Bilingual Teacher Licensure in the United States: Historical and Contemporary Policies and Practices

• In Event: A Bilingual Renaissance: Remedying and Repairing Monolingualism Through Critical Multilingual Education Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of the current licensure requirements for bilingual teacher in the United States. A salient characteristic of the Bilingual Renaissance has been the national expansion and growth of pre-k-12 bilingual/dual language programs that has increased demands for bilingual/dual language teachers, yet there is no current national data/knowledge base that documents state-level bilingual licensure requirements. Over two decades ago, Menken and Atunez (2001) conducted one of the only nation-wide, comprehensive analyses of state’s licensure databases. They found that only one-sixth of teacher preparation programs nationally provide programs to credential bilingual teachers. This study
Objectives: We explore the current status of states’ bilingual/dual language teacher licensure requirements in order to understand and define knowledge and capabilities dual language/bilingual teachers across the US.

We use Author’s Bilingual Teaching Epistemologies Framework (BTEF, 2019). 1) Multilingual Pedagogic Content Knowledge; 2) Crosscultural Capital; 3) Translinguistic Repertoires, and 4) Critical Agency with and through the bodies of literature base on bilingual teacher preparation (Leong, et al, 2018; author & Baca, 2017; Guellar et al, 2007)
We collected three sources of data: 1) states’ publicly available on bilingual teacher licensure requirements; 2) surveys and/or interviews of state’s licensure officers; and 3) bilingual teacher program standards and/or competencies. We provide descriptive data regarding the national landscape of bilingual teacher licensing. We applied Krippendorff’s (2018) concept of “coding units” (2018, p. 104) to conduct content analysis of the bilingual teacher preparation standards from 13 states that have currently adopted bilingual teacher preparation/program standards using Author’s Bilingual Teaching Epistemologies Framework (2019). We situate this framework within the 4 tenets of Critical Multilingual Policy Ecology to further explore bilingual teacher preparation policies across the states

Preliminary findings reveal that of the 26 states that offer some form of bilingual licensure:
o 15 of 26 states have adopted official bilingual teacher preparation standards
o Of these 15 states, two, Connecticut and Delaware, while confirming that bilingual teacher preparation standards as policy, upon further analysis, were were found to be generic to English Learners
o 2 of 26 states offer a Test-Only Option (Alaska and Oregon)
o 13 of 26 have adopted state-level standards
To conduct the content analysis using BTEF and the standards as “unit codes” from the 13 states, we found that California and New York had the greatest alignment with all domains of BTEF. The remaining 11 states vary greatly in the degree to which the tenets are addressed, with all of 11 representing Multilingual Pedagogic Content Knowledge and Crosscultural Capital.

These preliminary findings reveal incongruities between the ways that states prepare bilingual teachers for dual language/bilingual programs and the knowledge base. We provide sets of recommendations bilingual teacher preparation policy ecology, research and practice.

Authors

• Magaly Lavadenz, Loyola Marymount University

• Adam Sawyer, California State University - Bakersfield