bilingual teacher education

In 2017, the Massachusetts Legislature finally voted to make bilingual education legal after a 15-year experiment with  Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) that prohibited most forms of language programming for bilingual students. While the 15-year law severely curtailed bilingual education in Massachusetts, it did not eliminate it, and a few programs withstood the assault on the language rights of children. However, bilingual teacher education was completely eradicated, so those remaining bilingual programs had no pipeline with which to staff their programs when positions opened up. They provided all their own professional development for new teachers on site after they arrived. Since the change in the law, my colleagues at Boston College, María Brisk, Mariela Páez, Anne Homza, built the Bilingual Education Certificate program (BEC) for teachers currently teaching in bilingual programs who did not have the opportunity to be trained as bilingual teachers because of the previous law. Hundreds of teachers have now gone through the BEC, in part through funding provided for bilingual teacher education provided by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Recent research on bilingual education
Alvarado, J., & Proctor, C. P. (2025). Bilingual teacher candidates as policy appropriators in a previously anti-bilingual state. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 46(3), 637-653.

Alvarado, J., & Proctor, P. (2022). Cultivating bilingual education in Massachusetts: From survival to restoration. In Innovative curricular and pedagogical designs in bilingual teacher education: Bridging the distance with p-12 contexts (pp. 51-63). Information Age Publishing.