The "Effective" Bilingual Teacher: Making the Bilingual Child by Making the Teacher Roundtable

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Historicizing the Neocolonial "Languages" of Inclusion and the Good Life as Pathways for Transformation Roundtable

Abstract

This presentation traces the production of the rationale that ranks the practices of teaching bilingual children as more and less “effective” in the US. Specifically, it inquires the specific strategies of “effective” language teaching (diagnosis, planning, instruction, and assessment) that makes some teachers more successful in the education of bilingual children. I propose that the discourse about the “effective” teacher of bilingual children in current educational policy and scholarship generates cultural assumptions about who is the bilingual child and engenders differences among bilingual children that the teacher is to notice and act on them. This presentation is part of a larger study that historicizes the logics that made possible, in the 2000s, the reassembly of the bilingual child as a quantitative object of federal and state scrutiny in the name of equity and justice.

I view teaching as the practice of making particular kinds of bilingual children (Hacking, 2007; Popkewitz, 2010). This assumption begins with a historical note, that the teacher of bilingual students is not born, but rather made through practices that order and classify its performance. These practices are given intelligibility through the assemblage and connections of language-in-education policies, theories of (language) learning, curriculum models, and classroom practices.This study examines the discourses and practices that make “effective” planning, teaching, and assessment in current educational policy and bilingual teacher education research seem a reasonable approach to educating bilingual children justly and equitably.

I approach the analysis of “effective instruction” of bilingual children in policy and scholarship as a device—ensemble of discourses, institutions, regulatory decisions, laws, and scientific statements (Foucault, 1977)—produced historically. This device becomes part of the common sense of effectiveness, organizing notions of identity and differences to frame how bilingual children are supposed to participate and be included in school curriculum. Positioning the “effective” bilingual teacher as a historical event is an analytical strategy for recognizing that it has not always been possible to think that teachers of bilingual children can and should be “effective.” Hence, this mode of inquiry is less a rhetorical textual analysis, but an inquiry into the logics that have assembled the category of “effective” bilingual teacher in the present.

In order to examine discourses and practices of “effective” bilingual teaching, I group my analysis into two genres: language-in-education policy documents and educational science research. From this perspective, I emphasize two federal curriculum reforms pertaining to bilingual students in the U.S., No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act, and the policy materials that stem from those reforms at the state level WIDA English Language Development standards—adopted in 37 states—and the California ELD standards. Also, I draw in educational scholarship tackling bilingual teachers’ effectiveness.

The significance of this study lies in the need to investigate the possibilities and the limitations of current policies and practices for bilingual children. The transformative potential of bilingual education as a decolonizing form of knowledge demands a scrutiny of the “reason” of effective bilingual teaching.

Author

• Belén Hernando-Lloréns, University of Iowa