Multilingual pedagogies and pre-service teachers: Implementing “language as a resource” orientations in teacher education programs

Authors

Theresa Catalano, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2016

Citation

Published in Bilingual Research Journal 39 (2016), nos. 3–4, pp. 263–278. doi 10.1080/15235882.2016.1229701

Comments

Copyright © 2016 the National Association for Bilingual Education; published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Used by permission.

Abstract

While Ruiz’s (1984) influential work on language orientations has substantively influenced how we study and talk about language planning, few teacher education programs today actually embed his framework in the praxis of preparing pre-service and practicing teachers. Hence, the primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate new understandings and expansions of Ruiz’s language-as-resource (LAR) approach and ways in which teacher education programs can model this orientation in their own classes, including those programs, like ours, that prepare mostly monolingual preservice and in-service teachers to work with bi/multilingual students. The authors pursue this by laying out the theoretical framework for multilingual pedagogies that approach teacher education through the LAR orientation and then illustrate these pedagogies as they are realized in their own teacher education programs with the aim of moving closer to and expanding on Ruiz’s original proposal.