Using Early Career ESOL Teachers' Experiences of Everyday Advocacy to Support Teacher Agency

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

Abstract

Purpose
In an atmosphere of restrictive policies for emergent bilinguals (EBs), it is critical that we support new teachers of EBs who are often working in the most challenging conditions, with the fewest strategies to draw upon to maintain feelings of efficacy and hope. One way to support early career teachers (ECTs) of EBs is identifying and fostering their everyday moments of advocacy. Involving teachers as key stakeholders in larger conversations about policies and practices that affect teachers and their teaching, including the specification of practice (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2009), can provide important opportunities to claim agency. We examine how teachers’ everyday moves to advocate for their students open up spaces to develop agency. Our research question is:
How do early career ESOL teachers’ experiences of everyday advocacy support teacher agency?
Perspective
We draw on sociocultural conceptualizations of teacher agency (e.g., Haneda & Sherman, 2016), and scholarship on supporting teachers in developing identities as advocates (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2008; Varghese et al., 2016), to examine how collaborative engagement among six teacher educators (TEs) and nine ECTs supported ECTs in developing agency.
Methods and Data Sources
Using the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) to examine three years of qualitative data, we examine 70 observations and interviews with the nine ECTs, 25 meetings of the TE team, 14 meetings of our combined TE-ECT team, and weekly online conversations. We describe how advocacy became an important focal point for developing and understanding teacher agency.
Results
ECTs regularly sought ways to have more access to and impact upon student learning. In so doing, they embodied identities as advocates, extending their reach to contexts beyond their classrooms. For instance, Hailey’s comments are examples of everyday advocacy:
Hailey: I just got two new newcomers this week….I don't really know where I'm going to start with them, because I don't know their background….They're in class all day [with their classroom teacher]….The classroom teacher has 30 other kids….(10-19-16 team meeting).
Later, Hailey elaborated on how finding out more about these newcomers was an example of her advocacy:
Hailey: I feel like sometimes mainstream teachers with newcomers, they don't have the time to sit and talk with the student, or see what they actually know in their first language, so they have a better sense of where they might be able to start….So it was sort of like filling in gaps that teachers don't always have the time to fill in for themselves….and to advocate for the students’ strengths (12-15-16 team meeting).
We illustrate how ECTs in this study began to develop an agentic voice about their practice, and how their “agentive possibilities” (Varghese et al., 2016, p. 565) were strengthened through their opportunities for co-construction within our community of practice (Authors, 2017; Wenger, 1998).
Significance
Implications for the study include importance of creating a space to recognize everyday moments of teacher advocacy as a way to support the development of ESOL teacher agency, which are critical in an era of restrictive policies for EBs.

Author

• Megan Madigan Peercy, University of Maryland - College Park