Negotiating Multiple Figured Worlds: Novice Bilingual Teachers in Mainstream Teacher Education Programs

• In Event: Teacher Agency and “Pedagogies of Hope” for Bilingual Learners (in a Brave New World)

Abstract

1. Objectives
This study focuses on how four pre-service teachers in a ‘traditional’ and mainly monolingually conceived Masters Elementary teacher preparation program develop their professional identities and sense of agency as dual language teachers. Although empirical and conceptual work around agency and the agentive selves of language teachers is a relatively new area of study (Miller et.al, 2018), the understanding of the range of how these identities and sense of agency develop for bilingual teachers is even more limited (Author, 2006; Palmer & Martinez, 2013). This study not only attends to this gap but also makes the connection between the development of these teachers’ agency and professional identity with the programmatic structure and opportunities provided by their program.

2. theoretical framework
The conceptual framework we use is based on that of constraint agency (Mills & Gale, 2010; Author, 2012) and figured worlds (Author, in press; Holland et. al, 1998; Urrieta, 2007a, 2007b; Vagan, 2015). This framework allows us to delineate the structural affordances and challenges the developing teachers experience while charting their own self-defining and glocal professional identities.

3. Methods
This qualitative study is based on interviews, observations and documents. Participant observation enabled researchers to gather data through programmatic work such as coaching, courses and evaluations. The researchers serve as an instructional coach/teaching assistant and a professor in the program studied.
Data was analyzed thematically with codes developed by the researchers, drawing on the conceptual framework.

4. Data sources/evidence
All four teachers were observed 3-5 times and interviewed twice over the course of the year during their Masters in Teaching program. We also interviewed the program directors, the cooperating teachers that they worked with, their coaches and we collected their assignments as well as their teaching portfolios.

5. Results
Findings suggest that these teachers negotiate multiple figured worlds, especially that of being a novice teacher and of being a bilingual teacher. Their figured world of bilingual teaching was influenced mostly by their programmatic environments including the marginalization they experience through the lack of specific coursework and training needed to support their specialized work as dual language educators. This lead them to question their skills and capacities as language educators and to struggle to define their professional identities. At the same time, in some cases they crafted a critical advocacy-based stance towards their work as a future dual language teacher. This stance was based in part on those with prior experiences as language learners and Latin@s in the United States, and in part on their work with committed dual language educators as their cooperating teachers and their coaches.

6. significance
The significance of this study is that it makes explicit the connections between the creation of agentive and stable professional identities as dual language teachers with the different facets of their mainstream teacher education program, including the apertures of programmatic spaces for multilingualism. The study urges us to consider the identities and agentive selves of bilingual teachers within particular language policy and other programmatic environments of teacher education programs.

Authors

• Manka M. Varghese, University of Washington

• Rachel D Snyder, University of Washington - Seattle