As teacher education programs encourage more candidates to pursue bilingual certification, a need exists to improve the ways that preservice teachers (PSTs) are prepared to teach in bilingual classrooms. Research suggests the importance of preparing PSTs in the area of linguistic ideological clarity. Scholars define ideological clarity as an…

Language policies in the U.S., including matters relating to bilingual education, are tangled up with political tensions and ideology. All too often, the dialogue among educators and policymakers about what constitutes best practices for people learning English -- for whom we will use the term emergent bilinguals (EBs) (Garcia, Kleifgen and Falchi…

This article describes the ways in which study abroad experiences in international settings may help language teachers develop linguistic and cultural consciousness that ideally influence pedagogical practices in their home teaching contexts. Drawing upon the framework of critical multilingual awareness (CMLA; García, 2017), we describe three…

Using community cultural wealth as an overarching theoretical lens and validation theory interconnected with language and identity frameworks, this paper describes the educational trajectories of Latinx bilingual pre- and in-service teachers in the borderlands. This study explores how its participants experienced struggles and resilience while…

From a sociocultural perspective, identity is understood as constructed through active negotiations with others (Gee, 2006; Lantolf, 2009). Language constitutes a mediation tool used to create meanings in new social and cultural contexts as individuals become members of new communities of practice (CoP). In doing so, an ongoing process of sharing…

Currently, there is limited research examining the barriers that immigrant professionals experience when becoming a bilingual teacher in the United States. This study examines the trajectory of a Mexican national, trained as a teacher in his home country, who became a bilingual dual-language educator in a Central Texas school district. Drawing on…

This article describes bilingual teacher preparation at a public university on the U.S.-Mexico border. I examine colonizing language ideologies that are reproduced in the local schools and teacher preparation programs, and show how preservice teachers engaged in Participatory Action Research to counter negative ideologies about bilingualism and…

This paper explores the construction of identity in an academic learning environment in Central Mexico, and shows how identity may be linked to non-language factors such as emotions or family. These issues are associated with elements of hybrid identity. To analyze this we draw on language choice as a tool used for the construction of identity and…

This article provides portraits of two women on professional journeys to become bilingual teachers. Stacie Thao was born in Thailand. Nancy Aguilar was born in California, and spent some of her childhood in Mexico. Stacie's first language is Hmong, while Nancy's is Spanish. Each learned English in school, and each helped their immigrant parents…

The study described in this article took place in an international consortium type model program. The International Teacher Education Program (ITEP) is a California State University System (CSUS) credential program for elementary teacher candidates who are pursuing teacher certification as bilingual teachers (Spanish). Besides San Diego State…