Multilingual Youth Perspectives on Humanizing Core Practices

Background

Providing multilingual youth with an equitable education requires that all teachers are exceptionally well-prepared to support youth learning needs. Recent teacher education scholarship suggests that effective preparation of novice teachers requires more meaningful opportunities for novice teachers to engage in specific intentional practices than has historically been the case in most US teacher preparation programs (Brownell, et al., 2019). Research also demonstrates the lack of preparation for teachers who serve multilingual youth (Faltis & Valdés, 2016; Viesca & Teemant, 2019) though there is a growing body of scholarship that has offered some guiding frameworks, principles, practices, and strategies for educators serving such learners (Bunch, 2013; de Jong & Harper, 2005; Lucas et al., 2008). Utilizing sociocultural theories of learning (Johnson, 2009; Vygotsky, 1978) and calls to humanize approaches to instruction with minoritized learners (e.g., Bartolomé, 1994; Bartolomé & Trueba, 2000), this study contributes a perspective of core practices as providing a foundation for novice teachers to understand, enact, and reflect on effective pedagogical practices across a range of content-areas, grade levels, and teaching contexts. The larger goal of this research is to support social, emotional, and content-based learning for multilingual youth through intentional, skillful, and humanizing teaching.