Teacher Learning for Responsive Civics Instruction with Immigrant Youth: Student-led Transnational Dialogues as Professional Development

Abstract

Social studies teachers can advance more equitable democratic education for multilingual immigrant and refugee youth by enacting responsive instruction, based in knowledge of superdiversity within migration, and in students’ diverse transnational experiences and aspirations. However, scholarship has yet to articulate how teachers learn about students’ real (rather than perceived or assumed) transnational and multilingual funds of knowledge to inform their enactment of responsive practice. In this area, scholarship is needed that a) attends to teachers’ learning and pedagogical development, and b) produces deeper understanding of students’ civic identities and related classroom needs within the context of increased global migration (Lee et al., 2021).This dissertation responds to those gaps by examining the use of dialogues with immigrant students as part of a student-centered, job-embedded professional development program for a novice civics teacher. At the outset of the project, I sought to understand the impacts of this teacher-student dialogic interface on teacher learning and instructional aims as well as students’ experiences. Over the course of the study, my focus was drawn to examining a) the design of dialogue-based teacher professional development initiatives with immigrant youth, b) teacher learning to facilitate dialogues in English with multilingual learners, and c) the influence of dialogic spaces on teacher learning about students’ transnational civic knowledge. From January to August 2022, I partnered with Ms. Sutter (pseudonym), a second-year educator with state certifications in Social Studies and English Language Learners (ELL). She was selected through a purposive sampling approach of community nomination and four phases of selection criteria that considered: the cultural and linguistic diversity of her students; her teaching assignment of civics; her willingness to engage in dialogues with students; and her availability to collaborate on professional development. We recruited eight student volunteers from Ms. Sutter’s 12th grade civics classes to participate in after-school dialogues on essential questions in civics education. All were multilingual immigrant and refugee young adults who had moved to the U.S. from India, the Philippines, Mexico, Nepal, Malaysia, Afghanistan, and Vietnam as adolescents. Using a blended methodology of qualitative research approaches and practitioner inquiry techniques, I gathered fourteen teacher interviews (11.5 hours); six student group dialogue sessions (8.5 hours); field notes from nine daylong classroom observations, in a continuum sampling of Ms. Sutter’s teaching practice; and 70+ images of classroom artifacts, such as student work, teacher notes, and classroom space. Using dedoose, I engaged in the grounded theory practices of analytic memo writing, followed by first round coding (inductive) and second round coding (structural and deductive). I present findings in three interrelated articles, each articulating a particular facet of Ms. Sutter’s professional learning process. The first is a conceptual piece, advancing principles for dialogue-based professional development and complementary models for inquiry- and design-based professional development. The second piece is empirical, revealing differences in students’ discourse during after-school dialogues and in-class discussion activities. The patterns were shaped by, and in turn shaped, Ms. Sutter’s ideas about good conversations, her repertoires of discussion facilitation techniques, and her evolving ideas about new possible roles for her and her students, as researchers and discussion facilitators. The third piece is empirical and outlines how the “second classroom,” a concept borrowed from practitioner inquiry (Campano, 2007), served as a bridging space between students’ out-of-school and in-school civic understandings. In this space, dialogues expanded Ms. Sutter’s recognition of comparative transnational learning as uniquely important for students’ sense-making. It also prompted new thinking about expertise, as she positioned students as knowledgeable civic actors. Taken together, these articles contribute to a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of teacher learning, as it relates to responsive civics instruction with culturally and linguistically diverse immigrant youth.