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Open Access
Article
Publication date: 27 September 2022

Nahed Abdelrahman, Beverly J. Irby, Rafael Lara-Alecio, Fuhui Tong and Hamada Elfarargy

The purpose of this study was to explore intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that led 28 teachers of emergent bilingual (EB) students to seek a master's in educational…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to explore intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that led 28 teachers of emergent bilingual (EB) students to seek a master's in educational administration with a focus on bilingual/English as a second language (ESL).

Design/methodology/approach

To address the study objectives, the authors used a qualitative phenomenological design. The authors conducted online interviews with 28 teachers of EBs. The authors used the self-determination theory as the theoretical framework.

Findings

Primarily, teachers of EBs were intrinsically motivated to seek the principalship. The authors identified additional motivators that were not found in the previous literature which heretofore was based on general education teachers' responses. Those motivators were, gain advice from mentors, promote cultural awareness, commit to a campus-wide impact, increase awareness of the importance of bilingual/ESL education programs, and foster a relationship with the school community.

Practical implications

Identifying the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for teachers of EBs who desire to move into a principal position may aid faculty in university principal preparation programs and administrators in school districts to support and mentor these teachers to better serve as leaders in high need schools.

Originality/value

There is little known about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of teachers of EBs which influence their decisions to change their career paths to become principals.

Article
Publication date: 19 January 2021

Sally Brown

The main purpose is to investigate what resources young emergent bilinguals use to communicate a multimodal response to children’s literature. In particular, attention is paid to…

Abstract

Purpose

The main purpose is to investigate what resources young emergent bilinguals use to communicate a multimodal response to children’s literature. In particular, attention is paid to the ways students translanguage as part of the learning process.

Design/methodology/approach

An ethnography-in-education approach was used to capture the social and cultural aspects of literacy learning in an English-only context. A multimodal transcript analysis was applied to video-recorded data as a method for examining semiotic resources and modes of learning.

Findings

The results revealed that students used technology, paper-based resources and peers to construct meaning relative to books. Experimentation or play with the affordances of the tablet computer served as avenues to determine the agentive selection of resources. As students wrestled with constructing meaning, they gathered multiple perspectives from peers and children’s literature to involve symbols and representations in their texts. Signs, multiple language forms and meaning came together for the social shaping of situated perspectives.

Originality/value

This study addresses the call for educators to engage in multiliterate, multimodal practices with young learners in the contexts of classrooms. It provides insight into the need to create multilingual learning spaces where translanguaging freely occurs and the meaningful ways early childhood learners use technology. To fully understand what emergent bilinguals know and can do, they must be afforded a variety of semiotic resources at school.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 20 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 March 2016

Paul J. Yoder, Amanda Kibler and Stephanie van Hover

Using the systematic search and coding procedures of a meta-synthesis, this paper reviews the extant literature on English language learners (ELLs) in the social studies…

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Abstract

Using the systematic search and coding procedures of a meta-synthesis, this paper reviews the extant literature on English language learners (ELLs) in the social studies classroom. The 15 studies making up the corpus adhere to both topical and methodological criteria. The Language-Content-Task (LCT) Framework informed the coding and analysis of the results. Discussion of the findings provides three primary implications: (1) the need for linguistically and culturally responsive instruction for ELLs in social studies classes, (2) the need for increased training for inservice and preservice social studies teachers in preparation for teaching ELLs, and (3) the need for future research among ELLs in the social studies context.

Article
Publication date: 22 October 2020

Bridget Kinsella Druken, Alison S. Marzocchi and Michelle V. Brye

This paper reports on experiences of university-level mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) from participating in lesson study to improving mathematics teacher preparation. The…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper reports on experiences of university-level mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) from participating in lesson study to improving mathematics teacher preparation. The authors investigate the questions: “What did MTEs report as benefits of participating in cross-departmental lesson study?” and “What considerations did MTEs report for stakeholders interested in lesson study?”

Design/methodology/approach

This study employed qualitative methodologies on one cycle of lesson study where the authors served as lesson study participants. Debrief and focus group interview data were analyzed for emergent codes on benefits, supports and challenges from a university-level lesson study.

Findings

Engaging in university-level lesson study provided MTEs firsthand professional development, created community, enabled attention to detail, improved knowledge of issues related to teaching mathematics, improved curricular materials and extended beyond one lesson. Institutional support, a natural evolution of the process, alignment of goals among members and support within the group supported their university-level lesson study. Challenges of time and funding, imposition, misalignment of goals and building trust are discussed.

Originality/value

The paper contributes insights about benefits for MTEs who use lesson study to examine their own teaching practice for mathematics teacher preparation. The importance of supports and constraints is highlighted.

Details

International Journal for Lesson & Learning Studies, vol. 10 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2046-8253

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 June 2018

Amirullah Abduh

The purpose of this paper is to explore lecturers’ perceptions on factors that affect the implementation of bilingual instruction (BI) policy in Indonesian higher education.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore lecturers’ perceptions on factors that affect the implementation of bilingual instruction (BI) policy in Indonesian higher education.

Design/methodology/approach

This qualitative study used 15 lecturers who taught in BI programs in three Indonesian universities. The data were gained through semi-structured interviews. The semi-structured interview data were analyzed via thematic approach.

Findings

The findings of the study suggest a number of factors influencing the implementation of BI, including the support from lecturers, leadership, and government. The availability of adapted curriculum and systematic assessment also influences the successful implementation of BI in Indonesian tertiary education.

Practical implications

The findings of this study have implications for the success of similar programs and the ways to gain understanding of BI within higher education contexts.

Originality/value

BI research is not new; however, little information is related to BI in Indonesia. This work contributes to a growing body of literature that explore BI and education factors within higher education setting. The significance of this study is to raise greater understanding of several important factors that influence the implementation of BI policy within university settings.

Details

Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, vol. 10 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-7003

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 May 2023

Faythe Beauchemin and Kongji Qin

Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance…

Abstract

Purpose

Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students’ schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the in-betweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts, examines how two US Latinx teachers and their young bilingual students co-constructed affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds with a bilingual text that centered their culturally rooted ways of knowing and being.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on data from a larger practitioner research study that aimed at developing teacher candidates’ culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy instruction, the authors took a discourse analytic approach to examine how the two teachers created curricular opportunities for affect and play in designing the translanguaging read-alouds and how bilingual children and their teachers playfully engaged with the bilingual text during the read-alouds.

Findings

The analysis indicated that the teachers’ intentional selection of the Spanish–English bilingual picturebook Niño Wrestles the World created opportunities for the children to leverage their full linguistic repertoire and funds of knowledge to engage with the text. During the read-alouds, the children and the teachers co-constructed affect and playfulness through embodied performance and translanguaging.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the research and practice of literacy instruction of bilingual children by illustrating how affect figures into the process of literacy instruction and how translanguaging read-alouds can afford bilingual children opportunities to playfully engage with the text that centers their cultural epistemologies.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 22 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 December 2023

Baburhan Uzum, Bedrettin Yazan, Sedat Akayoglu and Ufuk Keles

This study aims to examine how teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye and the USA navigate their intercultural communication skills in a telecollaboration project.

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to examine how teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye and the USA navigate their intercultural communication skills in a telecollaboration project.

Design/methodology/approach

Forty-eight TCs participated (26 in Türkiye and 22 in the USA) in the study. TCs discussed critical issues in multicultural education on an online learning platform for six weeks. Their discussions were analyzed using content and discourse analysis.

Findings

The findings indicated that TCs approached the telecollaborative space as a translingual contact zone and positioned themselves and their interlocutors in the discourse by using the personal pronouns; I, we, you and they. When they positioned themselves using we (people in Türkiye/USA), they spoke on behalf of everyone included in the scope of we. Their interlocutors responded to these positionings either by accepting this positioning and responding with a parallel positioning or by engaging in translingual negotiation strategies to revise the scope of we and sharing some differences/nuances in beliefs and practices in their community.

Research limitations/implications

When TCs talk about their culture and community in a singular manner using we, they frame them as the same across every member in that community. When they ask questions to each other using you, the framing of the questions prime the respondents to sometimes relay their own specific experiences as the norm or consider experiences from different points of view through translingual negotiation strategies. A singular approach to culture(s) may affect the marginalized communities the most because they are lost in this representation, and their experiences and voices are not integrated in the narratives or integrated with stereotypical representation.

Practical implications

Teachers and teacher educators should first pay attention to their language choices, especially use of pronouns, which may communicate inclusion or exclusion in intercultural conversations. Next, they should prepare their students to adopt and practice language choices that communicate respect for cultural diversity and are inclusive of marginalized populations.

Social implications

Speakers’ pronoun use includes identity construction in discourse by drawing borders around and between communities and cultures with generalization and particularity, and by patrolling those borders to decide who is included and excluded. As a response, interlocutors use pronouns either to acknowledge those borders and respond with corresponding ones from their own context or negotiate alternative representations or further investigate for particularity or complexity. In short, pronouns could lead the direction of intercultural conversations toward criticality and complexity or otherwise, and might be reasons where there are breakdowns in communication or to fix those breakdowns.

Originality/value

This study shows that translingual negotiation strategies have explanatory power to examine how speakers from different language backgrounds negotiate second and third order positionings in the telecollaborative space.

Details

Journal for Multicultural Education, vol. 18 no. 1/2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2053-535X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 July 2017

Brette Garner, Jennifer Kahn Thorne and Ilana Seidel Horn

Though test-based accountability policies seek to redress educational inequities, their underlying theories of action treat inequality as a technical problem rather than a…

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Abstract

Purpose

Though test-based accountability policies seek to redress educational inequities, their underlying theories of action treat inequality as a technical problem rather than a political one: data point educators toward ameliorative actions without forcing them to confront systemic inequities that contribute to achievement disparities. To highlight the problematic nature of this tension, the purpose of this paper is to identify key problems with the techno-rational logic of accountability policies and reflect on the ways in which they influence teachers’ data-use practices.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper illustrates the data use practices of a workgroup of sixth-grade math educators. Their meeting represents a “best case” of commonplace practice: during a full-day professional development session, they used data from a standardized district benchmark assessment with support from an expert instructional leader. This sociolinguistic analysis examines episodes of data reasoning to understand the links between the educators’ interpretations and instructional decisions.

Findings

This paper identifies three primary issues with test-based accountability policies: reducing complex constructs to quantitative variables, valuing remediation over instructional improvement, and enacting faith in instrument validity. At the same time, possibilities for equitable instruction were foreclosed, as teachers analyzed data in ways that gave little consideration of students’ cultural identities or funds of knowledge.

Social implications

Test-based accountability policies do not compel educators to use data to address the deeper issues of equity, thereby inadvertently reinforcing biased systems and positioning students from marginalized backgrounds at an educational disadvantage.

Originality/value

This paper fulfills a need to critically examine the ways in which test-based accountability policies influence educators’ data-use practices.

Details

Journal of Educational Administration, vol. 55 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0957-8234

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 October 2023

Susan De La Paz, Josue Otarola and Cameron Butler

This study aims to explore how teachers in a large, diverse district could use a complex adolescent literacy curriculum, and it coincided with the start of the coronavirus 2019…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to explore how teachers in a large, diverse district could use a complex adolescent literacy curriculum, and it coincided with the start of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic, also a time of great upheaval for this nation. The authors and district partners collaboratively designed document sets that could help students explore socially complex historical topics with discipline-specific reading and writing support. These challenges led to fully virtual PD and redesigned cognitive tools and lesson materials that could be used in a fully distanced learning environment.

Design/methodology/approach

PD and data collection were ongoing and iterative, as the authors' goals were to understand variability in teachers' understanding and how the social unrest in the nation and the need for distance learning would influence their application of our curriculum. Data sources included teacher artifacts, interviews and implementation surveys and anonymized student work samples. The third author wrote memos during webinars and district meetings. The authors employed a grounded theory approach to analyze teachers’ evolving understandings of how to teach students to make judgments, their lesson differentiation and their attention to social justice issues.

Findings

Teachers who attended the authors' online PD increased their knowledge of the authors' cognitive apprenticeship (CA) approach to instruction, demonstrating more sophisticated understandings of important historical thinking skills and the need to provide students with explicit instruction and appropriate cognitive scaffolds. By the end of the year, teachers also showed ease in using new technological platforms and a more flexible use of disciplinary thinking scaffolds in ways the authors hoped. Finally, teachers in the authors' sample (and their students) frequently made connections between topics and sources in the authors' curriculum and ongoing societal problems (such as systemic racism) in this nation.

Research limitations/implications

The authors' original sample of teachers was over 70; however, this number eventually fell to nine teachers (about 12.5% of the eligible participants) due to many ongoing challenges (e.g. teaching while parenting) during this time period. The authors note that teachers who remained engaged with the authors had over 10 years of experience and all but one had at some point been in a leadership position such as a team lead or department head. It is possible that experience teachers found on the authors' curriculum intervention to be too challenging to implement during the pandemic.

Practical implications

Online PD can be successful when sessions focus on content that teachers will use with students. We provided video models showing teachers how to teach historical reading and writing using the authors' tools and supports authors' platform. Although brief, the authors gave teachers opportunities for collaborative practice during webinars, and time to share challenges related to virtual teaching. In return, teachers shared what was working for them and allowed the authors to use anonymized student materials as the basis for subsequent materials for teaching students to make historical judgments.

Social implications

All students, including those with learning or attentional disabilities/difficulties, emergent bilingual students, underrepresented students or marginalized students, must learn to grapple with complex historical and political information. Doing so will support their ability to make sense of conflicting and/or politicized information that pervades the media today and to judge for themselves what counts as evidence and truth.

Originality/value

Although there are a small number of teachers, this study shows that a strong research partnership between a university and district office can support the successful implementation of a complex historical literacy curriculum that allows students to explore social justice issues while learning important disciplinary literacy skills. Future work will share student learning outcomes.

Article
Publication date: 24 August 2010

Barbara Harold and Lauren Stephenson

In contrast with much of the existing academic discourse, through the autoethnographic technique of “narratives of self” this paper aims to provide an account and evaluation of…

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Abstract

Purpose

In contrast with much of the existing academic discourse, through the autoethnographic technique of “narratives of self” this paper aims to provide an account and evaluation of the progressive development of an undergraduate research seminar in a college of education at a United Arab Emirates (UAE) university. The seminar provides opportunities for preservice teachers to develop knowledge and skills that allow them to make realistic contributions to professional practice and educational reform in the UAE.

Design/methodology/approach

The review of the capstone seminar was done using autoethnographic techniques using a blending of autobiography and ethnography. Data were drawn from student research projects, supervision notes, course syllabi, student reflections on the research process, and the authors' own reflections about their role as research supervisors. The data were analysed using an inductive process of identifying themes.

Findings

Some of the findings reflect the themes in the wider literature on undergraduate research such as value and benefits, challenges and implementation issues, while others are more specific to the Emirati context. These relate to language challenges for bilingual graduate students and to emergent leadership development. Five key thematic elements emerge from the data including professional learning and leadership development, complexity, teaching approach, and assessment.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to the knowledge base on professional learning through the development of a better understanding and analysis of undergraduate student teacher programs, processes of professional learning, and the development of research skills in preservice teachers. The broader potential for undergraduate research to contribute to better understanding of classroom practice, educational reform, and leadership growth in the UAE is also discussed.

Details

Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, vol. 3 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1753-7983

Keywords

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