From linguistic outsiderhood to inclusive practice: critical experiential learning in multilingual teacher education

International debates about inclusive education increasingly stress the identification and removal of barriers to participation for all learners, yet teacher education often treats multilingualism as a specialist language issue rather than as a core dimension of inclusion. This qualitative study analyses 127 reflective papers written by licenced in-service teachers enrolled in an English as a second language/bilingual endorsement programme at a Midwestern US university. For a course-embedded experiential assignment, teachers spent one hour in an unfamiliar language context – radio, television, or a community/religious service – and then wrote a structured reflection and personal cultural-learning plan. Reflexive thematic analysis generated four themes: the affective weight of sustained incomprehension; multimodal and relational resources as access infrastructure; outsiderhood as the social organisation of belonging; and movement from empathy to inclusive pedagogical commitments. The article contributes to inclusive teacher education by conceptualising brief unfamiliar-language experiences as critical approximations: bounded, ethically framed tasks that do not simulate multilingual learners’ lives but can make visible barriers to participation and support teachers’ translation of linguistic empathy into inclusive classroom design.