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Classrooms across the United States today often include students from multiple different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The teaching force, by contrast, has remained predominantly White and Anglophone with little experience learning additional languages (Athanases & Wong, Citation2018; Deroo & Ponzio, Citation2023; Pettit, Citation2011). When teachers themselves have limited experience with linguistic diversity, how can teacher educators raise teacher candidates’ (TCs) critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) over the limited duration of the teacher certification process? This article analyzes the implementation of a CMLA project which engaged secondary TCs in becoming language learners themselves to reflect on the experience of being an early language learner. We collected written reflections from 49 TCs about their language learning experiences over 30 h and drew on the five domains of CMLA (Power, Cognitive, Affective, Social and Performance) (Prasad, Citation2022) to code the data set. We focus on the domain of Power to examine how learning a new language even for a short time can engage TCs practically in attending not only to mechanics of teaching and learning with multilingual students but also more critically to recognize the systemic power relations among languages and language users in schools.
