More than Multilingual: Investigating Teachers’ Learning to Support Multilingual Students through an Intersectional Lens

Abstract

Traditional teacher andragogy models oversimplify teaching multilingual students, overlooking both the complexity of identity and the contexts in which this work occurs. In this paper, we describe our intersectional approach to research, highlighting its affordances for research on teachers’ learning to support multilingual students. This intersectional lens opens urgent new research questions, invites different types of data, and offers informative analytic approaches to improve both research and practice.

Keywords:

• Equity
• multilingual students
• English language learners
• oppression
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

This study has received administrative review by the Institutional Review Board at North Carolina State University and has been approved as exempt (Protocol 24260). This material is based upon work supported by the Faculty Research and Professional Development Fund at North Carolina State University. We would also like to thank Dr. Nicole Joseph for her instrumental support of our understanding of intersectionality.