ABSTRACT
Understanding how to prepare educators for multicultural and multilingual classrooms is the focus of this chapter. While schools are sites of pluralism, student multicultural and multilingualism can be viewed by predominantly white, English monolingual teachers as something that gets in the way of acquiring literacy skills and mastering subject material (Pettit, 2011). To prepare pre-service teachers for the classrooms in which they will teach, moving preservice teachers towards critical multilingual language awareness is necessary (García, 2016). This chapter is informed by a 3-year mixed-methods study exploring 24 pre-service educators’ dispositions towards racially, culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Findings suggest that teacher identity, enrollment in critical language education courses, field placements in racially, culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, and the mentor teacher relationship, all shape preservice teacher criticality. The finding demonstrating the mentor teacher influence on preservice teachers criticality demonstrates the importance of both careful selection of mentor teachers and the significance of the relationship between teacher education and the practitioner community in terms of long-term transformation of taken-for-granted assumptions about racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse learners. The chapter concludes with a discussion of reenvisioning this relationship as a new direction worthy of pursuit in language studies.
