Newcomers as Teachers: Enacting Linguistic Ideologies and Practices in an Internship Setting

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the experiences of two high school newcomers who chose to participate in an internship program, assisting elementary school students, some of whom were also emergent bilinguals. This study used ethnographic and visual methodologies to explore young people’s evolving understanding of teaching, learning, and languaging as members of a community of practice within the internship. Both students rooted their practices in their work with children in their critiques of language policies that they had experienced. The narratives that the interns shared highlighted how the set of linguistic and cultural-historical repertoires of practice that they entered with shaped how they engaged with and contributed to the classroom communities in which they were placed.

KEYWORDS:

• Language ideology
• newcomers
• translanguaging

Acknowledgments

I am deeply appreciative of Wendy Luttrell, Ofelia García, Terrie Epstein, and David Chapin for their guidance and support in conducting the research featured in this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. New York City is divided into school districts, and districts are divided into zones; each school is assigned a zone. Each child is guaranteed a seat in a public school for which his/her address is zoned.

2. The New York State Department of Education (2019) classify newcomers as “students who have been in our schools for three years or less and are English Language Learners.”

3. In the United States, the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Program provides a proxy measure for the concentration of low-income students within a school.

4. I chose to use the term “Haitian Creole,” as it’s the term used by NYC DOE. Mayou used the name Creole (kreyòl) as most Haitian Creole speakers use and as did I in conversations with her.

5. The Regents Exams were originally honors exams used to evaluate college readiness, but to fulfill federal requirements, New York State began requiring that all students pass the tests in order to receive a high school diploma (Menken, 2008). These kinds of high stakes tests negatively impact the graduation rates of emergent bilinguals. According to the New York State Education Department (NYSED), the 2018 high school graduation rate (for the cohort entering ninth grade in 2014) was 29% for ELLs/MLLs, compared to an overall four-year graduation rate of 80.4% for other students.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ivana Espinet

Ivana Espinet is a Latina, immigrant, bilingual scholar. She is assistant Professor in the Education program at the City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College. She is a former high school teacher and a former project director for the CUNY New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals.