Reform in Teacher Education Pedagogy: Meeting the Needs of Bilingual Candidates and Emergent Bilingual Students

• In Event: Decentering Whiteness and Monolingual/Monoglossic Ideologies, Practices, and Identities in an Elementary Teacher Education Program

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
Most research done on bilingual teacher education takes place within programs that are separate from mainstream teacher education (Bustos Flores, Hernandez Sheets & Riojas Clark, 2011). Almost all bilingual teacher preparation takes place in settings meant for mainstream teacher education, without considering the specific needs of bilingual candidates within each subject area. With the addition of a bilingual teacher training element within the TEP program, needed changes within the program were implemented to account for the linguistic needs of K-12 emergent bilingual students and the needed methodologies to account for bilingualism and biliteracy. This study will add to the scarce literature on bilingual teacher preparation via an examination of specific methodologies in the content areas, while also examining how teacher educators perceive these reform efforts.

Conceptual Framework
Theorists of organizational change (Brown, 1978; Imershein, 1977; Morhman & Lawler, 1985; Pfeffer, 1982; Sheldon, 1980) assert that within an organization there is a collective culture and understanding of implementation (Hasan Simek & Seashore Louis, 1994). In teacher education there is a collective understanding of what candidates need to learn to work with all students, however we are attempting to expand this belief to include the specific needs of bilingual candidates and emergent bilingual students. Although Smircich (1983) asserts that sustainable change cannot be imposed upon on a culture, I argue that the addition of needed changes to accommodate the bilingual program was a catalyst for self-examination of teacher educator practices, which is essential to educational reform (Awbrey, 2005).

Methods
This is a qualitative case study of a teacher education program (Yin, 2004). The program added 13 candidates slated to work in bilingual classrooms upon completion of the program. Although previous cohorts trained bilingual teachers, the number of bilingual candidates increased significantly, making it imperative that material covered in methods courses could be applicable in bilingual classrooms. This study aims to answer the following questions:

1. What changes were made in the methodology courses to ensure transferability to bilingual classrooms?
2. In what ways did the teacher educator feel that these changes were effective and to what extent did they feel prepared for them?

Data Sources
Data sources for this study include participant observation and co-teaching in literacy, numeracy, and science methods courses over a three quarter period of time. Data also include interviews with teacher educators, along with observations in faculty meetings where program reform was discussed.

Results
Preliminary results show that across content, some teacher educators felt more prepared and open to reform than others. However, many teacher educators viewed changes to their courses as positive and beneficial for all candidates.

Scholarly Significance
Taking into account the linguistic needs of students is often left to those teaching in post program endorsement courses. This leaves a large population of teachers ill-prepared for work with emergent bilingual students. This study fills the gap in research on specific teacher education pedagogy for bilingual candidates and demonstrates how reform in teacher education will benefit the overall training of all candidates.

Authors

• Renee Shank, University of Washington - Seattle

• Manka M. Varghese, University of Washington