Teachers as Learners: Interrogating Raciolinguistic Ideologies for More Expansive Writing Assessment Practices for Multilingual Learners

Teachers’ beliefs about learners’ capacity and the languaging practices they value impact the writing curriculum teachers enact and the types of opportunities multilingual learners have to develop as writers. In English-dominant contexts such as the United States, teachers—who are majority white and monolingual—too often view racialized multilingual students with a deficit lens. In taking up this work, we ask, “How can teachers become more aware of their own raciolinguistic ideologies and beliefs about what counts as quality writing?” In this chapter, we describe several professional learning sessions in an 11-month program. These sessions illustrate how we facilitated opportunities for elementary educators to critically examine raciolinguistic ideologies—their own and those reproduced in writing instruction and assessment. Over time, teachers developed more expansive language ideologies which included validating and affirming multilingual students’ languaging practices. Finally, we describe a protocol for examining multilingual students’ writing from a holistic perspective considering ways to assess and provide strengths-based instruction.