Language teacher education programs at U.S. universities have increasingly turned to local-global communities as sites for language learning and teacher preparation (Clifford & Reisinger, 2018). Such initiatives commonly involve partnerships between universities and community-based organizations, whose multilingual and transnational members often belong to linguistically marginalized communities. The equitable and mutually beneficial dimensions of such partnerships are often assumed, but rarely examined (Authors, 2019). Also less documented in the literature are the voices and perspectives of multilingual community members, as well as the leadership, time, resources, and work committed by community-based organizations and members to ensure such programs and projects are successful (Authors, 2018). Finally, there is also much to learn about ways to enact liberatory, asset-based, and culturally-sustaining frameworks together with multilingual communities to de/re-create collaborative spaces of learning that move away from colonial legacies and towards ethical, equitable, and socially just practices. This paper explores the possible pathways, processes, and practices to decolonize the language teacher education curriculum and transform relationships of presumed power and dependency.
A team of community-based leaders, students, staff, and faculty from a public, land grant, university in the United States, came together to embrace these challenges. In partnership with a community-based organization that advocates for workers' rights, and in collaboration with multilingual families, teacher educators, and language teachers, we developed several projects for our language teacher education programs. Our partnership aimed at: 1) co-creating community-engaged projects that center and celebrate multilingual communities' knowledge, expertise and activism; 2) answering the urgent call to re-imagine language teacher programs, curricula, and praxis (López-Gopar et.al., 2021).
In this presentation, we report on a qualitative case study that explores the reported experiences, processes, and practices of this team and of the program participants who co-created and animated these community-engaged projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data for this study include stakeholders' planning meeting notes and documents, interviews of community organizers and multilingual participating families, written reflections from language teacher candidates, instructional materials and activities developed with and for participating families, and teacher educators' critical reflections. In this narrative report, we first share the community-engaged, decolonial, and anti-racist principles and practices guiding our collaborative work and partnership. We also share our curriculum re-design and our collaborative processes and challenges. With examples from these co-created community-engaged projects, we suggest ways to resist academic privilege by foregrounding multilingual families and community organizations' voices, leadership, expertise, and knowledge in our practices. In this paper, we advocate for a view of community-engaged partnerships and programming as co-learning sites to enact change in language teacher education and beyond.
Clifford, J. & Reisinger, D.S. (2019). Community-based Language Learning: A Framework for Educators. Georgetown University Press.
López-Gopar, M., Schissel, J., Leung, C. & Morales, J. (2021), Co-constructing Social Justice: Language Educators Challenging Colonial Practices in Mexico, Applied Linguistics, 42(6), 1097–1109.
Phipps, A. (2018). Decolonizing Multillingualism: A Struggle to Decreate. Multilingual Matters.
