Deborah K. Palmer

Teacher Agency in Bilingual Spaces: A Fresh Look at Preparing Teachers to Educate Latina/o Bilingual Children

This review poses an increasingly common—and increasingly urgent—question in the field of teacher education: How can teachers best be prepared to educate Latina/o bilingual learners? The answers that we offer here challenge some of the prevailing assumptions about language and bilingualism that inform current approaches to teacher preparation. To work effectively with bilingual learners, we argue, teachers need to develop a robust understanding of bilingualism and of the interactional dynamics of bilingual classroom contexts. Unfortunately, the conceptions of language and bilingualism portrayed in much of the teacher-directed literature fall short of offering teachers access to such understandings. In this review, we will make the case for developing materials for teachers that reflect both more up-todate theoretical understandings of language practices in bilingual communities and a more critically contextualized understanding of the power dynamics that operate in bilingual classroom contexts. We recognize that helping teachers come to these more robust understandings of bilingual language practices and the interactional dynamics of bilingual contexts implies an ideological shift for educators—and teacher educators—in the United States. Having made the case for rethinking how we talk to teachers about bilingualism in classroom contexts, we will venture to explore why this matters: What will teachers be better positioned to do once equipped with these understandings? It is our contention that such understandings will better position teachers to manage their classrooms for equity and learning for all students. Indeed, these more robust understandings of language and interaction are necessary if teachers are to capitalize on the flexibility and intelligence displayed by bilingual students as they engage in hybrid

High Stakes Accountability and Policy Implementation: Teacher Decision Making in Bilingual Classrooms in Texas

This article contributes to an emerging body of literature on the impact of high stakes testing accountability policies on implementation and teaching practice. It uses a theory of implementation, sense-making, to highlight the process by which policy and context shape teacher decision making. We focus on teachers in bilingual classrooms in an urban district in Texas where we found that teachers make decisions in an environment that exerts both formal and informal pressures to limit the curriculum they offer their students and privilege test preparation. Teachers struggle to reconcile their context, constituted by their students’ specific pedagogical and linguistic needs, with the pressures of their high stakes testing environment.

Code-Switching and Symbolic Power in a Second-Grade Two-Way Classroom: A Teacher's Motivation System Gone Awry

Code-switching is a natural part of being bilingual. Yet two-way immersion programs are known to insist upon separation of languages, discouraging both teachers and students from drawing on both linguistic codes at once. Drawing on Bourdieus concept of symbolic power, I examine one second-grade classroom in which the teacher instituted a motivation system to discourage code-switching. The children continue to code-switch as they find ways to draw upon all their linguistic resources. However, the system offers them a tool for manipulating symbolic power in the classroom. The conclusion agrees with recent research in encouraging teachers to allow conversational code-switches while expecting students to produce monolingual spoken and written texts where appropriate.

Building and destroying students’ ‘academic identities’: the power of discourse in a two‐way immersion classroom

Two‐way immersion is a model for bilingual education designed to help language‐minority students develop additive bilingualism while at the same time offering language‐majority students a chance to learn a second language. There is a great deal of rhetoric around two‐way immersion that claims these programs aim to improve overall equity among diverse groups of learners. The article begins with a brief review of the available research on two‐way immersion education. Then, using Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and Bourdieu’s and Gee’s ideas of discourse/Discourse, this article takes a close‐up look at the discourse patterns in one second‐grade two‐way immersion classroom in Northern California, with an eye to uncovering how the teacher deliberately attempts to expose students to ‘alternative’ discourses and to lead language‐minority students to construct positive identities as learners. The ultimate question the article attempts to address is whether and to what extent any classroom program can create lasting change in the larger society through exposing students to ‘alternatives’ to mainstream dominant discourses within the context of classroom norms and activities.

Pluralist discourses of bilingualism and translanguaging talk in classrooms

This paper examines student and teacher talk in a first grade classroom in a two-way immersion school in Central Texas. Drawing on audio and video data from a year-long study in a first grade two-way classroom and using a methodology that fuses ethnography and discourse analysis, the authors explore how pluralist discourses are constructed and lived in by bilingual students and teachers. These findings have implications for understanding the ways in which teachers and students are influenced by language policy, as well as how they might either support or undermine that policy.

Combating Inequalities in Two-Way Language Immersion Programs: Toward Critical Consciousness in Bilingual Education Spaces.

This chapter reviews critical areas of research on issues of equity/equality in the highly proclaimed and exponentially growing model of bilingual education: two-way immersion (TWI). There is increasing evidence that TWI programs are not living up to their ideal to provide equal access to educational opportunity for transnational emergent bilingual students. Through a synthesis of research from related fields, we will offer guidelines for program design that attend to equality and a framework for future research to push the field of bilingual education toward creating more equitable and integrated multilingual learning spaces. Specifically, this review leads to a proposal for adding a fourth goal for TWI programs: to develop “critical consciousness” through using critical pedagogies and humanizing research.

Educator Language Ideologies and a Top-Down Dual Language Program.

ABSTRACT Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs are framed to reflect pluralist discourses (de Jong, E. [2013]. “Policy Discourses and U.S. Language in Education Policies.” Peabody Journal of Education 88 (1): 98–111) and affiliated language ideologies. The continued expansion of DLBE programs not surprisingly brings to light the diverse and ever-changing landscape of educator language ideologies. This survey-based study used inferential statistics and qualitative thematic analysis to explore the language ideologies of a random sample of administrators and teachers involved in a district-wide, top-down implementation of a DLBE program in a large urban school district. The following three research questions guided our investigation: (1)What are prevalent educator language ideologies in DLBE schools? (2) How and to what extent do these language ideologies vary by: participation in the DLBE, level of teaching experience, educators home language, and degree of DLBE training? (3) How do educators perceive the attempted program shift to DLBE? Eight language ideologies including languages other than English (OTE) as endowments and multiple languages as a problem accounted for 46% of the variance in the data. All four experiential variables differentiated ideological orientation. Educators reported that ideological tensions and lack of support influenced their implementation.

Teacher and Student Language Practices and Ideologies in a Third-Grade Two-Way Dual Language Program Implementation.

This article provides an in-depth exploration of the language ecologies of two classrooms attempting to implement a two-way dual language (TWDL) program and its mediating conditions. Drawing on ethnographic methods and a sociocultural understanding of language, we examined both teachers’ and students’ language ideologies and language practices, including the use of Spanish, English, and code-switching. The English language arts teacher adhered to strict language separation as dictated by the TWDL model, while the Spanish language arts teacher instructed in both English and Spanish to accommodate standardized test preparation. Students enacted agency to engage in their hybrid language practices. Despite the multiplicity and, at times, contradictory ideologies embodied and articulated by both teachers, the overarching dominant language ideology of English superiority was present and powerful. We discuss implications for dual language implementation, including the role of standardized testing, students as language policy makers, and teacher (mis)alignment between articulated and embodied ideologies.

Dual Language Bilingual Education Placement Practices: Educator Discourses About Emergent Bilingual Students in Two Program Types

ABSTRACT This article explores the placement practices of students into different educational programs in PreK–first grade, including two bilingual education programs and an ESL “mainstream” classroom. We then examine the discourse practices of four third-grade teachers and the school principal. Our findings suggest that initial program placement resulted in a perception that students were tracked by ability, and educator discourses on student ability reflected long-term consequences of these initial placement practices. We conclude with both theoretical implications and practical suggestions for the development of equitable dual language bilingual education program implementation.

Translanguaging Pedagogies for Positive Identities in Two-Way Dual Language Bilingual Education

ABSTRACT Research suggests that identity matters for school success and that language and identity are powerfully intertwined. A monolingual solitudes understanding of bilingualism undermines children’s bilingual identities, yet in most bilingual education classrooms, academic instruction is segregated by language and children are encouraged to engage in only one language at a time. Few studies have explored how a translanguaging pedagogy supports the development of positive identities when learning through two languages. This article explores the co-construction of identities of emergent bilingual children whose teacher embraced dynamic bilingualism. We carried out a close discourse analysis, drawing on the sociocultural linguistic framework of Bucholtz and Hall of children’s interactions in a two-way bilingual education classroom. Our data revealed that translanguaging offered equitable, empowering educational and language learning opportunities to minoritized, bilingual students. A translanguaging pedagogy resulted in greater metalinguistic awareness, while developing bilingual identities.