Meg L. Gebhard

School Reform, Hybrid Discourses, and Second Language Literacies

This article analyzes how school reforms in the United States during the 1990s supported transformative literacy practices in the context of a Hmong-English third grade classroom. Using methods that allow for an analysis of both macro and micro discourses shaping the literacy practices of English language learners, this 2-year study illustrates how combined discourses at the state, district, school, and classroom levels created a discursive space that allowed for the production of hybrid texts that disrupted, if only temporarily, many of the reproductive forces associated with modern schooling. Using a critical perspective of language and social change (e.g., Fairclough, 1992), the author presents an analysis of texts produced and interpreted by participants in a classroom shaped by a statewide school reform initiative known as Senate Bill 1274, Californias school restructuring initiative. An analysis of these texts reveals that they afforded language learners opportunities to display multilingual and multicultural identities and to appropriate academic uses of English.

Debates in SLA Studies: Redefining Classroom SLA as an Institutional Phenomenon.

When language is systematically unavailable to some, it is important that we not limit our explanation to the traits of the persons involved; it is equally essential that we take into account the interactional circumstances that position the people in the world with a differential access to the common tongue. (McDermott, 1996, p. 283)

Charter schools and bilingual education: A case study of teachers negotiating policy-making roles

The purpose of this ethnographic study is to explore the connection between some educational reform initiatives represented by charter school legislation and the professional experiences of bilingual educators. I examine the interactions that took place between teachers and administrators in a newly formed bilingual charter school using a sociocultural perspective of teachers’ professional development. This perspective suggests that teachers’ beliefs and practices are shaped by the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they have been educated. Lortie (1975) describes this socialization process aptly using the concept of an “apprenticeship of observation.’’This concept describes how what teachers consciously and unconsciously come to know and do is derived from their years of experiences in the classroom as students. Later, their understanding of teaching and learning is further shaped by more immediate contexts. These local contexts include, for example, the quality of teachers’professional development opportunities, the kinds of daily interactions teachers have with students, parents, and colleagues, and the nature of the district and state policies that make certain practices more possible than others (see Talbert & McLaughlin, 1994 for a discussion of the embedded contexts that matter for teaching and learning). In the discussion that follows, I address the political dimensions of teachers’ policy making decisions as they attempted to negotiate the ways in which these multiple, embedded contexts interact, specifically in regard to the ways in which they attempted to explore the possibilities and limitations of charter school legislation. A study of this nature is warranted for two reasons. First, the literature regarding charter schools has described these schools as offering parents, teachers, and administrators a powerful mechanism for challenging the bureaucratic

Supporting L2 Elementary Science Writing with SFL in an Age of School Reform

In the United States, English language learners (ELLs) now account for over 10% of K-12 public school enrollment. This demographic shift coincides with a succession of school reforms, such as No Child Left Behind legislation, English-only mandates, and the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, which place new demands on all students and their teachers (Brisk, 2015; Gebhard, Chen, & Britton, 2014; Palincsar & Schleppegrell, 2014). These demands are prompting a renewed interest in how teachers can support students in simultaneously developing academic language proficiency and disciplinary content knowledge. As teachers, administrators, teacher educators, and policymakers attempt to respond to the demands of these reforms, a new national discourse regarding the relationship between language and content learning is emerging. This new discourse is one many teachers are struggling to grasp in their attempts to design more effective instruction, particularly for the growing number of ELLs in their classes (Bunch, Kibler, & Pimentel, 2012; Burke & de Oliveira, 2012).