story by Claire Miller
Teachers in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) classrooms need to be prepared to teach part of the school day in a target language and the other part of the day in English.
They must integrate their instructional practices and academic content with the languages they use in the classroom so that students gain both content knowledge and language skills.
The U.S. educational system doesn’t have codified guidelines for preparing DLBE teachers, so education students must rely on their teacher preparation programs or on-the-job training to give them the content knowledge, teaching practices and support to succeed in these classrooms.
Associate Professor Lisa Domke, doctoral candidate Christian Valdez and retired clinical assistant professor Cathy Amanti all have experience as DLBE teachers. In 2025, they worked together on a collaborative autoethnography – a combination of qualitative research and the authors’ personal and cultural experiences – to reflect on how their identities and teaching experiences affect how they prepare DLBE teachers.
Their autoethnography began with written autobiographical narratives. Each author wrote about how they entered the DLBE field and how they became supervisors for college students; they also reflected on the feedback they gave to 13 Spanish-English bilingual prospective teachers they supervised.
Domke, Valdez and Amanti then met to discuss each other’s narratives and student feedback, recorded these conversations and used them to identify links among their experiences and identities and how they provide observations and suggestions to their students.
All three authors gave both written and oral feedback to students, and they would begin by noting the practices that students did well in their student teaching. Then, they’d highlight a few key places for improvement to help students manage the areas they needed to work on.
They also made sure to emphasize how students used their bilingualism in the classroom and how they taught about and through the target language, Spanish.
While the authors had very similar approaches to how they gave feedback, the content of their feedback was greatly varied and highlighted each person’s academic background, identity and personal experiences.
“Domke’s academic background in and identity as a literacy scholar led her to prioritize language and literacy. Valdez, whose identity as a Latiné growing up in a Spanish-speaking U.S. household most closely mirrored PSTs’ identities and experiences, was best equipped to address their linguistic insecurities,” they wrote. “Amanti’s background in anthropology and education and identity as an anthropologist led her to focus on sociocultural aspects of teaching in her feedback, such as the importance of learning about and incorporating students’ everyday lived experiences in the curriculum.”
In conducting this autoethnography, the authors could identify any blind spots in their feedback to students and make changes in their supervisory practices – a key element in preparing high-quality DLBE teachers for today’s classrooms.
“Understanding the diversity of our experiences increased our understanding of how DLBE teachers enter the field so that we can prepare them better,” they wrote. “Our goal is not to homogenize supervision, but rather to recognize implicit biases and/or influences in what we choose to focus on, and what we ignore, when preparing teachers.”
They added that engaging in this study and reflection will support them in being “better supervisors in the future.”