This book details a three-year, multi-stranded study of teacher education programs that prepare future teachers to work with multilingual learners. The book examines how racism and linguicism collaborate to shape the conditions under which teacher candidates learn how to teach. The analysis traces dynamic shifts in thinking and practice as participants reflected on their personal, professional and academic experiences in relation to formal curriculum and assessment policies to interpret what it means to work with multilingual learners in the classroom. The book offers guiding principles – above all, learning from multilingual learners, not only about them – and presents a suite of teacher-education practices to disrupt the interplay of language and race that so deeply shapes teacher-candidate learning about multilingual learners.
The authorship team all worked on the research project which forms the core of this book, some as faculty and some as doctoral researchers at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada.
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Shakina Rajendram is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream and the Coordinator of the Language Teaching Field at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Canada. Shakina has taught at the K-12 and post-secondary levels in Malaysia and Canada for over 12 years. Her current teaching and research focus on second language teaching methodologies, pre-service and in-service teacher education, and supporting multilingual learners and international students through translanguaging and multiliteracies pedagogies.
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Julie Kerekes is Associate Professor in Language and Literacies Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include interlanguage pragmatics, language and power in intercultural institutional settings, and workplace communication.