The Leaking Spanish Bilingual Education Teacher Pipeline: Stories of PK-20 Challenges Told by Latinx Becoming Bilingual Teachers in the U.S.

ABSTRACT

Wondering about possible reasons for the continuous shortage of bilingual teachers in the U.S., this five-year longitudinal qualitative narrative inquiry examines potential “leaks” in the pre-kindergarten to college (PK-20) Latinx bilingual teacher pipeline (BTP). We adopt Ocasio’s Latino Teacher Pipeline framework which establishes PK-20 junctures where Latinx students are at risk of premature exit. The PK-20 junctures Latinx students face when deciding to become bilingual teachers are (1) high-school graduation, (2) enrollment in higher education, and (3) college graduation and obtaining certification. By examining the educational trajectories told by three Latinx becoming novice bilingual teachers, three salient PK-20 leaks are revealed in the participant’s testimonios. One is the challenge to become and remain bilingual. Another is the facing of negative family messages toward teaching as a desirable career option. A third challenge is not feeling valued and supported in terms of their culture and bilingualism, within educational institutions including in the Bilingual Education Preparation Programs (EPP). We propose specific concerted actions among school district administrators and BEPPs to implement initiatives that forefront a commitment toward structuring and strengthening the Latinx BTP that may ameliorate the shortage of bilingual teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• teacher preparation
• bilingual teacher pipeline
• narrative inquiry
• bilingual teacher shortage
• bilingual education preparation programs

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ We use the term “bilingual” both as a qualifier and as a noun to refer to the quality of having as well as individuals who have at least two languages in their sociolinguistic-communicative repertoire (García, 2009). We adopt the term Latinx to refer to people who identify as part of an ethnic group with roots in territories formerly colonized by Spain and Portugal in the Americas. The “x” suffix is explicit in recognizing and affirming gender diversity (Salinas & Lozano, 2019). We acknowledge that what to call groups of people and resulting categorizations are problematic (Nieto & Bode, 2011), and that specific terms, particularly Latinx, may not be familiar to or resonate with a given individual.