The Future of Education

This research takes place in a graduate online course, part of a teacher education program leading to bilingual certification in the United States. As teacher educators, the authors noticed that bilingual teachers are seldom given the time to deeply reflect on themselves and how their identities and lived experiences may affect their instructional pedagogy for linguistically diverse students. To provide students with the digital space to rethink their design choices before moving to instructional practice, the authors intentionally used collaborative methodology to guide course design to 1) weave content knowledge with computational and digital literacies and 2) explore the intersections of identity, bilingual education, and linguistic ideologies to guide and inform students’ curricular design processes in culturally responsive-sustaining ways. 

This work showcases the authors’ design processes and how they integrate digital and computational literacies (Yadav et al., 2017) in bilingual education through critical lenses such as translanguaging and raciolinguistic ideologies (García & Wei, 2014; Rosa & Flores, 2017) and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies (Alim & Paris, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2014). The authors argue that collaborative intentional design offers a moment of critical praxis, where students have opportunities to explore emerging conceptualizations about language and design, which can lead to mindful instructional and pedagogical practices in P-12 bilingual settings. The authors also posit that digital literacies have to be purposefully integrated in curriculum design to foster a critical computational literacy (Lee & Soep, 2016) through which students can question and identify oppressive ideologies to create new educational possibilities and stances that adequately support linguistically diverse students. 

Keywords: bilingual education, collaboration, design, language ideologies, computational and digital literacies

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