An Examination of the Collaborative Advocacy of ESL and Bilingual Teachers (66027)

Session Information: Teaching Experiences, Pedagogy, Practice & Praxis
Session Chair: Sora Suh

Saturday, January 7, 2023 (15:50)
Session: Session 5
Room: 317B
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation

All presentation times are UTC-10 (Pacific/Honolulu)

This paper examines the collaborative forms of advocacy that four public school teachers took for emergent bilingual students in one public school district. Previous research on the advocacy work of teachers has shown that while teacher advocacy takes many forms, much advocacy work is done by individuals, risking isolation or marginalization in their schools when advocating for immigrant youth. This paper contributes to the documentation and understanding of teachers’ advocacy work as a collaborative act in teacher education research. The paper is a multiple case study that identifies and tracks the advocacy-related topics that emerge in online discussions during a teacher preparation program and the advocacy work of the teachers in their school. We apply Bakhtin’s theory of language to theoretically frame the work of teachers as a dialogic construction of shared knowledge where individuals dialogue within themselves, with colleagues, ideas, and sociocultural discourses that structure their work. Data collected includes online discussions on the topic of advocacy, video-audio recordings of classroom teaching observations and individual and focus group interviews. The paper’s findings demonstrate that the advocacy-related topics discussed by teachers during their teacher preparation program and teaching practice were instructional advocacy, professional advocacy, and community advocacy. These findings support previous research on the types of advocacy work of teachers and provide new evidence of collaborative advocacy work by a group of engaged educators, which, to date, has been limited in the advocacy literature. The paper highlights the increased agency and effective advocacy of teachers through teacher education and collaboration.

Authors:
Sora Suh, Fairleigh Dickinson University, United States
Catherine Michener, Rowan University, United States


About the Presenter(s)
Dr Sora Suh is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Fairleigh Dickinson University, United States

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00