AERA 2025 Annual Meeting Presentation—Teachers’ Development of Critical Consciousness around Multilingual Families

Teachers’ Development of Critical Consciousness Around Multilingual Families
Date & Time: April 25, 2025 | 9:50–11:20 0.m MT
Location: The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 711

Presenter(s): Sarah Howard

Description:

Fundamental to teachers’ culturally relevant instructional practices is their knowledge of students and families (Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2014), but teachers typically receive little preparation in how to meaningfully engage with multilingual families and communities (Green, 2018; Jones, 2020). Aligned with recent calls to learn from and build on multilingual families’ dynamic literacy practices (Paulick et al., 2020), this case study explores the experiences of in-service dual-language teachers participating in a professional learning initiative designed to build their critical consciousness around family literacy. We address the question: How did participating teachers develop critical consciousness around multilingual families’ literacy practices through participation in this program? This intrinsic case study (Stake, 2006) focuses on a cohort of dual-language teachers (N = 4) from Applegate School District (pseudonym) who participated in an online university ESOL and Dual Language endorsement program that included coursework as well as a teacher-designed and district-specific family literacy project. This district was selected because of its long-standing dual-language programming. Data include two teacher focus groups (at the program’s beginning and end), an interview with their district facilitator, and teachers’ online course discussions and submissions. Researchers read data for inductive themes around family literacy, which they aligned with the critical consciousness principles for dual-language teachers (Dorner et al., 2022). To capture change over time for individual teachers and the district cohort, data were also coded to capture stages of development, as articulated in Harro’s (2000) cycle for liberation, which outlines intrapersonal, interpersonal, and systemic changes educators experience as they develop critical perspectives. Initial analyses suggest that dual-language teachers engaged in critical intrapersonal and interpersonal development through course discussions that asked them to historicize their own and their students’ family language practices, conversations that were marked by a strong sense of solidarity among teachers and with the multilingual families they served. Although some teachers could already embrace discomfort and listen critically, all showed evidence of further developing these skills through assignments and activities that asked them to engage directly with multilingual families to better understand their literacy practices. Finally, many dual-language teachers planned future systemic changes to help their schools affirm multilingual families’ identities, interrogate power by calling out inequitable circumstances, and center the translingual practices of families and communities. However, multiple teachers were ambivalent about the teacher-designed and district-specific family literacy project, which was created to support systemic change, suggesting the challenges involved in developing critical consciousness in ways that support systemic changes to better serve multilingual families. From a theoretical perspective, this analysis demonstrates the promise of applying critical consciousness and cycle for liberation frameworks to multilingual family literacy together to better understand the development of critical consciousness over time. This study also highlights successful areas for university endorsement programs aiming to develop critical consciousness for dual-language teachers around multilingual family literacy through intrapersonal self-reflection, engagement with peers, and direct experience with multilingual families. At the same time, it underscores variation in teachers’ uptake of these ideas, particularly when participating in systemic change.