Transforming Literacy Instruction in Second-Language Contexts: The Impact of Graduate Education in Colombia

Teacher educators often come to this role as former K-12 teachers and need to negotiate and transform their own identities and self-efficacy. This insider-outsider reflexivity offers considerations for teacher education and in-service English education programs that strive for an emphasis on literacies theory and practice in their curricula. In this chapter, Mora, Cañas, Rodríguez, and Salazar share their auto-ethnographic and collaborative ethnographic accounts of how they used a literacies graduate seminar as a springboard to transform their own practice in elementary and higher education. The authors provide perspective on transforming literacies theory into second-language contexts and enhancing self-efficacy of in-service teachers through encouraging teachers to pursue master’s and even doctoral degrees in second-language education. The authors believe that the change of perspective around literacy helps address the need for an extended reflexivity toward transformative teacher education practices.