ABSTRACT
Situated in a large north Texas school district, this fictional case study addresses myths regarding bilingualism as a cause of confusion in exceptional active bilingual learners/users of English (ABLE students) that can influence teachers to ask parents to stop using the home language with their children and push for these students’ removal from dual language bilingual education (DLBE) classrooms. The case study of this pervasive push towards English-only instruction provides context for professional development meant to activate the critical consciousness of DLBE teachers who may hold deficit-based ideologies that limit exceptional ABLE students’ opportunities for life-long bilingualism, and a critical consciousness decision-making (CCDM) model is provided to address these ideologies. The case narrative is structured through a series of email exchanges and classroom conversations between DLBE teachers at a one-way developmental DLBE elementary school, the Language Proficiency and Assessment Committee (LPAC) coordinator, and a bilingual speech language pathologist, in which ultimately a holistic understanding of bilingualism is clarified and misperceptions of who is capable of being bilingual are debunked. Through this team-based approach, examples of positive, critical-conscious practice, such as translanguaging in content-based story retells for assessment and instruction, are illustrated.
