Centring multilingual learners and countering Rrcism in Canadian teacher education

This article includes aspects of a larger study in which we critically examine how and what mainstream teacher candidates learn in preservice programs about supporting multilingual learners (MLs). Since 2015, the province of Ontario has required that all teacher candidates — not just future ESL specialists — be prepared to support MLs. Within this context, we provide a description and discussion of who multilingual learners are imagined to be in policy documents and by various actors in education, along with examples of teacher candidate learning from a mixed-methods case study of teacher-candidate learning in the Master of Teaching at the University of Toronto. Our article reveals the complexity of preparing teachers to support MLs and suggests possibilities for centring multilingual learners and countering racism in Canadian teacher education.