From starting stories to staying stories to leaving stories: the experiences of an urban English as a Second Language teacher

Abstract

This narrative inquiry examines why a well-respected English as a Second Language teacher quit teaching in an urban middle school in advance of her retirement. The work provides interpretive accounts of what attracted the teacher to start teaching ESL, what caused her to stay in the profession and the circumstances that drove her to quit. In the fourth largest city in the U.S. where the research unfurled, urban teacher attrition is a burgeoning experienced teacher phenomenon as well as a beginning teacher trend. The same can be said for other urban cores globally. Ashley’s stories of starting, staying and leaving teaching as an experienced and much-loved professional makes important knowledge contributions having to do with: (1) unfolding lives, unfolding social movements, unfolding educational trends; (2) different threads of experience and the making of a life; (3) ESL teaching and social justice; and (4) teaching metaphors and images.

Keywords:

• Experienced teacher attrition
• teaching context
• English as a Second Language teaching
• minority youth
• narrative inquiry
• social justice

Acknowledgement

A special thank you is extended to Ashley Thomas who not only actively participated in this research study, but also followed this article’s development closely. The faculty and students at T. P. Yaeger Middle School are also recognized for their acceptance of researchers in their midst. Appreciation is additionally extended to Angela Lopéz Pedrana, Liping Wei, Bobbie Abrol and Gayle Curtis who read and commented on an early version of this manuscript.

Notes

1. When Ashley Thomas and I first met, her principal introduced her to me as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher. Hence, I will always consider her an ESL teacher. As this article unfolds, readers will come to know why Ashley herself would want to be remembered as an ESL teacher.

2. Ashley’s eldest brother, who was five years older than her, attended a private military academy during his high school years. This was just prior to the Vietnam War.

3. What Ashley Thomas recounted here concurred with what my former doctoral student, Hector Aldape (2006), wrote about his grandfather’s migrant worker experiences.

4. What Ashley Thomas had to say here echoed what my former doctoral student, Angela Lopéz Pedrana (2004) wrote about her experiences as a child of a Mexican migrant worker, albeit in a different part of Texas.

5. The teacher assessment system changed from PDAS (Professional Development and Assessment System) to a value-added approach that based teachers’ pay on students’ academic performances.

6. Ashley said she could speak truth to power because she had oil revenue in addition to her teacher retirement income. Thus, she could afford to retire early. However, most teachers would have had to cower in the situation because they would need to complete the maximum amount of service in order to retire comfortably.

7. In the most recent Anna Dean paper (Craig 2014), the literacy teachers’ evaluations at T. P. Yaeger Middle School dropped in points because the school district wanted teachers’ evaluations to be commensurate with their students’ achievement test scores. Among the teachers, it was felt that administrators only had so many points to allot to faculty members. Hence, one [leaving] teacher’s loss of points (i.e. Ashley Thomas’s loss), might be a [staying] teacher’s gain of points.