Critical Consciousness in Dual Language Bilingual Education

Abstract

As dual language bilingual education (DLBE) embraces critical/sociopolitical consciousness as one of its goals, this chapter addresses the need to understand students’ outcomes in this area. We show that research on student development of critical consciousness is still nascent in DLBE. Based on our literature review of empirical work through 2021, we found only 19 peer-reviewed journal articles that focused on critical consciousness in the DLBE classroom and only 7 of those articles included outcomes of students’ development of critical consciousness. We analyzed the latter articles focused on student learning outcomes and found that the students in those studies developed different areas of critical consciousness, such as critical language, race, class, immigration, and gender consciousness. Because activism is an essential component of critical consciousness, we analyzed evidence of activism in the classroom and found that students were embracing these ideas. However, in none of the studies were students engaged in activism in the classroom. Research must continue to be done to better understand how students are continually developing their critical consciousness in the classroom.

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