Preparing and Enriching Linguistically and Culturally Responsive Educators Through Professional Development

• In Event: 52.049 - Improving, Inquiring, and Innovating (3 Is) Teacher Educators and Teachers Through an Ever-Evolving Professional Learning Community

Abstract

This paper examines fifteen QTEL inservice teachers’ and administrators’ views regarding their immigrant students and their families, including the culturally and linguistically-responsive supports that they committed to and the ones that they recognized as currently challenging within their pedagogical landscapes. Priorities that teachers deemed significant to address in their upcoming academic year will also be discussed.
Drawing on scholarship on culturally and linguistically responsive teaching (Gay, 2002; Lucas, Villegas & Freedson-Gonzales, 2008; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), language and language development (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010; Garcia & Wei, 2014) and professional development in diverse educational settings (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Ponte & Higgings, 2015), I sought to explore the following: What were the content teachers’ perceptions/assumptions and knowledge regarding immigration and their students in their school/district? How did the conversations through our professional development (PD) sessions enhance the teachers’ views, while they identified their areas of successes, challenges and priorities in working with multicultural and multilingual students?
The fifteen inservice teachers (of which, three are administrators) who participated in the study were from four public middle schools in an urban area in the Midwest, with one to 23 years of teaching experience, and attended the three professional development sessions on three Saturday Institutes that related to creating learning environments and designing language teaching and learning through differentiated instruction and instructional supports for multicultural and multilingual students. The third PD focused on communication strategies, developing and building relationships with immigrant families and community. Qualitative data were collected through reflective discussions with the teachers in each PD session, informal conversations with the participants, researchers’ field notes, and follow-up online reflective surveys after each PD session, a background and demographic checklist and a final questionnaire of overall learning and areas of priorities.
The analysis revealed that the PD sessions impacted the participants in positive ways, especially in paying more attention to the needs of their bilingual students when designing academic and social supports and assessments. Some predominant struggles were related to inconsistent or weak school-home communication and lack of supports or resources for immigrant students and their families in their schools/districts. The participants recognized that more could be done in supporting immigrant students and their families, particularly by enhancing a culturally responsive environment, continuing to provide supports and build positive relationships with students and their families but also by helping their students achieve their learning goals and make significant progress in their English proficiency levels.
Although the participants shared their individual successes, challenges and priorities, the findings pointed out how significant it is to create a culturally and linguistically responsive environment that goes beyond the classroom walls to develop stimulating collaborations through ongoing critical and systemic reflective practice and professional learning. With the growing number of English language learners in the U.S., it is imperative to enrich teachers’ practices through intentional and systematic professional development, and for teachers to seek professional growth and embed contextually and with ethical responsibility their new increased learning to reflect the needs of their linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.

Author

• Alina Slapac, University of Missouri