Bilingual, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color teacher candidates' translanguaging selves: Working with their multilingual assets and identities as future elementary science teachers

Abstract

Understanding how racially and linguistically just teacher education programs (TEPs) support the identity(ies) and translanguaging stances taken up by bilingual Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teacher candidates (TCs) in their professional lives is important both for their development as teachers and for teacher preparation more broadly. Drawing on assignments, classroom observations, interviews, and data from professional learning community (PLC) meetings for three BIPOC dual language bilingual education TCs, this qualitative case study sheds light on translanguaging stance development and the intersecting identities that emerge for these TCs as they learn to teach through the theoretical lenses of translanguaging and raciolinguicized subjectivity. Findings show how the TEP learning contexts supported the development of bilingual BIPOC TCs' translanguaging stances as a critical part of their professional identities as linguistically justice-oriented science teachers. We argue that their translanguaging stance is a new way of being multilingual and is central to building an elementary science classroom culture with and for multilingual students. This study underscores how bilingual BIPOC TCs' prior knowledge and identities can be leveraged in teacher education and K-12 classrooms to develop their translanguaging selves. It also supports robust pedagogical preparation and linguistic justice through multilingual transpositioning of science identities.