Critical Approaches to Spanish Language Teacher Education: Challenging Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Fostering Critical Language Awareness

Abstract

Drawing on raciolinguistics and critical pedagogies, this article discusses critical approaches to Spanish language teacher education. Previous research highlights how racialized, monolingual, and native speaker language ideologies underlie Spanish language instruction and subsequently influence teachers’ impressions of themselves and of their students. As such, this paper presents a model of a critically oriented methods course that includes content knowledge (sociolinguistics, critical language awareness, translanguaging) and pedagogical content knowledge (different Spanishes, social justice teaching) that may be incorporated to heighten preservice teachers' critical awareness and encourage them to challenge language ideologies in their future profession. Case studies of two preservice teachers of Spanish: Ari, a Mexican American heritage speaker of Spanish, and Ray, an African American language learner of Spanish, are also discussed in order to highlight the impact of such a course on developing teacher identities and their praxis, especially for teachers of minoritized backgrounds.