Tracing immigration policies through networks circulating in K-12 teachers’ professional development in the U.S. South

• In Event: Presidential Highlighted Session: Seeking Rights of Citizenship and Equality of Educational Opportunity: Issues Facing Immigrant Students in the U.S. South

Proposal

This paper reports on a study of classroom teachers working toward ESL endorsement through professional development coursework in the U.S. South. Drawing on Latour’s (2005) actor network theory (ANT), this ethnographic case study examines a university ESL teacher professional development course. The current study makes two new contributions to the literature on teachers working with immigrant populations. First, it builds new understandings of how immigration policies circulate in professional development work with teachers who serve immigrant students in the southern region of the United States. I contend that ESL teacher education is a field of policy and practice that “is positioned within complex and competing political agendas including those addressing inequalities, stigma and racism, social inclusion and economic development” (Hamilton, 2009, p. 58). This is especially true of ESL teacher education. Furthermore, the study brings a better understanding of how teachers make sense of these policies. “Teachers are key actors in educational policy appropriation: they interpret, negotiate, and re-vision assessment, curricular, pedagogical, and language policies in the classroom” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014, p. 141). In a fast-changing policy context, this study intends to contribute to nascent scholarship exploring how “little is known about how educators understand the immigration practices shaping students’ lives or how this impacts their teaching” (Gallo & Link, 2015, p. 359).

Secondly, in this paper I explain actor-network theory and show how an ANT-informed lens can contribute new perspectives to research on education and how policies both perform and are performed. I review Latour’s (2005) notions of the “social” as not preexisting, but rather emerging through the tracing of new associations. Next, I explain how ANT is attuned to human and non-human actors together in networks of action, and review its antecedents in the educational policy work of Bartlett & Vavrus (2014), Fenwick & Edwards (2010), and Gorur (2010). Then, I illustrate its use in the current study working with a network of teacher-participants, policies, stakeholder-leaders, an instructor, an online learning system, course readings, instructor discourses, and teacher-participant discourses. In the context of teacher professional development on working with immigrant students, this study is in line with ANT’s “ontological politics” (Mol, 1999), exploring how knowledge comes to be produced, and how resources are mobilized to establish an object of knowledge (Law, 1994).

Author

• Tobie Bass, University of Georgia