"¿Quién Soy en el Círculo?" Understanding Bilingual Teachers' Identity Development in Science and Engineering

• In Event: Sociocultural Perspectives on Teaching Science and Engineering in Bilingual and Dual-Language Programs: Professional Development Issues

Abstract

The professional development (PD) of educators is considered a key element for the success of dual language (DL) education programs (Guerrero & Lachance, 2018). Yet most teacher preparation programs are preparing DL teachers mainly as language specialists, rather than as combined literacy and content-area specialists. Therefore, DL teachers often lack PD opportunities in Science and Engineering (S&E) which support them in developing equitable approaches to biliteracy and S&E subject matter simultaneously. Such approaches would entail equitable access to challenging academic S&E content in both English and the partner language. Yet providing learners with access to academically privileged forms of language and S&E content-knowledge is only part of way teachers realize equity. Realizing equity also involves recognizing and disrupting the socially unjust practices that are limiting students’ inclusion. To do this, teachers need to be able to see their students and themselves in two ways: 1) as individuals with unique experiences, and 2) as members of larger group identities, who may have experienced some structural obstacles to learning (Chubbuck, 2010). We therefore recognize that PD that cultivates equitable systems of education will involve BDL teachers in an awakening about who they are within their sociocultural context of content-based instruction (Garcia et al., 2020).

As teacher educators, we wanted to better understand how self-study traditions can support teachers’ disciplinary S&E and social justice identity development simultaneously. The objective of this case study is therefore to consider how two bilingual teachers, as “telling cases” (Mitchell, 1984), developed disciplinary S&E and social justice identities in a graduate certificate program in Bilingual and DL Education. At the time of the study, both participants were teaching at the secondary level in a district comprised predominately of emergent bilinguals from working-class Latinx backgrounds. In a sociocultural theoretical perspective, “identity” is about teachers see themselves professionally, both as individuals, and in relation to others (Richards & Wilson, 2019). Teachers’ identities are dynamic, being constructed through semiotic resources they individually possess and socially through their interactions with others. To understand the discursive formation and enactment of teachers’ identities, our methods followed deductive coding procedures to analyze a corpus of data sources which the teachers generated through their participation in one course in the certificate program. Data sources are 1) teaching philosophy statements, 2) transcripts from course discussions where teachers offered “testimonios” reflecting on their identities as DL and S&E teachers, and 3) inquiry-based curriculum units, which the teachers generated at the end of the semester.

Findings show that the teachers came to see themselves as S&E and social justice educators by a) revisiting some of their own formative learning experiences in S&E, b) reflecting on their relationships to other S&E teachers, c) considering how their positionalities impacted their understandings and relations with the ethnolinguistically diverse students they worked with, and d) by co-designing an innovative secondary advising curriculum, “Las identidades múltiples del círculo”, that integrated embodied, indigenous, and S&E design practices. The significance of these findings are discussed for supporting identity development in bilingual and DL teacher education programs.

Authors

• Emma R. Britton, Cornell University

• Marialuisa Di Stefano, University of Massachusetts - Amherst