Apprenticeship of pre-service teachers through culturally sustaining systemic functional linguistics

This article examines a graduate language education course that was taught as part of an afterschool ‘club’ activity located in a majority-minority middle school (Latiné and Black) in the US southeast. Pre-service teachers were apprenticed as researchers and educators in developing a culturally sustaining pedagogy for multilingual and multi-dialectical youth through the lens of critical systemic functional linguistics. This cross-pollination is known as Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (CSSFL). This article traces how CSSFL impacted their thoughts, beliefs, practices, and understandings of what it meant to be actively anti-racist and decolonial. Their evolution over time is chronicled through the following themes that emerged from their reflections and multimodal artifacts: humanizing relations, register shifting, and language equity, and multimodal approaches. As one of my focal participants pointed out, this approach allowed her and her classmates to ‘connect theory and action’. This work represents an emerging understanding of how CS SFL could be implemented within a teacher education program.