Critical Collaborative Reflection With Linguistic Landscapes and Material Culture in Teacher Preparation

The use of linguistic landscapes (LLs) to expand the respect for and knowledge of minoritized language use has extended into classroom practice and teacher preparation. Nuanced racialized understandings of language that include multimodal and multilingual realities, however, complicate the potential for educators to make sense of the language they perceive through LLs within the context of US teacher preparation. This complexity highlights the de facto segregation that results in an overwhelmingly white teacher workforce entering US K-12 spaces with racially minoritized and multilingual student communities. Using critical multilingual awareness through a raciolinguistic perspective, this study extends and critiques using LLs in teacher preparation asking, “How can instructional design centered on the multimodal literate practices of racially minoritized communities expand the receptive linguistic repertoire of pre-service teachers (PSTs)?” Critical discourse analysis findings from five PST reflections and material culture and LL presentations suggest that (1) assimilationist hidden curricula and performative signage abound within segregated communities and (2) critical humility and engaged pedagogies can increase PST receptive literacies as they interpret and honor the complex language ways of racially minoritized communities. Implications of the power of collective, historicized and contextualized analyses of localized languaging in content-area teacher preparation is discussed.