"But We're in New Hampshire!" Troubling Our Assumptions of and Expectations for Teachers of Immigrant Youth

• In Event: 47.047 - Examining the Role of Teacher Education as Identity-Forming Site: Democratizing Our Work as Teacher Educators

Abstract

Purpose
Within the larger call to investigate and problematize the pedagogies of teacher educators/education (Goodwin et al, 2014; de los Ríos & Souto-Manning, 2015), this paper addresses the gap identified by Faltis & Valdés (2016), namely how teacher educators advocate for the needs of linguistically diverse learners. Housed within a larger longitudinal study investigating the complexity of in-service teacher learning, this paper examines how a team of four White, female teacher educators explain and respond to White, monolingual mainstream teachers’ struggles to connect to and advocate for their immigrant students. The principal research questions examined are: How do teacher educators identify and explain these teachers’ struggles? How do they understand their role in supporting teacher learning to address this area of concern?

Perspectives
The project is informed by social justice language teacher education (Hawkins, 2011) and more democratic, community-participatory approaches to teacher education (Author, 2018; Zeichner et al, 2015). Such projects embrace individual and collective critical self-reflexivity in order to name and act on oppressive practices that work to perpetuate inequities in schooling and society overall. Teacher learning is conceptualized as a complex system that includes many interacting but often unnamed or under-analyzed factors (Opfer & Pedder, 2011). The varying, shifting, even contradictory identities of teacher educators is one such factor (Russell & Loughran, 2007).

Methods & Data
Seeking to understand and scrutinize our roles in teachers’ learning, we drew on self-study in teacher education practices (S-STEP) in designing this qualitative, explanatory case study, conducted within a federally-funded professional development project serving teachers in three small cities in northern New England. Data for this paper include agenda, fieldnotes, and 33 hours of audio-recorded and transcribed team meetings conducted between March 2016 and December 2017. At four of those meetings, team members—in their roles as coaches, course instructor, and/or practicum supervisor completed stimulated recall interviews (Burden et al, 2015) where we shared our analyses of written feedback given to our teacher learners –on course assignments and classroom observations using a project-designed protocol. Positioning ourselves as critical friends encouraged us to “challenge assumptions, confront realities, and identify new ways of thinking about pedagogy” (Fletcher et al., 2016, p. 302). Analysis was multi-layered and ongoing. The team meetings were part individual reflection and part collaborative analysis where the interactions led to considering alternative perspectives. Consistent with case study design, analysis included identifying significant segments of meaning that addressed the guiding research questions (Merriam, 2009).

Results and Significance
Findings indicate that what is possible regarding advocacy for linguistically diverse students is mediated by teacher educators’ social and professional identities as well as the ways in which they understand and interpret sociopolitical, institutional and geographical contexts. Particularly troubling were implied acceptance of lower expectations for participating teachers based on the demographics of the state and that fear of professional repercussions legitimated White monolingual teachers’ hesitancy to act on behalf of their emergent/developing bilingual newcomers. These insights add a new layer of complexity to the ways in which teacher education “domesticates dissent” (Morgan, 2016).

Author

• Judy A. Sharkey, University of New Hampshire