Are we language teacher educators? Using linguistic cartography to support teacher identity development around language

Abstract

As university teacher educators in the United States, the three authors prepare teacher candidates (TCs) who will be working with culturally and linguistically diverse learners (CLDLs) in a range of classrooms at various levels and focused on various disciplines. The authors argue that all TCs will be language teachers, in that they will teach CLDLs and use language to teach content and, in this article, the authors discuss tensions in their own professional identities that arise when teaching TCs to work with CLDLs. Specifically, the authors use Self‐Study of Teacher Education Practices (S‐STEP, Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2015) to explore how a language mapping activity, linguistic cartography (Phillips Galloway et al., 2022), initially designed to support TCs to examine links between their personal idiolect and identities, has impacted how they understand their own identities and development as teacher educators.