Becoming Linguistically and Culturally Responsive Educators: Teacher Candidates’ Perspective Shifts in an Introductory Linguistics Course

Many teacher education programs aim to address the acute need for culturally and linguistically responsive educators by fostering linguistic consciousness and awareness of language learner populations. This mixed-methods study explores how elementary education teacher candidates’ perspectives shift through critical reflection and dialogue about English learners’ education and equitable classroom practices. Using a transformative learning framework, our findings illustrate that collaborative learning tasks as well as peers’ and multilingual graduate teaching assistants’ experiences play a disorienting role in challenging monolingual and bilingual teacher candidates’ beliefs about language acquisition, bilingualism, and English learners’ education. We discuss implications for teacher language awareness and instructional practices in ESL endorsement courses.