Elevating the Spanish Language Through a Linguistic Justice Leadership Coaching Approach

• In Event: Unforgetting our Language Inheritance: Imagining Multilingual Teacher Education Futures in the Midwest

Abstract

This paper explores the process of coaching towards the implementation of the Spanish Language Arts (SLA) standards, which serves as a lever for equity in a diverse suburban school district with a growing emergent bilingual population. The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), an urban research university, partnered with the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) to support the state-wide implementation of the SLA standards by providing coaching to district leaders. This paper focuses on the experience of a first-generation, Latina doctoral student in coaching a fellow first-generation, Latina district administrator within systems historically designed to privilege English language dominance. The paper focuses on multiple purposes: (1) to describe the systemic opportunities and tensions that emerge when implementing SLA standards, and (2) to offer a grounded framework for context-responsive, equity-driven language policy implementation.

This work challenges the notion that language education must focus solely on English acquisition in order to demonstrate ability in state achievement assessments. The practitioner-focused work draws on contextually-responsive pedagogical frameworks (Paris & Alim, 2017) to examine the professional learning of first-generation Latina educators working in white institutional spaces of P-12 public education (Martin, 2011). Through decolonial approaches to qualitative narrative inquiry, I examine language justice and sustainability (Ortega, 2020) and the implications for professional learning in cycles of improvement (Mehisto, 2012), based on coaching models designed for increased multilingual proficiencies rather than monolingualism as the norm.
This qualitative practitioner inquiry is based upon eight months of coaching work with a first-generation, Latina district leader navigating the complexities of implementing Spanish Language Arts (SLA) standards without holding final decision-making power. Materials used as evidentiary sources include coaching artifacts, reflective protocols, and documents created during coaching sessions. These artifacts were used to track implementation progress and to address institutional constraints. The inquiry acknowledges the administrator's dual roles as both insider and advocate, and as decision-maker for bilingual programming but not district policy changes. Additional sources include ISBE’s (2021) Spanish Language Arts Standards framework, the Illinois Comprehensive Literacy Plan (2024), and public reports on district demographics.
The findings highlight the implementation of SLA standards as an opportunity for shifting deficit narratives around the importance of instruction in the first language. Coaching helped the district leader assess SLA standards implementation, but systemic challenges include English-centric accountability measures. When coaching was responsive to local leadership dynamics and rooted in relational trust, deeper conversations about language equity and systemic change became possible. Findings also point to the significance of subjectivity in leadership orientations (Menken, 2017).
The lessons drawn contribute to the expansion of language education principles into wider disciplinary education and demonstrate how state-level policy is operationalized in different district-level implementation processes. As states acclimate to new standards of expanded multilingualism, such as in Illinois’ legislative efforts to support increased dual language programming, these principles demonstrated through coaching processes will be increasingly significant. More broadly, the findings provide a foundation for increased dual-language programming arguments across state legislative levels, meeting the call to action of scholars to increase multilingual learning in other disciplines.

Author

• Sylvia Ibarra Delgado, University of Illinois at Chicago