Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Welcome to this special issue, which centers on critical language awareness (CLA) as a framework for working with multilingual students in U.S. schools. The seminal idea for the issue arose from a colloquium, Language Aware Teaching in Multilingual and Remote Contexts, organized by TESOL’s Research Professional Council and held during the 2021 TESOL Convention. By 2021, the educational community was reeling from the effects of COVID-19 and the inescapable evidence that the pandemic had exacerbated already-existing educational inequities globally. These were especially seen in lower-income urban and rural school districts—social geographies that tend to overlap with racialized and linguistically marginalized communities. In the U.S., the disproportionate impact on schools in these communities was widely reported. With educational equity both an ongoing and urgent concern, the research colloquium highlighted instructional approaches that center multilingual students’ linguistic and cultural knowledge in school curricula through critical and liberatory teaching that seeks social change. This issue unpacks the ideological, pedagogical, and practical complexities, as well as the possibilities reported by teacher educators, preand in-service teachers, and students as they engaged these approaches in their multilingual classrooms. Instructional approaches committed to leveraging community languages, language practices, and knowledge in school curricula have gained traction in teacher education programs over the past three decades. Among these approaches, funds of knowledge research (Moll et al., 1992); linguistically and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017); linguistic landscape research (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009); youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008); and translanguaging (García et al., 2017) are represented in this issue. Yet those involved in the work of education have reported tensions between these approaches and established ideologies and practices in school settings. In the U.S., where English monolingualism rather than bilingualism has been predominantly promoted as an educational goal, there is a need to recognize and affirm the multilingual nature of schools as the worldwide norm (García, 2016), and to support and de-isolate teachers as they take up instructional approaches that value diverse forms of community knowledge. The articles in this issue demonstrate how CLA offers such an avenue. By illustrating how centering students’ languages, language practices, and knowledge unearths ideological and structural challenges, these CLAfocused articles offer possibilities for how teachers and students can be empowered by alternative pedagogies that engage their own decision-making along the way.