To Act or Not to Act: Teacher Agency in a Multicultural Monolingual Context

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Dismantling Linguistic Racism Across Diverse Contexts (Table 35)

Abstract

Previous research investigates how to raise teachers’ awareness of monolingual ideologies, but fewer studies explore how teachers can translate this awareness into action and resist monolingualism in their teaching contexts. We focus on one teacher of newcomer students and her agency in recognizing and responding to monolingual ideologies. Analyzing ethnographic data across one year, we examine two cases of agentive action to illustrate the strategies that supported her efforts and barriers that emerged along the way. Findings reveal how neoliberal discourses are deployed to obscure monolingualism, reframe structural problems as individual, and counteract teachers’ efforts towards multilingual transformation. They also demonstrate how collective action can be used to circumnavigate neoliberal logics. Implications for policymakers, researchers, and teacher educators are discussed.

Authors

• Samantha Harris, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Sarah Ahlers, Santa Barbara Unified School District