Exploring pre-service teachers’ perceptions about their linguistic knowledge: implications for initial teacher education

In the global north and south many classrooms are described as super-diverse (Vertovec, 2007) and although unevenly distributed, this is also a characteristic of many Australian classrooms. In Australia, an increasingly significant number of plurilingual people are preparing to teach in Australian classrooms, yet the voices of plurilingual Pre-Service Teachers are rarely heard. In this manuscript, we present the perceptions of a group of 28 plurilingual pre-service teachers enrolled in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) contexts in two metropolitan universities in Sydney, Australia. We analyse their perceptions of their own linguistic strengths, knowledge and experience, and their reflections on how their linguistic knowledge has been taken up in their university ITE programs and how it may inform their future teaching. Looking through a participatory social justice lens (Fraser, 2005), we analyse how the current educational landscape is informing our participants’ views and facilitating participatory justice for linguistically diverse teachers and students.