Linguistic and Cultural Appropriations of a Multilingual Literacy Teacher Educator: An Autoethnographic Self-study

This autoethnographic self-study describes my interpretations

of multicultural awareness, with special attention to multilingual

awareness (MLA), based on my interactions with 52 students in

the context of two literacy courses over a period of one year. An

autoethnographic self-study provided an avenue to harness my

reflections on practice and to study the ways in which my practice

reflected awareness of my role as an educator. Findings from

my teaching videos, written responses to students, and student

evaluations suggested that my communication patterns with students

reflected certain elements of multicultural awareness, as displayed

by my attention to individual predispositions, cultural practices and

personal stereotypes. The findings also appeared to indicate that

multicultural and MLA interacted to reflect facilitation and symbiosis.

Facilitation seemed apparent in my awareness of differences among

students’ cultures and my own as I monitored my linguistic processing.

Symbiosis appeared to emanate from the recognition of how my

response to individual predispositions facilitated my application of

conversational strategies based on feedback. This, in turn, heightened

my attention to stereotypical attitudes and behaviors. Implications

for multicultural teacher education include the benefits of using

autoethnographic self-study to scrutinize educators’ awareness in

practice as they determine the impact of this awareness on their

instructional roles in multicultural teacher education. By extension,

the study suggests that autoethnographic self-study research can

provide additional lenses through which to interrogate monolithic

perceptions of diversity in multicultural teacher education.