Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classrooms: Cultivating Critical, Anti-Oppressive, and Decolonial Spaces for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students in Teacher Education

Dear Colleagues,

In the United States and around the world, there is a long history of discourses and practices that dehumanize culturally and linguistically diverse students (also known as multilingual, emergent bilingual, or language-minoritized students) in the classroom and beyond. For example, culturally and linguistically diverse students have long been labeled as “limited” or “non-standard” English learners and segregated from their “native” English-speaking peers (e.g., the ‘push-in’ and ‘pull-out’ models). Despite the recent language-policy shifts and increasing access toward multilingual education, culturally and linguistically diverse students are continually subject to subtractive and assimilationist teaching practices and hostility (e.g., racial/ethnic, class, and religious) from their teachers and school leaders in the public schooling system. Teacher education, across disciplines, in different parts of the world, thus, must provide opportunities for language- and discipline-specific teachers to question and counter the hegemony of the English language, inequitable practices and policies, and its embedded power relations in ways that lead to more equitable and just action-oriented change. This work requires us to not only challenge deficit-saturated views of culturally and linguistically diverse students in classrooms, schools, and universities at the individual level but also examine the possibilities of culturally and linguistically sustaining curricula and pedagogy and working within and against educational policies that maintain dominant, oppressive discourses and practices of English learning and teaching at the structural level. We must also consider English learning and teaching and its coloniality at the global level, considering how intersecting global forces (e.g., colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and White supremacy) have structured educational disparities, inequities, or injustices for culturally and linguistically diverse students.

This Special Issue calls for research and practice that elicit critical, anti-oppressive, and decolonial conceptualization and embodiment of English learning and teaching with and for culturally and linguistically diverse students alongside diverse stakeholders (e.g., educators, teacher educators, community organizations, and policymakers). This Special Issue also warmly welcomes interdisciplinary and collaborative work in ways that center pragmatic challenges and possibilities in the design and implementation of research studies and collaborations in working with culturally and linguistically diverse students across disciplines and institutional boundaries.

Potential topics for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Exploring the effects of curricular, pedagogical, and/or assessment elements on culturally and linguistically diverse students’ equitable learning and socioemotional engagement.
• Cultivating pre- and in-service teachers’ professional identities in line with commitments to critical, anti-oppressive, and decolonial foundations of education.
• Exploring intersectionality (e.g., intersections of language, race, social class, gender, im/migration status) in English learning and teaching.
• Providing examples of a critical, anti-oppressive, and decolonial English language-specific and/or interdisciplinary curriculum for culturally and linguistically diverse students.
• Cultivating university-based teacher educators’ asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented stances and moves on working with culturally and linguistically diverse students (e.g., coursework, fieldwork, methodology, formal and/or informal curricular design and associated reflexivity).
• Building a coalition for transformative praxis and change among university-, school-, and community-based teachers, scholar-activists, and leaders.

If you are interested, please send a proposal to Dr. Jihea Maddamsetti (jmaddams@odu.edu) by before the submission deadline. This proposal must include (1) a working title; (2) a 200-word abstract that describes empirically or conceptually based unpublished work; and (3) author(s)’s name, affiliation, contact information, and a 50-word biographical statement.

Please share this call with your colleagues and communities who may be interested.

Dr. Jihea Maddamsetti
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• culturally and linguistically diverse students
• teacher education
• professional learning and development
• English learning and teaching towards critical, anti-oppressive, and decolonial goals