CTL5315H
Multilingual schools are not a new phenomenon, especially in white settler-colonial contexts such as Canada. However, multilingualism and the lives of multilingual learners are rarely a central topic in teacher education. Sometimes, a teacher-education program might have a one-off course, often an elective, about multilingualism; more often, there are certification pathways that prepare future specialists in language teaching (in Canada, e.g., future teachers of English and French as ‘second’ languages). What multilingualism is, who multilingual learners are, whose languages belong at school, what the intersections are between linguistic diversity and other categories of social differentiation—in particular colonialism and racism—too often are seen as peripheral questions in teacher education. In the last decade, this has begun to change. A growing number of teacher-education programs explicitly address linguistic diversity in their curriculum, and expect all teacher candidates to consider multilingual learners as part of their future practice. The purpose of this course is to engage with this growing research base on teacher education that centres multilingual learners, and to do so from intentionally international, comparative, and critical perspectives.