Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates’ meaning-making of space and place: Attending to raciolinguistic landscapes in bilingual teacher education

Abstract

In this article, we examine the ways 17 Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates (TCs) employed spatial rationales to make meaning of why they mostly leverage English within their bilingual teacher education classes at their Hispanic-Serving Institution. We asked: (1) How do TCs interpret the predominance of English on campus and the bilingual teacher education program? (2) What do TCs’ understandings reveal about the nature of the structures sustaining the hegemony of English? To answer these questions, we drew upon the raciolinguistic perspective and critical notions of space and place. Findings reveal that despite the University’s mission to serve Latina/o students, TCs still experience English as connected to the United States and the predominantly white community where campus is located, and Spanish as belonging in Mexico and the heavily Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods south of the city. Our analysis suggests that this mapping of language and race ideologies onto particular spaces/places—or what we have termed raciolinguistic landscapes—reflects and reproduces boundaries that uphold institutionalized systems of exclusion. Findings have implications for bilingual teacher education, with regards to ways to help TCs critically engage raciolinguistic landscapes.