Learning to Teach Emergent Bilinguals: Mainstream Preservice Secondary Teachers in Student Teaching

Abstract

This qualitative collective case study investigates how mainstream preservice secondary teachers in a university-based program learn to teach emergent bilinguals in their student teaching. Despite the facts that emergent bilinguals are the fastest growing but lowest performing student population in the U.S. and secondary emergent bilinguals are disproportionately represented in national rates of dropout and academic failure based on national testing results and statistical data, a large percentage of mainstream classroom teachers are underprepared to work with them. My dissertation captures what culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogical tools mainstream preservice secondary teachers appropriate during student teaching; explores how they perceive the impact of their teacher preparation program and their student teaching experience on their learning to teach emergent bilinguals; and investigates what factors shape and influence their enacted practices in relation to emergent bilinguals during their student teaching. Drawing on literature from schooling of emergent bilinguals at the secondary level, culturally sustaining teaching, linguistically responsive teaching, and teacher learning, the study takes a sociocultural approach and proposes a Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Teacher Learning Framework. Through interviews and participant observations of preservice teachers’ student teaching, this empirical study is situated in the broader contexts of teacher education program and the placement school. The findings present factors that provide affordances to preservice teachers’ learning: 1) the explicit English Language Learner coursework and workshop series; 2) the ELL expertise of mentor teachers, university supervisors, and university faculties; 3) characteristics of opening-mindedness, learner stance, and readiness to collaborate in mentor teachers and preservice teachers, and 4) practicum components where preservice teachers work with emergent bilinguals while receiving ELL focused coaching. Factors that constrain preservice teachers’ learning include fragmentation of ELL curriculum in teacher education program, the isolation of ELL specialists from mainstream teachers in placement school, and the weak bridge between teacher preparation program and the placement school, and between theory and practice. This study calls for explicit and coherent culturally and linguistically sustaining curriculum and pedagogy in teacher preparation program, more collaboration between ELL and mainstream teachers both at university preparation programs and placement schools, and a closer bridge between teacher education program and the placement school.