Re-Designing Teacher Education for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

A Critical-Ecological Approach

Ana Christina da Silva Iddings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315440460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Through a critical-ecological lens, this book examines how to prepare preservice teachers to be resourceful and responsive practitioners in addressing the intellectual needs of children often labeled as "culturally and linguistically diverse." It explores a comprehensive re-design of a teacher education program grounded in research on the complex factors that affect the teaching and learning of linguistically and culturally diverse children. Re-Designing Teacher Education for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students challenges hegemonic cultural and linguistic norms, quantitative and static views of "resources, " the impact of U.S. education policy, and the limited attention to the agency, identities, and strategic actions of diverse students and their families.

1 Introduction

Ana Christina daSilva Iddings

The issues addressed in this volume are of concern for all of those who would like to see the educational conditions of culturally and linguistically diverse children improved. These children make up the fastest-growing student population in the U.S. (Snyder & Dillow, 2015), yet, in the U.S. public schools, their education has tended to shortchange their academic potential, to be overly restrictive and compensatory, and to be largely driven by policies instead of sound educational theory and research.

At least two decades of research examining key reasons for the inferior-quality education culturally and linguistically diverse children receive (e.g., Gutierrez, Bequadano-Lopes, & Tejeda, 1999, Manyak, 2000; Rueda & de Neve, 1999; Souto-Manning, 2013) have pointed to two major factors: First, schools consistently fail to provide these children with expansive and enriching curricular activities that build on the ample resources available in their broader social environment. Second, teachers are not adequately prepared to work with these populations of students. Indeed, most colleges and universities have not succeeded in providing preservice teachers, as well as teachers pursuing advanced degree work, effective preparation in teaching linguistically diverse learners in their future classrooms (Amatea, Cholewa, & Mixon, 2012; American Federation of Teachers, 2014;Sleeter, 2001, Voltz, Collins, Patterson, & Sims, 2008).

Still, critical issues related educational quality and opportunity begin well before formal K-12 schooling. From much of the research on literacy development, we know that the foundation for success in elementary school begins at birth. According to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, “investing in children form birth to age 3 is the only way to ensure that every child has the opportunity to reach his or her future potential” (Bellamy, 2001). How do we best support literacy development beginning with birth? The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that the literacy achievement gap between Latino and white populations begins in infancy. How do we address the unique challenges posed by families whose first language is not English? In Arizona, which has one-sixth of the nation’s Latino immigrants, these challenges are a critical and pressing issue. However, we know from other studies that the gap narrows when certified early childhood teachers work with preschool populations over an extended period of time.

Using and understanding written words is a complex task that involves social, cultural, and language practices that are specific to individual communities. When school-based instruction does not build on the literacy knowledge within the home and community, it is less effective because it underestimates the knowledge children bring to the school setting and thus, their potential achievement. Early literacy practices need to aggressively incorporate strategies that bridge the differences spanning home, school, and community. Teacher education must prepare teachers who know such strategies and who are able to implement them because they have had extensive practice working with these strategies in school and community settings.

To address these overarching issues, there is a pressing need to develop a more encompassing and dynamic way to attend to the learning needs of these children and to prepare teachers to work with this population. This includes opportunities for preservice teachers to develop a closer understanding of the specific sociocultural and linguistic assets of these children, as well as the array of in-school and out-of-school activities, family practices, and communities that mediate learning.

One way of framing the discussion of the sociocultural and linguistic assets, resources, and capital of distinct communities is through the well-developed concept of funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti, 2005; Moll, 2014; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Moll & Gonzalez, 1994). This volume presents research that serves to generate new knowledge about the funds of knowledge of culturally and linguistically diverse students. As such, we employ an ecological educational approach as applied to practice, placing multiple layers of community in the forefront of our educational commitments and pedagogical concern. Within this perspective, and using a design-based research methodology, our research team (Clift, daSilva Iddings, Jurich, Reyes, & Short, Co-Principal Investigators, 2011–2015), funded by the Helios Education Foundation, set out to systematically reform an early childhood teacher preparation program—The Community as Resources in Early Childhood Teacher Education, or CREATE (www.createarizona.org). This program provided a new infrastructure of coursework and innovation in field experiences as well as novel spaces for action and interaction among multiple stakeholders to promote new understandings that would inform curriculum, pedagogy, and educational policy. Through this ecological lens and through the designed experiences of our curriculum, preservice teachers have engaged in intellectual inquiries from different perspectives and angles to form rich learning portraits of culturally and linguistically diverse young children.

Why an Ecological Approach?

Although the term ecology has referred mostly to a scientific discipline that considers the relationships of an organism with all other organisms, an expanded notion of ecology in social sciences research (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Cole, 2006; Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003) seeks to understand the dynamic relations of learners and the world, whether it is at a macro-level (e.g., culture, history, or socioeconomic status) or at a micro-level (e.g., interactions, physical objects, or dialogs). More specifically, an ecological approach focuses on “relations between people and the world, and on learning as ways of relating more effectively to people and the world” (van Lier, 2004, p. 4, emphasis added). In this way, studies informed by an ecological perspective include an investigation of dynamic and mutual influences between learners and surrounding contexts through semiotic and material resources.

An ecological approach is neither a theory nor a method with which to do research. Instead, it can be conveyed as a way of thinking (and acting), allowing for broad understandings of cultural, historical, social, institutional, and linguistic phenomena in the classroom. Although not a theory per se, an ecological approach draws from various theoretical positions, including sociocultural theory. For example, at the core of sociocultural theory is the concept of mediation, which emphasizes the dynamic interactions and negotiations between learners and material/symbolic artifacts or cultural tools (Vygotsky, 1987; 1977; 2004). In this way, both the ecological approach and sociocultural theory recognize the significance of the context and its mediating role for human minds and actions, and furthermore consider development as inseparable from the contexts of activities.

Two central tenets of ecological approaches to language learning are the concepts of emergence and affordance. These are intimately related to the notion of mediation. That is, this approach proposes that learning emerges as a mediated and situated activity from interactions between a learner and his or her surrounding context. From this perspective, then, learning cannot be understood without considering the physical, social, and symbolic context in which learners are engaged. In this way, the ecological approach considers the context of human activity through the idea of affordance, which refers to “what is available to the person to do something with” (van Lier, 2004, p. 91). Herein, learning arises from, and is mediated through, various types of affordances, or a myriad of opportunities for meaningful action and interaction offered to an engaged participant.

From an ecological perspective, it is assumed that sociocultural practices per se become a mediational process in shaping particular relationships between learner and context, and that a learner’s actions are understood in relation to the constraints and affordances of a particular instructional context and its inherent social practices. Using this approach, then, we are able to ask certain questions: “What is it in this environment that makes things happen the way they do?” and/or, “How does learning come about within this particular context of activity?” (van Lier, 2004, p. 13).

An ecological approach was particularly relevant to our CREATE research team as we began to formulate a comprehensive reform of early childhood teacher education. Of primary concern to the CREATE team was the goal to expand, through theory and practice, a funds of knowledge perspective. In other words, by applying an ecological approach, we aimed to illuminate the ways by which all stakeholders involved in this process (e.g., preservice teachers, university faculty, participating families) engaged in praxis, defined here as the dialectic unity of consciousness and actions in the world (Lantolf & Pohener, 2011). In addition, within this focus, we aimed to track the critical and self-reflexive discourses and practices that these social agents used to intervene at the level of social action. Following Thibald (2004) praxis leads to “exposing, challenging, and changing those social meaning-making practices that function to conceal and to maintain illegitimate and repressive relations of power and domination in the social order” (p. 8). Thus, this concept was also immanently suited for understanding community development, especially for traditionally disenfranchised populations who may or may not speak the institutionally dominant language—in this case English. An ecological lens with a focus on praxis helped us to understand how critical awareness, or conscientização (Freire, 1970), developed for the participants, as they began to overcome monologic institutional views and create new possibilities for addressing the needs of the linguistically and culturally diverse children and their families (cf. daSilva Iddings, McCafferty, & Teixeira, 2011).

A Design-based Approach to Research in Early Childhood Teacher Education: Building a Base of Useable Knowledge

Aligned with our focus on the ecology of learning, for the overall purpose of the early childhood teacher education reform, we applied a design-based research approach, which considers the learning process as an intricate system of relations as opposed to a mere set of practices that work in isolation. A design-based methodology generally consists of five main characteristics. First, this paradigm aims to derive theories relating to the process of learning as well as the means by which this process is supported. Second, a design-based research methodology relies upon intervention by bringing about new forms of learning. Third, design-based research has two complementary faces: prospective and reflective. Prospectively, hypotheses are created about a specific form of learning and the means of supporting it. Reflectively, these conjectures are implemented, exposed to scrutiny, accepted, or refuted. Researchers may need to refine their initial hypotheses in light of newly collected data. Fourth, the methodology requires that researchers engage in repeated cycles of hypothesis creation and analysis. Last, as design-based research is heavily reliant on theory, the work done within this paradigm tends to focus on the direct application of seemingly abstract theoretical concepts onto a specific context. In other words, the theories employed within the experiment are useful to impel not only thinking but also practice. Through detailed description and analysis of these interventions, researchers, in collaboration with other stakeholders in the field (e.g., pre- and in-service teachers, families, community members, university faculty) can expand the base of useable knowledge—that is, knowledge that could be directly applicable to the contexts of the university classes and our community and school partners and the circumstances of our students and, ultimately, the educational circumstances of the children we want to affect.

Funds of Knowledge as a Foundational Principle for Teacher Preparation

The research on “funds of knowledge,” brought forth over 20 years ago, was mainly concerned with the literacy education of Latino, mostly Mexican American, children in the U.S. Southwest (Moll, 1990). In this work, teachers as co-researchers collaborated using ethnographic-like household observations and interviews with household members. Importantly, this research advanced a “sociocultural” orientation in education, seeking to build strategically on the experiences, resources, and knowledge of families and children, especially those from low-income neighborhoods (e.g., Hogg, 2011).

From this perspective, families, especially those in the working class, have been characterized by the practices they have developed and the knowledge they have produced and acquired in the everyday living of their lives. The social history of families, and their productive or labor activities in both the primary and secondary sector of the economy, are particularly relevant to educational contexts and teachers because they reveal experiences (e.g., in farming, construction, gardening, household maintenance, or secretarial work) that generate much of the knowledge household members may possess, display, elaborate, or share with others. This knowledge may develop through their participation in social networks, often with kin, through which such funds of knowledge may be exchanged in addressing some of life’s necessities. As Moll, Soto-Santiago, and Schwartz (2013) further explained:

One might help a neighbor fix a car, because one has the required knowledge and experience as an auto mechanic, and the neighbor incurs an obligation to reciprocate and help paint one’s house, a task that is within his or her areas of expertise.

(p. 23)

The authors note that these forms of reciprocal exchange are not of cash for labor as in commercial transactions; instead, it is an exchange in another currency, that of funds of knowledge. One could argue, then, that funds of knowledge in a particular household or in a network of households may form part of a broader (nonmonetary) household economy (Moll, 2014).

Thus this type of research, especially if conducted in collaboration with teachers, provides one with an opportunity to (a) initiate relations of trust—or confianza—with families to enable discussion of their practices and funds of knowledge; (b) document families’ lived experiences and knowledge that may prove useful in defining households’ intellectual resources or assets that may be valuable for instruction; and (c) establish discursive settings with teachers to prepare them theoretically, methodologically, and analytically to do the research, and to assess the utility of the findings for classroom practice(González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005, p. 213). In other words, the studies cited here show that the knowledge base one can accrue through one’s approach to households can be treated pedagogically as cultural resources for teaching and learning in schools. A close understanding about families’ funds of knowledge represents an opportunity for teachers to identify and establish the “educational capital” of families often assumed to be lacking any such resources, and to leverage this capital in the classroom (daSilva Iddings, Combs, & Moll, 2013).

Many subsequent studies in different parts of the world have pointed to the usefulness of the funds of knowle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Why Are Critical Perspectives and Ecological Approaches Needed in Early Childhood Teacher Education? Toward a Trans/contextual Cultural-Ecological Approach
• 3 Using a Design-based Research Approach: Educating Early Childhood Teachers to Understand, Engage, and Teach the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Child
• 4 Engaging Teacher Educators’ Commitment to the Principles of CREATE over Time
• 5 Prospective Teachers’ Interactions with Families: Understanding Home Contexts
• 6 Teacher Candidates Connecting to Community Resources and Children’s Literacies
• 7 Thinking with Teacher Candidates: The Transformative Power of Story in Teacher Education
• 8 Understanding Children’s Funds of Knowledge through Observations of Play
• 9 Stories that Travel: Preservice Teachers Using Photography to Understand Children’s Funds of Knowledge in Literacy Learning
• 10 Making Race and Racism Visible: Respecting and Valuing the Voices of Educators of Color in Teacher Preparation Programs
• 11 Learning to Teach for Equity, Access, and Inclusion: Directions for Program Design and Research in Early Childhood Teacher Education
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index