Commonly and Less Commonly Taught Language Communities' Designs for Curriculum and Teacher Education

• In Event: Community-Based Action Research Toward Participatory and Transformative Educational Language Policy

Abstract

‘Heritage’ language (HL) education offers home language, literacy, and culture courses as world language electives. Goals vary from bilingual recuperation to academic biliteracy, to critical pedagogy and translingual approaches (Author, 2017; Author & Co-authorA). HL programming in K-12 schools is a policy action driven by community and teacher (typically multilingual teachers of color) advocacy for access to linguistically and culturally sustaining spaces (Author, under review).
HL teaching is not the same as new language (L2) teaching. World language teacher education focuses on L2 learners with limited access to the language and community, and Eurocentric perspectives (Potowski, 2003). Resources for curriculum and teacher development for less commonly taught languages (LCTL) are based in economic or national security interests (Bale, 2010; 2011; Author & co-AuthorB). Language teachers continue to receive little to no intentional instruction on best practices for teaching HLs (Brinton, Kagan, & Bauckus, 2017; Potowski & Carreira, 2008). Few studies exist to guide HL teachers. This paper asks what should teachers of HL learners know and be able to do? (extending Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2007). This includes what to teach (curriculum), how to teach (pedagogies), and who teaches.
This paper draws from a fight back ethnography (McCarty, 2012; Villenas, 2012) of a five-year participatory design research study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2015) and interviews with thirty participant-designer HL teachers (Spanish and Hmong). Youth, parents, elders, and teachers engaged PDR to iteratively design curriculum and teacher professional development. Fight-back ethnography (McCarty, 2012; Villenas, 2012) interrupts circulating narratives of risk, heroism, and villainy in U.S. education by leveraging critical ethnographic methods for policy analysis towards educational transformation. Fight back ethnographies of social transformation projects “’make public’ the injustices our ethnographic work reveals and [works] alongside the antihegemonic projects of insurgent educators, youth, and communities” (McCarty, 2012, p. 6). PDR provided evidence-based examples from classroom instruction, collaborative action research, and the shaping of community desires into policies of practice (Menken & Garcia, 2010). Interviews were transcribed and coded for themes and content (Saldaña, 2012).
Findings from two ongoing multi-year PDR projects (Spanish and Hmong heritage language teachers, elders, youth, parents, and community educators) include curriculum models, units of study, and professional development content reflecting youth and community members’ desires for language, literacy, content, and culture education. HL teachers (most of whom are multilingual teachers of color teaching within their communities) created working units of study that translated community desires directly into curriculum and long-term HL teacher professional development. Curriculum and professional development content reflect linguistic and cultural sustainability (Paris & Alim, 2012; 2017), as defined by communities, including ethnic studies frameworks and translanguaging. Viewing policies as practices that youth and teachers engage in (as compliant with, defiant of, outside the imagination of overt/covert institutional policies), policies of liberatory education and linguistic/cultural sustainability are revealed in the shape of community members and teachers as determiners of what “counts” as a high quality teacher, what becomes units of study/curriculum, and what language and curricular policies are enacted in their everyday practices with one another in K-12 classrooms.

Author

• Jenna Cushing-Leubner, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater