The notion of culturally responsive education has gained prominence in the past 25 years, launched with the seminal writings of Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994), James and Cherry McGee Banks (1989), Lisa Delpit (1995), bell hooks (1994), Sonia Nieto (1992), Christine Sleeter (1991), Beverly Tatum (1997), Jonathan Kozol (1991), Geneva Gay (2000), along with many others. Following their intellectual forefather, Paulo Freire (1970), these scholars outlined the principles of education as a practice that questions: What is knowledge? Whose knowledge is the ârightâ knowledge? Who gets to teach it and who gets to learn? And most importantly: Who benefits from (this) knowledge? Posing such questions aims to narrow, and eventually reframe, the cultural, academic, and opportunity differences between White middle-class students and their culturally and linguistically âOtheredâ counterparts by tailoring education to the needs of all and expanding the narrow confines of the âWhitestreamâ educational canon and practices (Urrieta, 2010). Simultaneously, the scrutiny of the socially constructed nature of knowledge produced a ripple effect of ensuing critiques demanding that we question, de-center, or displace the prevailing structures of traditional education in the U.S.: the delivery of White, Western knowledge by White, native English language speakers, in hierarchically organized classrooms situated within the edifices of scientifically credentialed âacademiaâ.
At the same time, global migration, population shifts, and technology use have further complicated the demands of preparing teachers for more diverse classrooms. Students characterized as English language learners (ELLs), emergent bilingual learners or dual language learners now describe one in every ten public school students in the U.S. (McFarland et al., 2018). Along with demographic shifts come new understandings of how to prepare teachers for instruction that is both linguistically and culturally responsive and cultivates problem-solving perspectives within a complex world. Today, the challenges of neo-liberal economic globalization, widespread digital interaction, high levels of human migration and growing climate instability call for locally relevant but globally aware problem-solving perspectives (OâConnor & Zeichner, 2011). These shifts in understandings of educational contexts and purposes signal that we are on the verge of significant educational transformation (Apple, 2001; Kubanyiova & Crookes, 2016; Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Zeichner, 2010). âTeaching competenceâ now includes mastery of instructional tools for global problem-solving, as well as personal experience within intercultural spaces (Longview Foundation Report, 2008). We believe that teachers prepared specifically to work with emergent bilingual students are at the forefront of these educational imperatives.
This book argues that international learning experiences and other forms of cultural immersion, such as community-based field experiences are a valuable and necessary component of teacher preparation. Such experiences have the potential to âengage [teachersâ] multiple epistemological stances in order to open space within formal educational settingsâ (Rahatzad et al., 2013, p. 77). The recent growth of intentionally-crafted cultural/linguistic immersion experiences for teachers is matched by teacher candidates who arrive to their classrooms committed in their desire to become teachers and advocates of English language learners. It is primarily these teachers and the wider teacher educator community that our book takes as its focus and hopes to inspire and inform. We feel fortunate to address these first cohorts of educators who have purposefully put themselves in the symbolic footsteps of their culturally and linguistically diverse learners, and who, by sojourning in traditional âimmigrant sending countriesâ are working to develop their ecologies of inner lives (Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015), interpretative life-words (Scarino, 2014), and emotional ecologies (Zembylas, 2007) that foreground readiness to engage in classrooms that increasingly represent the cultural and linguistic diversity of the world.
We have adopted the term âimmersionâ program to signify experiences in which preservice teachers travel outside of their home neighborhoods to interact in day-to-day activities within communities in which the primary language used and the sociocultural framework is non-dominant or differs from the primary socialized experience of program participants (Smolcic & Katunich, 2017). Thus, an immersion program might take place in another country, or within another ethnolinguistic community in the teacherâs home country. An âimmersion experienceâ is characterized by daily interactions with local people (teachers, students or families) in classrooms, community-based learning, homestays, or service-learning projects and may also involve learning of the language(s) of that community. It should be asserted that daily life in the twenty-first century is, infact, an intercultural experience. Culture can no longer be defined as static and nation-based, but might be more productively conceptualized as fluid, reciprocal, and constantly shifting depending upon context and localized interactions (Risager, 2007). Likewise, recent conceptualizations of language move toward a description of speaking behavior irreducible to the properties of the speaker or the structural properties of a given language (Martin & Daiute, 2013). In this view, language is understood not as a neutral medium, but as a social practice in which identities are negotiated, often within unequal relations of power (Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson & Golombek, 2016; Norton, 2013). Along with the broad âsocial turnâ which has occurred in many disciplines such as applied linguistics, social psychology and anthropology, teacher competence can no longer be viewed as a specialized skill set but rather as a disposition located in âteachersâ inner lives [with]in the larger world of social facts that are grounded in collective, or shared, intentionalityâ (Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015, p. 440).
In the following, we outline a growing body of empirical research that explores the development of teachersâ cultural responsiveness through immersive programs and describes how understanding language and culture in childrenâs lives, classrooms, and communities can work against deficit-based teaching approaches (GarcĂa, Arias, Harris Murri, & Serna, 2010; Smolcic & Katunich, 2017; Valenzuela, 1999) and can shape and inform new forms of teaching and being in the world. As this body of research grows in-depth (i.e. a range of research designs and methodologies), in-breadth (i.e. differing educative goals, programmatic designs, and geographic situatedness) and in medium (i.e. the expanding variety of digital-based experiences), we applaud the diversity of programmatic options to be experienced and analyzed. At the same time, troubling concerns about the colonial roots of study abroad, the field of English language teaching, as well as widespread inequities in education remain, inviting questions of who benefits, who participates, and how to create reciprocal and solidary relationships among the actors within such programs.
To advance the various interconnected agendas within teacher education through immersive experience, this volume brings together the voices of teacher educators and researchers, as well as pre- and in-service teacher participants of immersion programs to help articulate, reflect, and expand upon specific pedagogical concepts (or core practices) that can be applied beyond the confines of what might be understood as âinternational teacher education,â âteacher preparation for ESL/English language learnersâ or âstudy abroad.â We argue that an immersion context that spotlights languages and cultures in contact provides a unique opportunity for teacher candidates to negotiate individual, local, national, and global systems of meaning and that learning and working within diverse ethnolinguistic communities can âremind us that other ways of being and thinking have not been erasedâ (Rahatzad & Dockrill, 2016, p. xvii). Implied in this project is a critique of the colonial social relations that continue to undergird educational...