Discovering Best Practices for Bilingual Teacher Preparation: A Pedagogy for the Border

Abstract

As members of a team of bilingual preservice faculty in the South Texas borderlands, we have observed a consistent, pattern of inappropriate pedagogy offered to the emergent bilingual learners (EBLs) in the region’s inadequate PK-12 system, where subtractivist teaching practices and school policies undermined their academic development and their personal and professional identities as bilinguals and linguistic minorities. Our task is to teach our preservice students about best practices as we help them develop an awareness of themselves as bilingual, bi-literate professionals who can navigate within the accountability-driven school system and provide additive developmental learning opportunities to their emergent bilingual students.

In this chapter, we describe the experiences and findings from a five-year research project that employed an innovative approach to higher education pedagogy to teach 63 bilingual preservice students how to provide research-based, constructivist-oriented additive pedagogy to emergent bilinguals. Analysis of data from journals and focus group discussions suggest the development of the critical stance necessary for the development of an additive approach needed for the optimal development of emergent bilinguals. Although the study is limited to the specific context of South Texas US–Mexico border communities, the findings have implications for the preparation of bilingual education settings across the nation.

Citation

Ostorga, A.N. and Farruggio, P. (2014), "Discovering Best Practices for Bilingual Teacher Preparation: A Pedagogy for the Border", Research on Preparing Preservice Teachers to Work Effectively with Emergent Bilinguals (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 113-136. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720140000021004