Linguistic and Cultural Appropriations of an Immigrant Multilingual Literacy Teacher Educator

Abstract

This autoethnographic self-study describes my interpretations of multicultural awareness, with special attention to multilingual awareness (MLA), based on my interactions with 52 students in the context of two literacy courses over a period of one year. An autoethnographic self-study provided an avenue to harness my reflections on practice and to study the ways in which my practice reflected awareness of my role as an educator. Findings from my teaching videos, written responses to students, and student evaluations suggested that my communication patterns with students reflected certain elements of multicultural awareness, as displayed by my attention to individual predispositions, cultural practices and personal stereotypes. The findings also appeared to indicate that multicultural and MLA interacted to reflect facilitation and symbiosis. Facilitation seemed apparent in my awareness of differences among students’ cultures and my own as I monitored my linguistic processing. Symbiosis appeared to emanate from the recognition of how my response to individual predispositions facilitated my application of conversational strategies based on feedback. This, in turn, heightened my attention to stereotypical attitudes and behaviors. Implications for multicultural teacher education include the benefits of using autoethnographic self-study to scrutinize educators’ awareness in practice as they determine the impact of this awareness on their instructional roles in multicultural teacher education. By extension, the study suggests that autoethnographic self-study research can provide additional lenses through which to interrogate monolithic perceptions of diversity in multicultural teacher education.