Exploring an elementary ESL teacher’s emotions and advocacy identity

ABSTRACT

Scholars, activists, and communities strive for educational equity and justice for emergent bilinguals. The pursuit of advocacy, however, is often fraught with emotional tension, leading many teachers to question their identities as advocates. Relatively few studies have focused on language teachers of color, and on how they navigate their emotions as they construct their identity as advocates – even though teachers of color are disproportionately called upon to act as advocates. By drawing attention to discursive and emotional aspects of identity positionings related to raciolinguistic ideologies, this study shows how one Latinx teacher’s emotions shaped her identity as an advocate in support of emergent bilinguals. The participant, an experienced elementary ESL teacher, constructed her identity as an advocate in her striving to address issues of equity and social justice during a period of shifting language policy in Massachusetts. The analysis reveals that she variously adopted, appropriated, or resisted normative discourses around advocating for emergent bilinguals and power relations over her career, and over the changing education policy context. This study is a step toward giving minoritized language teachers greater institutional support in their pursuit of advocacy work, by focusing on their emotions and identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Language teacher advocacy for emergent bilinguals
• identities
• emotions
• raciolinguistic discourses
• language policies

Acknowledgment 

I deeply appreciate the editors and anonymous reviewers of International Multilingual Research Journal for incisive and thoughtful comments. I was blessed to know Daniela. Thank you for opening your classroom door; thank you for sharing your stories; thank you for opening your heart to me. 

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I use the term “emergent bilinguals” to position students’ bilingualism as a valuable repertoire for their learning and sustaining their linguistic connection to the school, home, and community (García, 2009; García & Wei, 2014). I also use this term to avoid deficit views of these students as linguistic and cultural Other.

² I use the term, “language teachers of color,” instead of a minority, non-native, or nonwhite in this paper. However, I recognize that issues of race and racism in the lives of language teachers of color intersect with other social constructs such as language, class, gender, and immigration status (e.g., Maddamsetti et al., 2018; Maddamsetti, 2020b, 2020c; Varghese et al., 2016).