Appropriation of Language Policy: Teach For America Teachers in Arizona

• In Event: Language Policy Appropriation: Teachers’ Perspectives on Policies and Programs for English Learners Across Five States

Abstract

In Arizona, language policy has been governed by Proposition 203, which has led to a decade of English-only instruction. The original legislation called for the broadly defined Structured English Immersion (SEI), which was recently narrowed to a more rigid, four hour model called English language development (ELD). Written in 2006 and implemented in 2008, the ELD program model requires strict compliance measures for all ELs to be placed in separate classrooms from mainstream peers to receive four hours of skill-based English instruction.

This qualitative study explores Teach for America (TFA) teachers’ discourse on Arizona language policy. Using the framework of appropriation and recognizing the agentive role of the teacher, the study looks at how current and former TFA teachers carry out the strict instructional mandates in the classroom. Based on past research on policy appropriation of alternatively and traditionally certified teachers, this research aims to determine how teachers trained by TFA, a national organization that utilizes alternative paths to certification to place teachers in low-income schools, conceptualize their roles in the policy process and appropriate language mandates in the classroom.

The study will be conducted with teachers in the Phoenix metropolitan area who teach in ELD classrooms and entered the profession through TFA. The proposed paper will utilize two subsets of participants: (1) current TFA teachers, or corps members, who are in their first or second year of teaching, and (2) TFA alumni who continued to teach after the required two-year commitment. Both participant groups will be given surveys and interviews to be analyzed with discourse analysis to understand how teachers utilized language to describe their role in the language policy process.

Both sets of data will yield an investigation of how current and former TFA teachers in ELD classrooms describe the state-mandated language policy and mandates for daily instruction. Current TFA teachers, who only recently finished their five-week summer training and entered the ELD classroom, will be recruited, surveyed, and interviewed in November 2011. After collection and analysis of this data, the findings will be compared with data collected during the 2009-2010 school year with TFA alumni teachers.

Findings based only on the more veteran TFA teachers demonstrated the open evaluation and critique of the language policy, in addition to the appropriation of language policy directives to match their ideologies, pedagogies, and classroom contexts. Findings from discourse analysis of the interview data also demonstrated that the teachers’ discourse reflected their TFA preparation regarding recognizing the flaws in the educational system and taking action to make change within the four walls of their urban classrooms. Since the teachers in the alumni sample had more experience, the comparison with the first-year teachers will allow more analysis of how the TFA connection affects language policy appropriation.

The research holds implications for education reform through recognizing the active role of the teacher in language policy formation and implementation. Further, it also adds a new lens on policy appropriation research - looking at teacher preparation, rather than individual teacher traits.

Authors

• Quanna Cameron, Arizona State University

• Amy Jennifer Heineke, Loyola University Chicago