The field of teacher education has seen a surge in rhetoric advocating the need to cultivate teachers' linguistic and cultural responsiveness (Gay, 2018; Hollie, 2012; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), as well as their transformative agency (Lourenço, 2021; Simões, Lourenço, & Costa, 2018). Such rhetoric arises from the perception that teacher education should not just be about training for the demands of professional practice but should prepare teachers to become proactive contributors to a more equitable, inclusive and peaceful world. Addressing this context, this presentation reports on a qualitative case study (Yin, 2009) conducted with a group of pre-service teachers attending a course in Elementary Education in a Portuguese Higher Education Institution. The study aimed at understanding whether, how and to what extent these teachers incorporated plurilingual and global citizenship education into their "becoming" teacher identities, while developing a project for eight non-formal education settings. Data consisted of the projects developed by the pre-service teachers in one semester and individual reflections written throughout the academic year. These were subjected to deductive content analysis (Krippendorf, 2013) according to three dimensions that characterize a teacher's professionalism: a pedagogical and didactic dimension, a linguistic and communicative dimension, and an ethical and political dimension (Andrade et al., 2015). A preliminary analysis of the results shows that the teacher education programme contributed to teachers' growth as culturally and linguistically aware educators, as well as global citizens. They adopted a more positive attitude towards language learning, and towards the inclusion of different languages and cultures in mainstream education. Furthermore, they understood "the major purposes of education" and the demands of the teaching activity in a globalised world, realising that there is no other way than to adopt transformative forms of education. Still, despite their motivation and commitment to address global issues and value pupils' linguistic repertoires, pre-service teachers mentioned that they feel unsure about the ways to integrate these perspectives in their future teaching practice, claiming that they lack sufficient knowledge and pedagogical training. These results seem to justify a more systematic work with pre-service teachers throughout their academic preparation to support them in integrating plurilingual and global citizenship education into their skillset and mindset. This work should be sustained on a reflective and critical pedagogy and on the development and evaluation of plurilingual projects in diversified settings.
References
Andrade, A. I., Martins, F., Pinho, A. S., De Carlo, M., & Anquetil, M. (2015). REFDIC - Un référentiel de compétences en didactique de l'intercompréhension pour la formation de formateurs. www.miriadi.net.refdic
Gay, G., (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (3rd edition). Teachers College Press.
Hollie, S. (2012). Culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and learning: Classroom practices for student success. Shell Education.
Krippendorf, K. (2013). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (3rd Edition). Sage.
Lourenço, M. (2021). From caterpillars to butterflies: Exploring pre-service teachers' transformations while navigating global citizenship education. Frontiers in Education, 6(651250). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.651250
Simões, A.R., Lourenço, M., & Costa, N. (Eds.). (2018). Teacher education policy and practice in Europe: Challenges and opportunities for the future. Routledge.
Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2002). Preparing culturally responsive teachers: Rethinking the curriculum. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(1), 20-32.
Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: design and methods (4th edition). Sage.
