1 / 13

Manka M. Varghese Associate Professor University of Washington College of Education

Teacher education for language minority teachers in the United States: Perspectives in preparing teachers. Manka M. Varghese Associate Professor University of Washington College of Education Seattle, Washington mankav@uw.edu MOSAIC Centre, University of Birmingham June 11, 2012.

sumi
Download Presentation

Manka M. Varghese Associate Professor University of Washington College of Education

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Teacher education for language minority teachers in the United States: Perspectives in preparing teachers Manka M. Varghese Associate Professor University of Washington College of Education Seattle, Washington mankav@uw.edu MOSAIC Centre, University of Birmingham June 11, 2012

  2. Overview • Background • Working definition of language minority students • Context: Educational and language policy in the US/ Teacher certification • Pursuits as a teacher educator & researcher • Highlighted literature in language minority teacher education • Current issues/dilemmas/discussion points in U.S. teacher preparation • Definitions and applications of language • Changing teacher role and knowledge base • Social justice/advocacy • My ongoing work • Discussion questions

  3. Working definition • Language minorities: • immigrants (not international students),who speak a primary language other than English at home, and who can be discriminated against on the basis of being a nonnative/outer circle speaker of English (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1992) • often racializedminorities, from immigrant communities and from low-income backgrounds (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2003) • studies & theories of Globalization (Block & Cameron, 2005), Immigration (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2003; Suárez-Orozo, Suárez-Orozco & Todorova, 2008), Multilingualism, Critical Race Theory (Yosso, 2005) are weaved into this understanding

  4. Context: Language and educational policy in the US/ Teacher preparation • No Child Left Behind (NCLB) & Title III • Mainstreaming • Restrictive language environments/ Dual language programs • Endorsement – primary or secondary

  5. In pairs: What do you see as the most critical challenges and ways forward in preparing teachers of language minority students?

  6. Pursuits as a teacher educator & researcher • Moving away from prescriptive knowledge base of language minority teaching • Focusing on teacher knowledge, skills, AND TEACHER IDENTITY (Varghese, 2010) • Using various conceptual frameworks (Alsup, 2006; Bourdieu, 1986; Giddens, 1984; Morgan, 2004; Varghese et.al, 2005) • Making links between different disciplines • Engaging in various research settings/pursuing different questions(Motha & Varghese, in preparation; Varghese et al., in preparation; Varghese, 2006, 2008, 2010; Varghese & Johnston, 2007)

  7. Highlighted literature in language minority teachers’ classrooms/work • Research studies on language minority teachers’ professions & daily practice (Creese, 2005; Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Varghese 2006, 2008; Tsui, 2003 Skilton-Sylvester, 2003) • Classroom discourse, academic language development, & instructional moves in language minority classrooms (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008; Gibbons, 2002, 2006; Moshkovitch, 2000, 2007) • Social justice language minority teacher education (Althanases& de Oliveira, 2010; Hawkins, 2011)

  8. Salient issues/dilemmas/discussion points in language minority teacher preparation

  9. 1) Definitions and applications of academic language • Definitions of academic language (Gutiérrez, 2002; Valdés, 2004) • Applications to teacher preparation • Task-related (Bunch et al., 2001) • Discipline-specific (Barwell, 2005; Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008; Moshkovitch, 2000, 2007) • Scaffolding (Gibbons, 2002, 2006; Walqui & van Lier, 2010)

  10. 2) Changing teacher roles and knowledge base • Collaborative teaching • Grade level/mainstream teachers • Language minority teachers (Creese, 2005; English, 2012; English & Varghese, 2010)

  11. 3) Social justice/advocacy • Personal backgrounds and experiences of teachers • Teacher preparation (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009; Dubetz& deJong,2011; Telléz& Varghese, in press; Varghese et al., in preparation)

  12. My ongoing work as a teacher educator/researcher • How can we re-frame teacher education to be also focusing on the project of developing teacher identity? (Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Varghese, 2006, 2008, 2010) • How do we create ‘social justice pedagogies’ in our teacher preparation programs and for our student teachers to enact? (Hawkins, 2011, Varghese & Motha, in preparation) • What types of expertise count and how do we develop these for novice language minority teachers? How are these different for grade-level/mainstream teachers?

  13. Discussion questions • What aspects of the presentation resonated with you as a teacher educator, especially when thinking about the context(s) in which you are teaching? What other issues were not brought up that are relevant about your context(s)? • What expertise does your program help novice language minority teachers develop and how does it do that? • What types of experiences and reshaping would need to be made to make teacher identity a central aspect of your program? To what extent would this be useful or not?

More Related