Bi/multilingual Teachers' Professional Holistic Lives: Enacting Inquiry-Based, Equity-Oriented Identities Across School Contexts

• In Event: 44.047 - Explorations of Bilingualism and Biliteracy as a Resource Across School, College, and Career: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Objectives
Within the field of bilingual education, preparing highly qualified teachers (HQT) is crucial as research on bilingualism and biculturalism has stressed the significance of supporting emerging bilingual (EB) students’ first language development, as well as paying attention to the cultural practices surrounding their learning environments (August & Hakuta, 1997; Cummins, 1991; Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010; González, 2001; Nieto, 2001; Villegas & Lucas, 2007). The purpose of this paper is to explore two teachers’ enactments of professional identities in two dual language teaching contexts wherein they organized more equitable learning spaces from a more dynamic, robust and situated understanding of bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism.
Theoretical Framework
Contexts for enacting a professional identity were conceptualized as linguistic communities of practices (Wenger, 1989) that have particular histories of participation in language practices (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). I analyzed these communities in terms of Hornberger’s (1989) Continua of Biliteracy to explore teachers’ linguistic negotiations and forged identities. This research was also informed by theoretical perspectives that suggest teacher learning and professional identity development includes the personal, professional and social nature of teachers’ identity (Beijaard et al., 2004a; Clandinin, 1986; Cote & Levine, 2002; Goodson, 1992; Goodson & Cole, 1994; Mead, 1934; Schepens et al., 2009; Vygotsky, 1978; Wenger, 1998).
Methods and Data Sources
The study addressed the following research question: What are the main socio-cultural, ideological and societal factors they believe have shaped their professional identities as bilingual- bicultural teachers? I conducted three life history interviews (Goodson, 2013) over four months. I analyzed bilingual teachers’ linguistic experiences beginning with their memories of growing up mono/ bi or multilingual to their pedagogical trajectories as key for informing the teaching and learning within their classrooms.
Results
Data analysis resulted in the following findings. First, these teachers’ vision and professional identities helped them create more equalizing spaces that counteracted the dynamics within the linguistic, social, and political communities in tension. Second, these teachers’ multilayered and strategic drawing upon their linguistic, cultural, social and ideological resources allowed them to forge a professional identity and biliteracy development that paid close attention to their contexts, contents, media and development of biliteracy as simultaneous and sequential bilingual (Jennifer) and trilingual (Sofia) teachers. I argue that these two teachers, while in different social and linguistic contexts, were each able to enact an inquiry-based and more reflective view of teaching and learning, and an ethics of caring (Valenzuela, 1999) for their students.
Scholarly significance
The significance of these bi/multilingual teachers’ pedagogical approaches is that they represent successful models of more robust enactments and embodiments of a fuller, holistic bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural professional identity, which demonstrates ideological clarity (Bartolomé, 2008). Further, these two teachers’ new situated understandings and pedagogical practices might (re)shape emergent bilinguals’ learning contexts based on the teachers and students’ new interactions and relationships that more clearly consider and reflect the students’ and teachers’ linguistic and cultural practices (Nieto, 2002). These enactments are not only critical of systemic inequalities, but they also articulate pedagogical projects that challenge those inequalities (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001).

Author

• Patricia E. Venegas-Weber, Seattle University