Cultural and Linguistic Multiplicity as a Resource for Sensemaking in a Dual Language Immersion Teacher Education Context

Abstract

Dual Language Immersion (DLI) language education programs are complex spaces that have the potential to support greater educational equity. However, achieving this potential requires DLI teachers who are prepared to disrupt inequitable status quos by engaging with complexity to welcome into their classrooms ways of knowing and being that are typically excluded. This three-paper dissertation examined how DLI teacher candidates in a methods course used multiplicity as a resource for sensemaking about the work of learning to teach in DLI. Multiplicity refers to an awareness of heterogeneity in ways of knowing and being, including how dominant ideologies flatten learning to reproduce norms that center White, monolingual English ways of knowing and being. Across the three papers, multiplicity served as a resource for teacher candidates to surface ideological tensions that supported sensemaking around the complexity of DLI teaching and learning. Paper 1 considered how multiplicity was a resource in the methods course that allowed for sensemaking about settled norms in disciplinary learning shaped by settler-colonial histories. In Paper 2, multiplicity was used by the course instructor, Emily, as a resource to help the teacher candidates develop professional vision, or an ability to see the work of DLI teaching in new ways. Finally, Paper 3 traces how multiplicity served as a resource that supported teacher candidates to develop ideological clarity about the potential for equity in DLI learning. Cultivating multiplicity and its potential to welcome alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world may be essential to preparing teacher candidates who can create future DLI classrooms that re-envision DLI education in ways that take up its promise for equity.