“You have a master’s degree, but you speak so ghetto”: Secondary Content-Area Teachers Navigating Raciolinguistic Ideologies

This qualitative study analyzed data from urban intensive and urban characteristic in-service teachers in a master's program using a raciolinguistics framework. Using classwork and interview data, we explored how professional development (PD) allows teachers to engage with professional discourses to process raciolinguistic experiences as they teach in secondary content-area courses. These experiences included microaggressions with other teachers, friends, and the students they taught. Teachers identified and navigated tensions in their profession from being positioned through raciolinguistic policing. Lastly, indexing and naming raciolinguistic ideologies led teachers to negotiate professional identities. Based on those findings, we share implications for in-service teacher PD and the potential to engage teachers to negotiate raciolinguistic ideologies around teaching emergent bilinguals in various urban contexts.