Teaching in Uncertain Times: Preparing Teachers to Work With Immigrant Students, Families, and Communities

• In Event: Imagining a World Anew: Designing Teacher Education to Support Expansive Visions of Multilingual Learners

Abstract

Discussions about improving learning opportunities and educational equity for young children have been at the top of educational agendas in the U.S. These discussions have been intensified in the last couple of years due to restrictions in learning environments imposed by COVID-19. However, often missing from such debates are the firehose of sociopolitical challenges facing immigrant and refugee children and families—a population that has been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic (Gándara & Ee, 2018). Further missing from those conversations are questions about how best to prepare and support teachers to be responsive to these challenges when working with immigrant students and to engage in advocacy praxis with immigrant families and communities. Along these lines, the thrust of this research has been to advance a critical-ecological theoretical perspective on multilingual teaching and learning, to promote an asset-based orientation toward multilingualism and cultural pluralism in the classroom and society, and to establish and sustain strong partnerships between university, community organizations, schools, and immigrant families’ households. This research has forged a comprehensive, community-engaged, and transcontextual model for multilingual teacher education programs, and expanded toward preparing and supporting teachers to establish and sustain collaborative relationships with community and family partners with the goal to increase capacity and to ensure learning opportunities and equity, especially during the pandemic. In these ways, my work has envisioned and enacted new contexts for advocacy action, new forms of family and community engagement, and new circulations of languages and literacies across households, classrooms, and communities. Importantly, this work has challenged the limited attention to agency, identities, and strategic actions of immigrant students and their families as they traverse home, community, and institutional contexts.
A Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach was engaged to accent issues of trust, power, dialogue, capacity-building, and collaborative inquiry toward the goal of equitable education for immigrant children and families in U.S schools. Participants (n=153) were pre- and in-service early childhood teachers, immigrant and refugee students’ family members, and community leaders from immigrant/refugee-serving organizations. All participants were interviewed to help us gain insight into the political and institutional circumstances of immigrant and refugee students. Further conversations revolved into ways to impact systematic and structural changes to policies to significantly increase educational access, equity, and inclusion of authentic immigrant and refugee experiences, perspectives, and voice into the school curricula, spaces, and educational materials. Interviews and interactional data were analyzed using qualitative methodologies (Creswell & Poth, 2013). Findings point to the need to listen to and engage the voices of immigrant communities in the public dialogue, pedagogical procedures, and policies to facilitate educational equity for immigrant and refugee students and families.
Significantly, this study suggests that to comprehensively improve educational opportunities for immigrant families and children, stronger partnerships between home, school, community, and university need to be forged and sustained. In addition, teacher education programs need to consistently promote anti-racist stances, center multilingualism and cultural plurality in the curriculum and school spaces and maintain a strong focus on equity and justice.

Author

• Ana Christina da Silva Iddings, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author