Integrating the Literacy Classroom in TWDL (Two-Way Dual Language): A Bilingual Second-Grade Team Navigates Transitions Through Multiple Policy Changes

• In Event: Exploring Successful Integration for Equitable Teaching and Learning in Two-Way Bilingual Education (TWBE) Contexts

Abstract

Objectives:
In 2019, a 50/50 TWDL school in the mountain west decided to move from delivering initial literacy instruction in children’s “dominant” language (i.e. language-segregated literacy classrooms) to keeping children in linguistically integrated/diverse groups throughout the day. At the same time, their district adopted a new literacy curriculum - ReadyGen - that lacked parity across Spanish and English materials. Given current debates in bilingual education research regarding the potential (de Jong, Barko Alva & Yilmaz, 2022) and risk (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017) of integrated bilingual settings for equity, we conducted an ethnography of policy implementation to accompany teachers through these multiple imposed language/education policy changes.

Framework:
Ethnography of policy implementation (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, 2010) allowed us to learn from our four bilingual teacher participants, the second grade team, as language/education policymakers (Menken & García, 2011). Based on an initial reading of data, we chose two theoretical frameworks to guide analysis: teaching for critical consciousness in DLBE (Freire, 2019; Palmer et al., 2019;) and translanguaging pedagogies (García & Wei, 2014; García, Ibarra-Johnson & Seltzer, 2017). We examined teachers’ process of developing and carrying out curriculum and instruction in this newly-integrated space through these twin lenses to understand the complex transition to integrated classrooms.

Methods/Data Sources:
We interviewed teachers in August 2019 and their principal in January 2020. We took detailed field notes of weekly planning meetings and approximately one day/wk literacy instruction during the first seven months that they grappled with teaching integrated groups (until March 2020). Our qualitative thematic analysis was first inductive, then deductive. We collaboratively generated an initial codebook after reading through and discussing data; we selected our two theoretical frameworks, then drew on these as we returned to the data (Saldaña, 2021).

Conclusions:
Findings revealed that as teachers worked hard to accommodate more diverse groups of children, they expanded their repertoires for translanguaging pedagogies (García et al., 2017), they explored ways to embrace thematic teaching, and they increased the intensity/sophistication of their team-teaching. These three ‘integrations’ (of language, curriculum, and collaboration) emerged in their planning conversations as potential solutions to the logistical and equity challenges they noticed with student integration. At the same time, their planning conversations, and the curriculum/instruction that we then saw in their classrooms, provided many examples of “actions toward critical consciousness”: historicizing, critical listening, experiencing discomfort, and interrogating power (Palmer et al., 2019). We conclude that the teachers continuously focused on ensuring equity, even as they struggled with time-consuming logistics and identified ongoing injustices in both old and new curriculum, policies and program structures.

Significance:
We have much to learn from teachers; a close examination of this team’s transition process sheds light on some of the social, political and programmatic complexities that make language/race/ethnicity/class integration challenging for equity and justice, both in TWDL and beyond. While the struggle is ongoing and never complete, the alternative – segregation – is usually worse. With this analysis, we hope to offer strategies to help teachers more equitably integrate language education programs.

Authors

• Deborah K. Palmer, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Alexandra F. McGrath, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Allarie Coleman, University of Colorado - Boulder