Preparing Bilingual Teachers

Abstract

This study draws upon a survey of writing conceptions and cultural dispositions data, as well as multimodal compositions allowing bilingual teacher candidates to recursively explore and deepen the relationships between language, identity, and culture in learning. We found that teacher candidates did rethink the relationships through the multimodal tool. Moreover, their epistemic writing conceptions were correlated with high intercultural dispositions and multimodal complexity. The multimodal composition allowed candidates to follow individually distinct processes, but they all made more references to their imagined teaching practice at the end of the learning experience. These references were the result of, and resulted in, a deeper reflection of the relationships. Our results have implications for preparing teachers to confront the reality of diverse classrooms through more flexible pedagogical practices that allow for diverse modes of meaning making, such as the multimodal composition in this study.