“Trying to Say the Right Thing”: Helping Online Language Teacher Educators Respond to Rapidly Changing Times

Abstract

Abstract Language teaching is facing rapid and ongoing policy changes that fundamentally affect how we structure and carry out US multilingual education. Teacher educators must guide new and current teachers in a time when decades‐old policies and operations are shifting in unprecedented ways, moving toward restricted immigration and monolingual policies. In a recent special issue on teaching in times of flux, we explored how Pinar's (1995) concept of complicated conversation as curriculum, which centers dialogue as essential curriculum, could help teacher educators respond to changing contexts (Salerno et al., 2025). We now extend that work to how teacher educators can teach amid changing multilingual education policies by: (1) teaching what is known and unknown in the current moment; (2) connecting that to the historicity of policies; and (3) creating caring classroom communities where students form opinions based on historical and scholarly evidence within the context of their lived experiences. We draw upon examples of how April engaged in these practices in a Fall 2025 graduate‐level course on policy and practice. As many US language teacher educators increasingly work in a culture of surveillance and restriction, this work helps fill a growing need for dialogue in TESOL teacher education.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. TESOL Quarterly, 2026 · DOI ↗