ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that decolonization efforts are significant to envisioning a field that engages with the complex realities of educating heritage teacher/learners and of learning from their experiences. Undoubtedly making a distinction between multilingual and monolingual can become a reductive attempt to make stable a privileging social condition that offers prestige to those who skillfully manage the current dominant variety of language. The chapter provides an examination of decolonizing efforts in the personal, professional, and social worlds of teacher education. It addresses several of the challenges involved in moving teacher education, in particular heritage language teacher education, towards a process of decolonization. The chapter also provides evidence of several cases of mobilization of local efforts to leverage resources that build resistance and resilience towards decolonization within an adverse and hostile national context. Teachers of heritage languages who themselves are heritage language learners are survivors of the US educational system.
