Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

Spanish/English

Two-Way Bilingual Immersion

This paper shares insights from a two-year ethnographic study that explores how teachers at one high-performing, bilingual K-8 school make sense of and navigate the Common Core. The paper offers a counternarrative to more conventional accounts of policy implementation in schools serving ELs; findings have implications for policymakers and practitioners.

In 2012, we visited a K-8 school that is bucking national trends by supporting English Learners (ELs) to develop as bilterate, socially conscious citizens and to achieve at high levels on traditional assessments. During that visit, the school’s teachers spoke—unprompted, with agency and optimism—about implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Interested in learning from their process, we invited them to join a research project. This paper shares insights from the resulting two-year ethnographic study, which explored how ten teachers—working within the high-performing school’s dual immersion program—make sense of and navigate the CCSS.

While our paper responds to popular debates about national standards, it also breaks from prior accounts of standards-based reform by drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory to explore the particular tensions and contradictions that arise at the intersection of standards-based reform, high-stakes accountability, and teaching practice guided by the core tenets of multicultural, bilingual, and critical education. Specifically, our analysis examines the relationships among standards-based reform, local school conditions, and teachers’ instructional practices across multiple classrooms, grades and disciplines.

Focusing in this way, we illuminate crucial aspects of a controversial policy and complex implementation process—aspects that are uniquely visible and instructive, because of the school’s high-functioning culture and high-performing status, and its teachers’ shared pedagogical orientation, commitment to bilingualism/bilteracy, and exemplary work ethic.

Ultimately, we argue that the school offers a kind of counter-narrative to the often-grim predictions about standards-based reform, teaching practice, and academic achievement among historically underserved students. We also show, however, that when pressured to implement accountability-infused policies, even well-informed, dedicated educators run the risk of attending to policy-related demands in ways that undercut, rather than enhance, instructional quality, particularly for ELs and other students from non-dominant groups and in established (and essential) bilingual programs.