A Transformational Bilingual Model for Teacher Education.

Overview & Synopsis

At San Diego State University, the training program for bilingual education teachers was developed to systematically accommodate changing needs in education, particularly the needs to educate students with academic proficiency in both Spanish and English and to have a multicultural perspective. The emerging teacher education model empowers prospective teachers to effect positive change by helping them understand how meaning is established in human systems in the immediate context and over time. One strategy for driving systematic change involves peeling back successive layers of political and cultural factors surrounding the system's core value structure. For example, teachers must learn to give clear explanations in Spanish through understanding of the cultural and political context of the explanation and appropriate vocabulary. A central goal of the program is to develop self-directed learning, and prospective teachers are exposed to teaching strategies that give them flexibility in classroom practice. (MSE)