Abstract
Teacher education serves as a crucial phase and component to address the issue and challenge of unpreparedness of mainstream teachers to work with the growing number of students from diverse backgrounds in the classrooms. This chapter presents the experience and perspective of a teacher educator who taught a teacher preparation course in the area of school psychology and was required to infuse English language learner (ELL) content in the course. The work focuses on the teacher educator's sense making of infusing the content based on her own personal and professional experiences and beliefs. Findings highlight the important role of personal experiences and beliefs and the active position of general education teacher educators in preparing teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Implications for professional development are also discussed.
TopIntroduction
In the educational context of the United States, there has been a rapid growth of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds over the recent decades (who are often labelled as “English language learners/English learners”, or “ELLs/ELs” in policy documents and school context). By the school year of fall 2017, there was 10.1 percentage (5.0 million) of public school students across the nation identified as English language learners (ELLs), ranging from 19.2 percentage to 0.8 percentage by state, with more than 10 states equal or higher than 10 percentage (NCES, May 2020). Instead of solely relying on the support of English as a second language (ESL) or bilingual teachers or having ELLs in pulled-out sessions and specialized programs, mainstream teachers need to teach both ELL and non-ELL students in the classroom for content and language learning. The general “good teaching” strategies are insufficient for ELLs because they are not culturally and linguistically situated to address the learners’ unique backgrounds, needs, and the resources they bring with them (de Jong & Harper, 2005).
Many of the mainstream teachers are unprepared or underprepared to work with ELLs in the classroom. Relatively low levels of preparedness have been showed in research for both pre- and in-service teachers (e.g. Li et al., 2017; Salerno & Kibler, 2013; Walker et al., 2004). The training that teacher received in their teacher education programs is closely related to such insufficient preparedness (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2008; Durgunoğlu & Hughes, 2010; Samson & Collins 2012). The current research in this chapter situates itself in a very specific part of this complex picture of the teacher preparation gap. At the teacher education level, it becomes more and more common for programs to infuse content related to cultural and language diversity or more specifically about ELLs and other groups of diverse learners with the purpose of building teachers’ capacities of teaching students of different backgrounds in their future classrooms. The approach of infusion is perceived to be more pragmatic for many of the teacher education programs in terms of the cost and time of hiring new faculty members and the space of coursework in the curriculum (Verkler, 2007). It is also seen as an ideal way to achieve the integration of disciplinary content and ELL teaching expertise (Nutta et al., 2012).
As part of a larger research, the work presented in this chapter goes into the detailed experiences and perspectives of one teacher educator teaching a disciplinary specific course infused with ELL-related content, and it tries to understand how this teacher educator makes sense of this experience. In the particular context, there is a state mandate requiring general education teachers in their initial training to graduate with an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) endorsement, and most teacher education programs realize this through a specific ESOL infusion model, where ESOL content is infused through two separate courses focusing on ELL topics and other disciplinary courses infused with ESOL content and standards. More details of the research context will be provided in the chapter later. This chapter seeks to contribute to the conversation of integrating ELL and diversity perspectives into general education teacher education courses from the perspective of teacher educators.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Teacher Education Program: In this chapter, it refers to university-based degree and certificate programs for preparing future classroom teachers in mainstream/general education contexts.
ESOL/ELL/EL Infusion: The approach of incorporating, integrating, and infusing ELL-related content into general teacher education courses and program from a general perspective. ESOL infusion can be achieved through the components of courses, field experiences, and the whole curriculum at a systematic level.
ELL Content/ESOL Content: This can contain the areas of knowledge, skills, understandings, and perspectives about language learning, bilingual development, linguistic diversity, ELLs/bilingual learners, critical awareness, sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts related to ELLs, and instruction that addresses ELLs’ backgrounds and needs.
General Education Teacher Educator: The teacher educator who teaches courses (not ELL-focused) in general teacher education programs to prepare teacher candidates. They can be professors, doctoral students, or adjunct instructors, and come from different areas of studies in education.
English Language Learner (ELL): A term to classify and label learner whose primary language is not English and is in the process of learning English. There are alternative names such as English learner (EL), culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students, and emergent bilingual (EB). The chapter understands ELLs from a bilingual and asset-oriented perspective. The name ELL is used in the chapter to access a wider range of audience as this is one of the terms most often used in scholarly literature and policy documents.
General Teacher Education: Programs and training such as elementary education, early childhood education, and secondary education that prepare teachers for mainstream classrooms. Courses in these programs focus on learning about content area and pedagogical knowledge and skills in these educational levels. Many of these programs also include courses in areas of educational psychology, counseling, and special education besides subject content areas.