ABSTRACT
Dual language (DL) education programs directly challenge schools’ role in settler-colonial projects and, as such, today's DL teachers are called to enact critical, anticolonial practices founded upon contemporary language theories that are culturally and linguistically sustaining and support rich content learning. This chapter first situates DL teachers’ professional development (DLPD) within current sociopolitical context and then examines the contemporary research about DLPD. Dominant, neoliberal framing of DL education recognizes multilingualism as the development of transactional skills instead of as sustenance of identities, cultures, and community cultural wealth. Most DLPD has been interwoven with these neoliberal structures, privileging interest convergence and English learning. To be in line with DL teachers’ realities and needs, DLPD must be situated within complex, ideological, sociopolitical frameworks and make this messy reality a central component in DLPD to foster critical consciousness and activism. An ideological shift must take place to align DLPD in solidarity with the movement for linguistic justice and to fully embrace the liberatory potential of DL education. This chapter suggests a critical approach to DLPD that is dialogical and anticolonial, centers teachers’ community cultural wealth and healing on their path toward ideological clarity, and foments activist networks.
