"Strength in Numbers": Advocacy of a Teacher Coalition to Provide Linguistically Responsive Teaching for Emergent Bilinguals

• In Event: Taking Responsibility as Advocates: Research on Advocacy Work for Equitable Education of Immigrant-Origin Youth

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the collaborative advocacy work of a group of four public school teachers formed to advocate for their emergent bilingual students in one public school district. Previous findings on the advocacy work of bilingual and ESL teachers have shown that while teacher advocacy takes many forms in and out of the classroom, much advocacy work is done by individuals and less by collective action (Dubetz & deJong, 2011). As a result, individual teachers risk isolation or marginalization in their school contexts when they advocate for immigrant youth who are facing educational inequities. This paper is intended to contribute to the preparation of educators for advocacy work in racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse P-12 schools by expanding our understanding of teachers’ advocacy work as a collaborative act.
Theoretical Framing
The increase of English learners (ELs) in US classrooms (US DOE & NCES, 2018) and a corresponding lack of teacher preparation to meet the needs of ELs (Lucas & Villegas, 2013) has motivated the training of educators in linguistically responsive education (e.g. ESL, sheltered English instruction [SEI], bilingual education). Drawing on a collaborative orientation of teacher advocacy, a “dynamic social activity that is situated in a social context, and distributed across people, tools and activities… tied together by a shared goal or object ... aiming for an intended outcome” (Martin-Beltran & Peercy, 2014, p. 2), we apply dialogically-informed (Bakhtin, 1981; Marková et al., 2007) coding to teachers’ discussions over three years of advocacy learning and work in one district. We track how teachers’ discussions on advocacy during a teacher preparation program led to collaborative forms of advocacy in their daily teaching lives in and out of school. Data collected included online discussion forums, focus group discussions, and documentation of district discussions of the coalition’s advocacy work
Findings
The findings demonstrate that the teachers’ understanding of advocacy developed through collaborative partnerships formed in the teacher preparation program and grew into active forms of collaboration addressing instructional, professional, and community advocacy work. As the teachers developed their collaborative advocacy work, their discussions moved from discourse moves of brainstorming and building collaborative knowledge around instructional advocacy to planning and implementing professional and community advocacy acts. The teachers formed partnerships with teachers, families, community members, policymakers from the local government, and educational researchers to advocate for their own professional expertise and their EL students by planning advocacy events such as professional development for their general education colleagues, new family orientations, and family nights geared to immigrant families.
Significance
The findings support previous findings of the types of advocacy work in which teachers engage (pedagogical, curricular, out-of-school work) and provide new evidence of collaborative advocacy work by a group of engaged educators, which, to date, has been limited in the advocacy literature (see Dubetz & de Jong, 2011). The paper highlights and effective advocacy of teachers through teacher education and teacher coalitions, and suggests a need for more research on coalitions of teacher advocacy for English learners.

Authors

• Sora Suh, Fairleigh Dickinson University

• Catherine Michener, Rowan University