I Influence Too: The Role of Professors in Developing Bilingual Teachers\u27 Spanish Proficiency

To support the growing number of English learners (ELs) across the nation, professors in the field of bilingual education are being called to prepare highly effective bilingual teachers who not only have linguistic proficiency in English and Spanish but can also successfully perform in academic settings. As a result, we, two bilingual education professors working at two different institutions along the Texas–Mexico border, conducted a duoethnography study to explore the question, How are our practices impacting the students we teach?—an area in the field of bilingual education that has been relatively unexplored. We examine our practices using the existing literature in (a) bilingual education teacher preparation and (b) the teaching of Spanish heritage language learners as our framework. In this article, we describe (a) the challenges we face, (b) the language strategies we use in our classrooms to build our students’ language skills, and (c) the pedagogical activities we use with our students that have the greatest impact on their language