Examining a Grow Your Own Bilingual Education Program Through the Experiences of Novice Latinx Teachers

• In Event: Teacher and Staff Perceptions of Emergent Bilinguals

Abstract

Grow-Your-Own (GYO) programs have been hailed as a promising practice to address the national teacher shortage (Valenzuela, 2017), to diversify the teacher workforce (Carver-Thomas, 2018), and to raise the academic achievement of students from minoritized backgrounds (Villegas & Irvine, 2010). The present study was conducted with the first graduating class of a GYO bilingual education program in Oregon, a partnership between a public university and eleven school districts. Working through a sociocultural transformative lens (Flores et al., 2011), we utilized discourse analysis to grasp how Latinx bilingual teacher scholars understood their figured worlds (Gee, 2011; Holland et al., 1998). Findings reveal novice teachers identifying language, race and ethnicity as motivating factors to become teachers and persist in the field.

Authors

• Maria E. Dantas-Whitney, Western Oregon University

• Kristen L. Pratt, Western Oregon University

• Jessica Dougherty, Western Oregon University

• Xiaopeng Gong, Western Oregon University