The enactment of sociocultural competence in a network of faith-based schools.

• In Event: Promoting Sociocultural Competence and Critical Consciousness in Dual Language Bilingual Education Programs

Abstract

Through a Templeton Foundation Grant, researchers for the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, at Boston College (Scanlan & Miller, 2024), set out to investigate the enactment of Pedagogies of Character Formation in the TWIN-CS schools, through a sociocultural lens. This paper presents a summary of its findings.

While Dual Language education pursues three main goals: high academic achievement, bilingualism and biliteracy, and sociocultural competence, some schools pursue additional goals, such as STEM performance or excellence in Performing Arts. Faith-based schools typically reflect their communities’ priorities and include Character Formation as an additional goal. Schools who form part of a national network of dual language Catholic schools, the TWIN-CS (Two-Way Immersion Network of Catholic Schools), embrace the three dual language goals and this fourth goal common to faith-based schools – Character Formation.

Data was collected through a family and educators survey sent to all 28 network schools. Based on the survey results and other factors such as administrators’ willingness to participate, four schools were selected to form a professional learning community (PLC) and participate in collecting additional data from their schools: such as ways in which character formation is enacted in the classrooms and in the school.

Finding 1. The survey and data collected from the schools suggest that TWIN-CS families and educators see character formation as fundamental in education, and as a set of values and virtues necessary to live a fulfilling and happy life for one's own and the common good.

Finding 2. The PLC created for purposes of this study, identified a set of values and virtues that relate directly with the enactment of the four sociocultural strands – identity affirmation, appreciation for diversity, interpersonal collaboration, and critical mindedness.

Finding 3. The same PLC discovered that most (if not all) schools in the network, had been practicing sociocultural competence through the enactment of values and virtues that directly connect with its strands. For example, schools had been promoting the value of equal dignity (Catholic Social Doctrine Principle 1), and the virtue of humility (as Gospel principle), and consequently enacting identity affirmation (including one's own identity) and appreciation for diversity.

Dual language in Catholic education has been a recent phenomenon. There are only about forty dual language Catholic schools in the United States; most of them teach in Spanish, two in Mandarin, and two in Lakota, the latter have incorporated the spirituality of their forefathers. These schools reflect their community and pursue character formation as well as the three goals of dual language education. The paper concludes by proposing that the same connection made in faith-based schools – of communities’ values and virtues and sociocultural competence, can be applied to all dual language schools. The paper also discusses universal parameters of virtues and values (aligning these to parameters of democratic culture competence) to avoid designing schools that reflect a community that supports extremists views that oppose a democratic culture.

Authors

• Elena Sada, Boston College

• Melodie M. Wyttenbach, Boston College