Elementary ESL teachers’ advocacy for emerging bilinguals: a third space perspective

ABSTRACT

This year-long multiple case study examines how three elementary-level ESL teachers understood their advocacy for emerging bilinguals, what tensions arose during their advocacy, and how they dealt with those tensions. Interviews, teaching artefacts, and observations were analyzed using a theoretical model informed by third space theory and existing research on teachers’ critically conscious advocacy. The way that these teachers conceptualized their advocacy (i.e. non-critical, critically emerging, and critically conscious) was tied to the tensions that they encountered as advocates (i.e. advocacy as core versus marginal ideas; advocacy beliefs versus actions; ideological alignment versus misalignment). Teacher participants often dealt with tensions by engaging with stakeholders in third spaces, which are hybrid zones between formal and informal spaces of social interactions. Some of the actions that teacher participants took within third spaces included co-constructing new cultural knowledge with emerging bilinguals’ families; building bridges between the school and their students’ communities; and reimagining alternative practices. This study shows that third spaces can help teachers and stakeholders to jointly identify tensions stemming from divergent goals and help them to collaborate in advocating for emerging bilinguals.

KEYWORDS:

• Emerging bilinguals
• teacher advocacy
• critical pedagogy
• third spaces
• teacher education

Acknowledgments

I want to thank teacher participants who opened classroom doors and shared their stories with me. I would like to extend my gratitude to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their critical and insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use the term “emerging bilinguals” because this term captures that the development and use of language(s) as a fluid, dynamic, and context-dependent process across one’s life (Escamilla, 2006; Téllez, 1998). This term veers away from deficit views on language-minoritized students’ language practices with respect to those of linguistically and culturally dominant groups (ibid.).

2. I adopt the term “intersectionally minoritized” instead of a minority or non-White because race and racism intersect with other social constructs such as language, class, and gender, and immigration status (e.g. Maddamsetti, 2020a, b, in-press; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jihea Maddamsetti

Jihea Maddamsetti is an assistant professor of elementary Education at Old Dominion University. Her research interest includes humanizing pedagogy and critical race theory in teacher education. Some of her work has been published in the Action in Teacher Education, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Education for Teaching, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, International Multilingual Research Journal, Teaching Education, The New Educator and Urban Review. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum Instruction and Teacher Education at Michigan State University.