Finding Power in an Ideological Stance: Three Urban Teachers’ Orientations Toward Linguistic Diversity

• In Event: Teaching and Learning in Linguistically Diverse Settings

Abstract

Teachers today are faced with many compelling challenges related to educating diverse learners; they must honor students’ knowledge and experience as well as support students in learning codes of power and developing academic literacies. Drawing on a theoretical framework of ideological becoming, data from interviews with three urban high school teachers were analyzed to examine how teachers negotiated and reconciled various ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values related to language diversity. Findings suggest these teachers adopted similar ideological stances, or orientations towards linguistic diversity in general and students’ ways of using language in particular, which allowed them to feel powerful even in the face of difficult challenges related to teaching linguistically diverse learners.

Author

• Denise Ives, University of Massachusetts - Amherst