Grouped by Ability or Linguistic Background? Teachers' Enactment of Differentiated Instruction

• In Event: Roundtable Session 41
  In Roundtable Session: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Student Assignment Policies

Abstract

Ability grouping is a long-standing educational tradition that was highly criticized in the early 90’s in light of Oakes’ (1985) seminal study that cast the practice as a form of in-school segregation for traditionally marginalized student populations. Indeed, as educators of young children, elementary teachers possess a great deal of autonomy and power, while simultaneously responding to institutionalized practices that interact with their professional subjectivities and classroom teaching. Informed by a cultural-historical theoretical framework (Vygotsky, 1978), this qualitative inquiry blends semi-structured interviews with participatory ethnographic fieldwork (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 1995) to generate nuanced description of first grade elementary school teachers’ perceptions of instructional grouping for English learners in the setting of a Southeast US elementary school.

Authors

• Michelle Plaisance, Greensboro College

• Tina Lane Heafner, University of North Carolina - Charlotte