Developing agency for advocacy: Collaborative inquiry-focused school change projects as transformative learning for practicing teachers. The New Educator

Many mainstream educators of English language learners (ELLs) have experienced neither adequate pre-service preparation nor appropriate in-service professional development. Yet, ELLs are one of the fastest growing student populations in the United States. While practicing teachers typically espouse the view that all students can learn, they often lack the knowledge and skills necessary to support ELLs in their academic and language development. This gap in preservice teacher education programs often leads general education teachers to rely heavily on bilingual paraprofessionals and language teachers for educating ELL students. This paper describes a 5year professional development initiative, Project Alianza, during which the researchers provoked dissonance through texts, narratives, experiences, and encounters to push teacher participants to name and question their current assumptions, biases, beliefs, and practices. A teacher inquiry project emerged from the Analysis of participant writing suggests that a teacher inquiry project caused teachers to make changes in their beliefs and professional practices as they developed a sense of agency for educating and advocating for ELL students. SCHOOL CHANGE PROJECTS 2 Developing Agency for Advocacy: Collaborative Inquiry-Focused School Change Projects as Transformative Learning for Practicing Teachers Schools across the United States are becoming increasingly more culturally and linguistically diverse. The number of students who are English language learners (ELL) 1 has increased by 57% over the past ten years (Ballantyne, Sanderman, & Levy, 2008). At the same time, too few teachers have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to effectively teach ELL students (National Clearninghouse for English Language Acquisition, 2010). Unfortunately, while only about one third of ELL students pass the mathematics and reading components of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), more than two thirds of their native English speaking (NES) peers passed these standardized tests (Ballantyne, Sanderman, & Levy, 2008). While standardized tests are not the only, or even the best, indicator of academic development, this achievement gap is still alarming. Lack of teacher preparation to teach ELL students is likely a contributing factor to this achievement gap (Brooks, Adams, & Morita Mullaney, 2010; DeJong & Harper, 2005). Although most teachers enter the profession with the espoused belief that all students can learn, deficit perspectives regarding ELL students often develop as ELL students do not perform as well as their NES peers. Teachers’ lack of understanding about the importance and practice of culturally and linguistically responsive instruction often influence this shift from an asset to a deficit based view of culturally and linguistically diverse students (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Gorski, 2009; Medina, 2012). In our own research, we have found that not only do many teachers develop a deficit view of their ELL students, but they also develop a belief that they do not have 1 Regarding terms: Many acronyms are employed by both scholars and teacher practitioners, resulting in a confusing “alphabet soup” of letters. In this article, students who are learning English as an additional language will consistently be referred to as “ELLs” by the authors. Participant quotes will variously use terms such as ESL, ENL, etc. to refer both to language learners and to the language development programs/courses. Language teacher specialists may be referred to as “ESL” or “ENL” teachers. SCHOOL CHANGE PROJECTS 3 the capacity to teach these students (Brooks, Adams, & Morita Mullaney, 2010). This deficit view of their ability to teach ELL students effectively often leads to an overreliance on English as a second language/bilingual teachers and paraprofessionals to assume full responsibility for all aspects of the education of ELL students. This lack of shared leadership for educating ELL students means that ELL students are often marginalized within their schools; their needs are not typically taken into consideration when administrators and teachers make programmatic and instructional decisions (Brooks, Adams, & Morita-Mullaney, 2010). School change initiatives should challenge this marginalization by developing a model in which language specialists and general educators share responsibility for educating ELL students (Brooks, Adams, & MoritaMullaney, 2010; Davila, 2005; Hoo-Ballade, 2004; Tupa & McFadden, 2009).