Language Policy and School Change: Examining the Role of Distributed Leadership in the Change Process

• In Event: 63.081 - Language Policy for Social Justice: Challenging Educational Inequality for Emergent Bilinguals

Abstract

Recent research in language education policy has increasingly moved away from a solely top-down perspective towards more nuanced understandings of the role of human agency in the interpretation, negotiation, contestation, and/or appropriation of policies by educators within schools charged with their implementation (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; Menken & García, 2010). Such scholarship highlights how language policy development and adoption within schools is in actuality a fluid, dynamic, and multilayered process.

School principals are particularly key players in language education policies, deeply influential in determining whether schools will be monolingual or multilingual in their approaches towards educating emergent bilinguals, yet their role has typically been overlooked in language policy research (Menken & Solorza, 2014). Departing from research that considers English-only policies in U.S. schools, here we examine leadership in three schools participating in an initiative in New York that required that they embrace dynamic bilingualism in their approaches towards educating emergent bilinguals; accordingly, the schools were required to adhere to the following two guiding principles: 1) bilingualism is to be seen as a resource in education, and 2) schools must promote a schoolwide ecology of multilingualism.

Data were gathered over the duration of the schools’ first 1.5 years of participation in the project, from January 2012 to June 2013, through interviews with school principals, other administrators, and teachers and observations of leadership team meetings. Following Johnson (2011), we employed critical discourse analysis to examine the data and thereby deepen our understandings of the language policy and school change processes as school leaders worked to implement new language policies that embrace their students’ multilingualism. We examined the ways in which ideological shifts are both explicitly characterized by leadership and implicitly revealed through their discourse, and found that change centered around these concepts of dynamic bilingualism served to widen the community of decision-makers across all of the schools studied, making it more distributive. In this way, our findings are aligned to recent scholarship suggesting the importance of ‘distributed leadership’ – a reconceptualization of leadership from concentrated in one individual to that of an interactive play shared among multiple formal and informal leaders – to address the complex needs of all students (Leithwood, Mascall & Strauss, 2009; Harris & Spillane, 2008).

We discovered that shifts in how emergent bilingual students and their languages are viewed within each school corresponded to changes in the way leadership is distributed, thereby enabling these schools to provide stronger and more appropriate programming for their emergent bilingual students. Moreover, our research suggests that language policy shifts within schools might necessitate changes in school leadership structures from hierarchical to collaborative, particularly in contexts where school principals have less expertise in the education of emergent bilinguals than teachers do.

Authors

• Kate Menken, Queens College and Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Laura Ascenzi Moreno, Brooklyn College - CUNY

• Sarah Hesson, City University of New York