Based on critical analysis of the racial and linguistic ordering of Ontario schools, this presentation examines how racism and linguicism collaborate to shape the conditions under which teacher candidates learn how to teach. Our goal here is not to identify which kinds of teacher-candidate learning and practice are "good" and which are "bad." Nor do we intend to portray the ideas and practices of participants in this study as fixed or static. Rather, our analysis traces dynamic shifts in thinking and practice as participants drew on their personal, professional and academic experiences to interpret what it means to work with multilingual learners in the classroom.
Our research is situated in a jurisdiction that since 2015 requires all teacher candidates to learn about linguistic diversity and to support "English language learners," and within a teacher-education program with explicit commitments in policy and in curriculum to challenging racism and other forms of oppression. Moreover, just over half of teacher candidates in the program studied here are themselves multilingual, while just under half identify as racialized. This constellation of policy, curricular, and demographic features helps explain the generally positive disposition the vast majority of teacher candidates in our study held towards multilingualism and supporting their future multilingual learners. However, this positive disposition was often disrupted by candidates' shifting ideas about multilingualism in the classroom and emergent teaching practices that continued to reproduce racialized hierarchies of languages.
We do not read these contradictions as individual teacher candidates having failed to learn the right things, or as individual teacher educators as having failed to teach the right things. Rather, we focus instead on shifts in participants' ideas and practice as they reflected on their own lived experiences with multilingualism and racism; engaged with formal curriculum and policy documents designed to support "English language learners"; interacted with real multilingual learners, whether in practicum placements or through video profiles called Me Maps, which were initiated through this project; and reflected on their practical experiences in Toronto-area schools. By tracing participant interactions with these people and resources, we reveal how candidates' thinking and practice changed with respect to "supporting English language learners." In many instances, these shifts provide compelling evidence of how teacher education can function as a form of white institutional listening (Daniels & Varghese, 2020), and how multilingual and racialized teacher candidates themselves learn how to function as white listening subjects (Flores & Rosa, 2015).
Despite the preponderance of this evidence, however, our primary investment in this research is in understanding how and under what conditions positive change is possible. The presentation concludes by identifying various practices and policies identified in our research as supporting the kind of changes we do need and how to realize them in teacher education.
