From the Universal to the Specific: Teacher Candidates' Understanding of Supporting English Learners

• In Event: 34.059 - Teacher Education Policies and Linguistic Diversity: An Investigation of Teacher Education for Supporting English Learners

Abstract

Objectives
In 2015, Ontario became the first Canadian province to mandate that all teacher candidates learn about supporting English Learners during their pre-service program. This paper reports a case study of Ontario’s only master’s level teacher-education program and the required course it created in response to this policy.

The paper’s objective is to reveal how mainstream teacher candidates understand course content relative to: a) their own linguistic profiles, b) previous educational experiences, c) the subjects they’re learning to teach, and d) their ambitions as future teachers.

Theoretical Framework
This paper follows Feiman-Nemser (2001) in viewing teacher learning as cyclical and context-dependent. Lucas and Villegas (2013) have adapted Feiman-Nemser’s approach, especially her notion of central tasks, to teacher preparation for linguistic diversity. Central tasks help candidates to develop the dispositions, knowledge, and skills necessary to work in a linguistically-diverse classroom, and they lay the foundation for becoming critical novice teachers.

This paper views policy as social practice (Levinson, Sutton & Winstead, 2009). This interpretive approach unifies analysis of policy intentions (i.e., textual analysis of formal policy) with policy appropriation (i.e., how various policy-relevant actors interpret a given policy and make it their own in specific contexts) (Johnson, 2009).

Methods & Sources
The research informing this paper is a case study of one teacher-education program’s response to Ontario’s new policy mandate. It focuses on a new course, Supporting English Language Learners, required of all candidates in the program. Fourteen sections of the course are offered each year, organized by certification levels (K–6, 4­­–10, 7–12). The data come from 6 sections across these levels offered between January and December 2018. Data include interviews with teacher candidates (n=15), artefacts of candidates’ work (three assignments consistent across all course sections, along with other ad hoc work, from ~95 teacher candidates), classroom observations (~1/3 of instructional time per section), and instructors’ materials (e.g., Powerpoints, handouts).

Results
Preliminary analysis indicates two findings. First, candidates often understand “supporting English Learners” under the rubric of Universal Design and inclusive education. While this suggests candidates embrace the need to tailor instruction to meet specific needs of their future students, appeals to Universal Design also suggest that candidates do not yet understand what is unique about language learning. Second, teacher candidates from linguistically diverse backgrounds are not necessarily any more open to the content of this course than candidates from English-only backgrounds.

Significance
To date, most research on teacher education for linguistic diversity has focused on developing robust theoretical frameworks to guide pre-service programs (e.g., Commins & Miramonte, 2006; de Jong, 2005; Lucas & Villegas, 2013; Samson & Collins, 2012) or have been smaller case studies of a single course section or teacher candidates in a single subject area (e.g., Tanden et al., 2017, de Jong & Harper, 2011). This case study advances the field by including a more comprehensive data set with a larger number of participants, and coupling that empirical analysis with the broader perspectives represented by the other papers in this symposium.

Authors

• Wales Wong, University of Toronto

• Jeff Bale, University of Toronto - OISE