This study explores teachers' use of Spanish in sixth-grade bilingual science classrooms at an urban middle school in Texas. We used a case study approach to study how two Spanish-English bilingual teachers utilized Spanish during instruction in a unit on space exploration and their beliefs on Spanish use in English-dominant science classrooms.…

The central purpose of this Dissertation in Practice was to understand factors that influence educators' empathy towards their elementary English Learner students in a small school district in South Texas. The study sought to understand practical implications for designing an intervention to support educators facing increasingly diverse students.…

For linguistically diverse students, the path to college is often defined by language. Depending on assessments and institutional policies, students may be placed into course sequences in developmental English, adult basic education, and/or English as a Second Language courses. The purpose of this study was to better understand developmental…

The purpose of this study was to review policies that affect English Learners in Texas public schools. Specifically, the relationship between ESL certification and teacher preparedness to teach English Learners was addressed. In this journal-ready dissertation, the first article contains a review of national and state policies that were designed…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the US public education system under great stress, resulting in quick, emergency changes. This stress has been particularly apparent in providing accommodations needed to Special Education (SPED) and English Learners (ELs). This paper reports on a qualitative narrative study based on interviews with K-12 educators…

World language (WL) teachers are often at the forefront of using cutting edge technology for language teaching and learning purposes. However, as technology is ever changing, WL educators often lack adequate professional development (PD) opportunities to ensure effective technology integration while maintaining their technological, pedagogical,…

Translanguaging in classrooms opens spaces for multilingual students to engage in learning across the full range of their linguistic repertoire. We argue that one result of translanguaging pedagogy is that it can transform the talk-for-learning in the classroom and create a corriente or flow of ideas that is more free and less constrained than…

This article shares findings from the implementation of an ongoing National Professional Development (NPD) project that advances second language literacy and biliteracy in secondary content areas. The project is part of a research-practice partnership between a large public university and two school districts in south Texas that engages in-service…

With the recent changes in student demographics in the United States and the development of technology, virtual professional development (VPD) for teachers of English learning students(ELs) has become a valuable means to support teachers and their students. We developed a federally funded, five-year VPD program, Project Massive Open Online…

Transformative, anti-oppressive curricula, as theorized by Banks (1989, 2014) and Kumashiro (2001, 2009), directly address present-day realities of racism, discrimination, and oppression. According to Banks (1989), a transformative curriculum includes "the infusion of various perspectives, frames of reference, and content from various groups,…

Leadership takes on a tone of urgency when we are struggling for justice. At the same time, the right to lead -- the agency to embrace a leadership identity -- can also feel more distant when we are marginalized by the dominant society. For bilingual education teachers working with immigrant communities, the development of critical consciousness,…

This article discusses the contributions of foreign-born TESOL instructors helping adult language learners develop literacy skills through a pen pal project, which lasted 10 weeks and consisted of writing letters back and forth weekly. The project provided adult immigrant learners with an opportunity to practice meaningful writing to support their…

The purpose of this article is to examine how a first-grade ESL teacher understands teaching and learning as she explores her agency (and that of her students) in implementing and experimenting with project-based instruction (PBI) in her economically, culturally, and linguistically diverse classroom. Utilizing video-cued ethnography and drawing on…

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…

The population of English learners (ELs) is increasing dramatically and teachers need to learn how advocate for these often marginalized students. This study investigates various syllabi from English as a second language pre-service teacher course work that are aimed at preparing future teachers to advocate for ELs. The researchers employed…