Exploring Bilingual Teachers’ Callings to Dual Language Classrooms: Testimonios de Motivo y Capacitación

In the context of a growing popularity of Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) alongside a persistent, nationwide bilingual teacher shortage, this qualitative study examined the callings of bilingual teachers to the dual language classroom and the professional experiences they value to learn pedagogy. Using testimonio methodologies, ten bilingual teachers from Chicagoland schools with two-way dual language programs were invited to share their sociolinguistic and educational histories and perspectives about teaching and learning in DLBE. Through a LatCrit lens, this research addresses the impact that a long history of socially and politically marginalizing and subtractive practices have had on bilingual teachers. I synthesize those impacts with the outcomes they envision, for themselves and their students, from their work as dual language teachers. The main findings of this research are: (1) bilingual teachers elect to work in DLBE because they want to contribute to a language education model that contrasts the linguistically and culturally subtractive experiences they experienced in their own schooling, (2) dual language teachers find opportunities through their work to serve as advocates, enhance their own bilingualism, and offer their students a more positive, flexible approach to bilingualism, (3) dual language teachers appeal for resolved leadership to address the threat that gentrification poses to the integrity of their programs, (4) dual language teachers gain competencies from legitimate peripheral participation within communities of practice, and (5) the opportunity for dual language teachers to refine their ideological clarity creates confident praxis. This research calls attention to more nuanced ways to recruit, retain, and support dual language teachers because these efforts are vital for the success of DLBE.