Transforming Leadership Through Language Policy: Translanguaging Pedagogies and Shifts in Discourse

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Educating Emergent Bilinguals in New York: A Focus on Structural Changes, Distributive Leadership, Translanguaging Pedagogy, and Socioemotional Supports

Abstract

Objective:
This paper seeks to explore the changes in New York State public school administrators’ and teachers’ discourse through participation in a project to develop translanguaging pedagogies and ideologies at their school.

Theoretical Framework:
Diamond, Halverson and Spillane (2007) state that understanding the motivation behind leadership practice is key in describing how leadership shifts in schools. They also emphasize that distributed leadership is crucial in reforming schools’ pedagogical practices. Author (2010) studied the relationship of a community-governed bilingual public school and noted that the nature of distributed leadership deeply affects the implementation of language policies. Our paper extends this work by further describing how distributed leadership is catalyzed within the realm of bilingual education.

Methods:
This study uses data from four of the 27 schools that participated in the project over the course of one calendar year. These four schools represent a range of participation and successful implementation of translanguaging according to an internally devised scale. Interviews and field notes with principals and leadership teams were used to analyze teacher and administrators’ discourse using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methods. In our analysis, we examined the ways in which ideological shifts are both explicitly characterized by teachers and principals, and implicitly revealed through their discourse. The questions guiding this project are as follows:
- How does administrators’ and teachers’ discourse reveal underlying language ideologies?
- How have the discourses of school administrators and teachers shifted over the course of their participation in the project?

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an ideal method of analysis for several reasons. First, CDA recognizes the power dynamics inherent in language and communication. In this way, CDA parallels the beliefs of the project, and inherently focuses on the manifestation of power dynamics in discourse. Our project also shares CDA’s focus on social change, so that language analysis is not an end in itself but a means for identifying both potential and actualized spaces of transformation.

Results:
The results of our analysis have shown several ways in which change occurs in the realm of bilingual education, specifically through schools’ participation in our project. First, schools that explicitly embrace distributive leadership show markedly different patterns of change than schools that espouse more hierarchical leadership roles. Second, the ways that principals speak about their own role and the roles of their staff closely relate to the ways and the extent to which structural and pedagogical change occurs in classrooms. Lastly, for both teachers and principals, changes in the way emergent bilingual students are viewed directly relate to the structural and pedagogical changes that take place in the schools.

Significance:
This study provides urgently needed insight into the mechanisms and means by which administrators and teachers make changes to their understanding of bilingualism. This particular perspective is important because it places language policy at the center of leadership change.

Authors

• Laura Ascenzi Moreno, Brooklyn College - CUNY

• Sarah Hesson, CUNY - Graduate Center