (based on EQAO 2017 test)

Math

Task 3: Root (an associate teacher corrects an EL’s collocation for finding the root of something)

a

J/I; P/J

Social studies

Task 2: Red River Rebellion of 1869 (re-create a drama enacting how the Métis resisted colonization)

Connected divisions I/S; J/I

Subject area Science

Task no. and title (short description)

Task 1: Writing a lab report (Mandarin speakers who are beginner ELs)

Table A.2  PeCK-LIT Test A task and item information Response type

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

Yes/no

Yes/no

Yes/no

Yes/no

Yes/no

Yes/no

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

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Discipline None

Math

History

English

None

Task no. and title (short description)

Task 1: Arlene and Ken Shou (learner profiles)

Task 2: Auction (standardized math test item)

Task 3: Residential schools (create fishbone organizer to demonstrate understanding of text)

Task 4: Discombobulator. (answer questions about a poem)

Task 5: Home languages

Table A.3  PeCK-LIT Test B task and item information Connected divisions

All

J/I

I/S; J/I

I/S; J/I

P/J; J/I

Grade level

Dimension

M M M M

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

P

4.3 N/A

M P

4.2

P M

3.2 3.3

P CAR

3.1

2.2

M P

1.5 1.6

CAR

M

1.4

2.1

M M

1.2 1.3

M

Item no. 1.1

Grades 7 and 8 4.1

Grade 10

Grade 7

5

Response type

Open

Yes/no

Yes/no

Yes/no

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

Open

Yes/no

Yes/no

Yes/no

Yes/no

Open

Appendix: Overview of the PeCK-LIT Test and Additional Analyses  225

226  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Test Scoring Rubric design

The following description of the PeCK-LIT test scoring is from Larson’s (2023) validation study. The PeCK-LIT test rubrics are based on competency stages ranging from 1 to 4 based on Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ (1986) five-stage model of adult skill acquisition. A score of 1 indicates a novice with insufficient and/or inaccurate responses. A score of 2 indicates an advanced beginner with basic understanding, some elements are correct, but others are not. A score of 3 indicates competency with appropriate understanding, what we would expect a TC to know and be able to do. In ongoing discussions as a design team, we further clarified the distinction between a score of 2 and 3, with the former indicating the kind of knowledge a successful TC would develop in a teacher-education program without a specific content focus on supporting multilingual learners, and the latter indicating the kind of knowledge developed in a program with specific content on supporting multilingual learners. A score of 4 indicates proficiency with exceptional understanding, what we would expect a teacher with experience working with multilingual learners to know and do. As the PeCKLIT tests were designed for TCs, the highest expected score per item was 3, with a 4 representing the abilities of a current classroom teacher, or an exceptional TC. Given the content-specific nature of the tasks and items, rather than providing descriptors for each construct at each stage, the PeCK-LIT test rubrics contain a rationale and descriptors for each item at each competency stage. For illustrative purposes, we have included the rubric for PeCK-LIT Test A, Item 1.1 in Table A.4. The level of detail in the PeCK-LIT tests rubrics is provided in order to aid the rater in making the most appropriate scoring decision. It should be noted that binary items did not require a rubric because they are either true (score of 1) or false (score of 0). Scoring

Two other members of the larger research team separately rated the PeCK-LIT test responses in summer and fall 2019. To achieve inter-rater reliability for the PeCK-LIT Test B data, the raters had several meetings and agreed upon the final scores during these meetings. Larson then conducted inter-rater reliability analyses on each open-response item with the PeCK-LIT Test A data, using Kohen’s weighted kappa. For this test there was only one score for item 16, so this was left out of the analysis. Landis and Koch (1977) argued for the following interpretations of kappa: ≤0 = poor, 0.01–0.20 = slight, 0.21–0.40 = fair, 0.41–0.60 = moderate, 0.61–0.80  =  substantial and 0.81–1  =  almost perfect. Inter-rater reliability ranged from moderate (weighted k = 0.52 with p = 0.00, 95%

Item

1

Task

1

M

Construct

This question is designed to see if teacher candidates understand the benefits of using home languages in the classroom to build on the students’ prior knowledge AND for them to reflect on what strategies they can practice/use in the classroom to specifically support students with writing. The discussion of the use of home language strategies in the classroom is a window into their stance on the use of home languages in the classroom. Although there may be examples related to standardized testing, for example, where the use of home languages may not be practical, this is not true in a science lab in class assignment.

Rationale

Table A.4  PeCK-LIT Test A rubric information for Item 1.1

Teacher candidate does not provide an answer or does not allow students to use their home languages. Does not provide reason(s) for why students cannot use home languages.

Stage 1 Teacher candidate allows students to use their home languages, but does not provide strategies for supporting them OR one or more strategies do not address the use of home languages during the writing process which can benefit students.

Stage 2

Teacher candidate allows students to use home languages and describes how they would support them.

Stage 3

Teacher candidate encourages students to use home languages and provides strategies for how they would support students along with reasoning for doing so.

Stage 4

Appendix: Overview of the PeCK-LIT Test and Additional Analyses  227

228  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

CI 0.43, 0.61) to almost perfect (weighted k = 0.92 with p = 0.00, 95% CI 0.87, 0.97) level of agreement between the two PeCK-LIT Test A raters across the other 12 open-response items. Additional Analyses of PeCK-LIT Data Teacher candidates’ backgrounds

TCs had a wide variety of backgrounds and were asked to specify their division, home languages, medium of instruction (MOI) they experienced in school, formal language learning experiences and language teaching experiences. Table  A.5 contains information regarding TC variables. Fisher’s exact tests comparing background variables with test scores

Larson (2023) provides an explanation of how PeCK-LIT test scores were treated. The following paragraph is adapted from her validation study. Table A.5  Teacher-candidate background information: Years 1 and 2 Variable name

Meaning

Total no. of TCs and proportion of total sample (Year 1) (n = 307)

Total no. of TCs and proportion of total sample (Year 2) (n = 224)

P/J

Individuals in this category 124 (40.39%) indicated that they were studying to become teachers in the primary/junior (1–6) grades

105 (46.88%)

J/I

Individuals in this category indicated that they were studying to become teachers in the junior/ intermediate (6–10) grades

56 (18.24%)

32 (14.29%)

I/S

Individuals in this category 127 (41.36%) indicated that they were studying to become teachers in the intermediate/senior (8–12) grades

87 (38.83%)

Home language: English only

Individuals in this category indicated that English was their only home language

150 (48.9%)

121 (54.01%)

MOI English only

Individuals in this category indicated that English was the language of their schooling

251 (82%)

138 (62%)

Formal language learning: Other

Individuals in this category indicated that they had formally learned languages other than or in addition to English

247 (80%)

Not asked

Language teaching experience

Individuals in this category indicated that they had some experience teaching a language

154 (50%)

124 (55%) (Note: Another 15% did not answer this question)

Appendix: Overview of the PeCK-LIT Test and Additional Analyses  229

PeCK-LIT test scores were treated as ordinal variables. While much of the research done on scale variables tends to treat scores as continuous, this treatment is often insufficient (Byrne, 2012; Flora & Curran, 2004). For example, if the team treated the PeCK-LIT test items as continuous, providing a mean score for an item would indicate its relative difficulty level. However, if the mean is 2.5 or 2.7 or 3.2, what actual information does this provide? These numbers are located in gray areas between competency stages and do not provide solid evidence of TCs’ competencies. Therefore, Larson (2023) treated the PeCK-LIT test scores as ordinal. In keeping with Larson’s approach, the research team decided that mean-level information was not useful to the research agenda, so the PeCK-LIT test scores were treated as ordinal. Scores for PeCK-LIT Tests  A and B ranged from 1 to 4, with the most common score being 2 on the open-response items and 1 on the yes/ no items. Scores of 4 were quite rare across all items, making chi-square tests of significance impossible, as there were not high enough numbers in each cell. Therefore, Larson (2023) conducted Fisher’s exact tests to look for statistically significant relationships between TCs’ backgrounds and their test scores. Tables A.6 and A.7 include the statistically significant relationships for PeCK-LIT Test A and Test B, respectively. As illustrated in Table  A.6, there were some relationships between test scores and background variables on some items. Those who had language teaching experience (five items) or experience formally learning a language other than English (two items) had a high proportion of higher scores, compared to those without these experiences. TC panels had significant relationships to scores on seven items, mostly with those in the I/S panel having a higher proportion of higher scores and those in P/J having a higher proportion of lower scores. Results were somewhat more confusing regarding MOI and home language. Those who had English as their only home language had higher proportions of higher scores in three items, but a higher proportion of a low score in one item. Regarding MOI, for one item those with English as their MOI had a higher proportion of higher scores, and for another item, the converse was true. As illustrated in Table A.7, there were some significant relationships between scores and background variables on some items, except for language teaching experiences where there were no significant relationships. Only one item showed a relationship between home language as English only and PeCK-LIT Test B scores, with those who had English only having a higher proportion of 3s, compared to their counterparts. Results were somewhat difficult to interpret for the MOI and panel variables. There were three items where the scores had a significant relationship to MOI, with two of these items indicating that those whose MOI was in other than/in addition to English had a higher proportion of 3s, but with another item those whose MOI was English had a higher proportion of correct scores. Three items showed a significant relationship between

230  Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies

Table A.6  Relationship of background variables to PeCK-LIT Test A scores Item

Background variable

Fisher’s exact p- Differences between value (two-sided) groups

Differences between groups

1.2

Language teaching experience

0.01

A higher percentage of scores of 3 for those with language teaching experience

A higher percentage of scores of 2 and 1 for those without language teaching experience

1.2

Home language English only

0.03

A higher percentage of 1s for those whose home language was English

A higher percentage of 2s and 3s for those whose home languages were other than/in addition to English

1.2

MOI: English

0.02

A higher percentage of A higher percentage 2s for those whose MOI of 3s for those whose was in English MOI was other than/in addition to English

1.2

Panel

0.00

Highest percentage of – 2s for I/S; 1s for P/J; and 3s for J/I

2.1

Panel

0.02

Highest percentage of – 3s for J/I; 2s for P/J; and 4s for I/S

2.2

Panel

0.03

Highest percentages of – 1s for P/J; 2s for J/I; and 3s for I/S

2.3

Language teaching experience

0.01

A higher percentage of 3 and 4 scores for those with language teaching experience

A higher percentage of 2 scores for those without language teaching experience

3.1

Panel

0.04

P/J had the highest percentage of 1s; I/S had the highest percentage of 0s

Note: 88.6% of all TCs got a 1 on this item

3.2

Panel

0.02

IS had the highest percentage of 1s

Note: 91% of all TCs got a 1 on this item

3.2

Language teaching experience

0.03

A higher percentage of 1s for those with teaching experience

A higher percentage of 0s for those without teaching experience

3.5

Language teaching experience

0.00

A higher percentage of 3s for those with language teaching experience

A higher percentage of 1s for those without language teaching experience

3.5

Home language English only

0.02

A higher percentage of 2s for those whose only home language was English

A higher percentage of 1s and 3s for those whose home language was other than/in addition to English

3.5

Formal language learning: Other

0.01

A higher percentage of 3s for those who had formally learned another language other than/along with English

A higher percentage of 1s for those who had not formally learned another language other than/ along with English (Continued)

Appendix: Overview of the PeCK-LIT Test and Additional Analyses  231

Table A.6  Continued 3.5

Panel