Rethinking the Education of Adolescent English Learners From an Ecological Perspective

• In Event: Reconceptualizing and Improving the Education of Adolescent English Learners: An Ecological Approach

Abstract

Objectives
This paper presents the ecological/sociocultural framework that gives meaning and coherence to the portfolio of work presented in the symposium. Rather than examining educational components separately, we sought to start with the overall context in which the education of English Learners takes place to locate each study in the contexts nested within it. Key in this ecological view are the interactions and coherence that should exist in and across the macro (societal), exo (policy, academia), meso (district, school), and micro (classroom) systems to ensure that the whole organism of education works to provide adolescent English Learners mutually supporting experiences. This framework is also useful in understanding where the system may be rectified to offer quality, equitable education for English Learners.

Framework
Applied to education by Brofenbrener (1979), Larsen-Freeman (2017), and van Lier (2004, 2014), among others, ecology considers the macrosystem in which education takes place. Within it, in subsequent embeddings, are the microsystem (the classroom, its activities, teacher, etc), the mesosystem (the school, principal, neighborhood) and the exosystem (the district, the state, policies). In this model the value resides not on the embeddedness of the system, but on its focus on the interrelations among and across components.

In the education of English Learners, each system is studied through its set of actors, practices, artifacts, and specific patterns of operation considered interactively to understand its impact on the quality of educational opportunities English Learners are offered. At the micro-level, for example, classroom pedagogies are concerned with dynamic dialogical processes in context, rejecting linear causal information-processing traditional assumptions in second language acquisition. Equally important is an emphasis on the development of learner perception, and availability of affordances, a departure from the narrowly defined experimental constructs of attention and input in Second Language Acquisition based on information processing theory.

Modes of Inquiry
We reviewed theoretical and research literature from sociocultural theory and ecology, interviewed key policy makers and scholars from the field of English Learner education. We then engaged in multiple discussions with researchers interested in contributing to our emerging portfolio of research and implementation, to jointly arrive at the framework presented in the paper.

Data Sources
Data included a qualitative text analysis of policy and pedagogical documents to unpack positions related to transformation in educational experiences, interviews of key players, focus groups with teachers, students, administrators, and the community.

Results
We identified and unpacked four systems in the ecology of adolescent English Learner education, its main actors, roles, activities and stances. The stronger the coherence and interrelatedness of these systems, the better opportunities to positively transform educational experiences.

Significance

Responses to disparity in education are typically undertaken piecemeal, thus unwittingly contributing to the problem. We argue that the most effective way to address the broad array of educational and derived social and economic conditions is through the adoption of an educational ecological approach (Bishop & Noguera, 2019). Our five-year research in the field will help us understand how impactful this work can be.

Author

• Aida Walqui, WestEd