Radical Pedagogy (2015) Volume 12 Number 2 ISSN: 1524-6345

Suarez & Dominguez.pdf

“Carrying that Weight”: ESL Teacher Negotiations Toward Advocacy and Equity

Michael Suarez School of Education University of Colorado Boulder, USA E-mail: Michael.Suarez@colorado.edu Michael Dominguez School of Education University of Colorado Boulder, USA E-mail: Michael.Dominguez@colorado.edu

Abstract English language learners, a group predisposed to both academic and social

marginalization, present a considerable challenge for educators who wish to foster academic growth by supporting their personal needs, all while negotiating the considerable, often restrictive, policy directives at play urban schools. Through a conceptual approach that fuses the approaches of critical pedagogy and care theory, we examine how care and witnessing become integral parts of teacher’s critical-care practices. The reconciliation of the sometimes-dichotomous positions of critical and care theories into a dual perspective has implications for teachers’ efficacy, in addition to all historically marginalized students’ agency in schools. Keywords: English language learners, care theory, critical pedagogy If one ventures to the back hallways and hidden classrooms of a high school, one may stumble upon programs and departments serving students that have been classified as needing extra assistance. Oftentimes, these students carry labels and

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are stigmatized for the supportive services that they receive from the school. One is not simply a high school student, but categorized as something extraordinary to the general student population. One of the fastest growing populations of all students, English language learners, fits within the category of students receiving additional services in their education. English language learners (ELLs) are valuable commodities for schools to demonstrate growth in an era of accountability and standardized testing. For instance, in states such as Colorado, schools receive points toward accreditation if their English language learners score well and show growth on aptitude tests such as the Colorado English Language Assessment (CELA) and the Partnership Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), the Colorado state accountability assessment. Districts expect ESL departments to function with these specific academic-political goals in mind.1 Yet much more actually happens in classes focusing on English acquisition than strict progress in English literacy. With the guidance of a reflective, caring teacher, who aims to inspire his/her students, many ESL classrooms represent dynamic communities of learning wherein reflective and conscientious students and teachers work together to overcome the everyday barriers and burdens faced in an American high school and American society. In this paper, we explore the vitally important extraneous learning taking place in ESL classrooms and aim to highlight the ways in which efficacious teachers describe their experiences with English language learners.

While the population of English language learners has grown exponentially over the past two decades, the concern for ELLs is nothing new. Their marginalization has been widely acknowledged since the Lau vs. Nichols decision (1974), which called for more equitable educational practices for English language learners. This event, among others, spurred a growth of interest in culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009), multicultural education, and the formation of programs that specifically serve ELLs. Yet while Lau vs. Nichols ensured the existence of programs to support English language learners, educators aiming to teach literacy to students embedded in cultural practices, languages, and discourses outside of the American mainstream are often tangled within a polarizing web of contradictions and complications. Despite legal protections, school districts and local power structures continue to take action and make decisions that defy research and erect obstacles to the learning and social acclimatization of ELL students in American schools (Soto, 1997). As a result, teachers must navigate between being responsive to their students’ observed needs and meeting the academic standards and directives laid down by policy makers.

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This paper reconsiders the goals and objectives of teachers working with students in English acquisition educational programs. Rather than determining what constitutes quantifiable success for students, or delineating the teaching practices that lead to measurable results, we explore the factors at work in the negotiation and development of ESL teachers’ personal and professional identities, and how these affect their ability to negotiate competing policy pressures, academic targets, and students’ socio-emotional needs as they endeavor to create authentic relationships with all of their students. By exploring teacher beliefs and pedagogical considerations, and invoking a fusion of principles from critical pedagogy and care theory, we suggest a new way to conceptualize how some ESL teachers approach their practice and forge their identity. The six teachers we worked with demonstrate why English language learners need transformative programs; programs that provide a safe place for students to acclimate and a space where they feel empowered. Moreover, these teachers exemplify how we should approach the task of teaching English language learners: holding the students to high academic standards, while exhibiting equity and compassion. These ways of framing practice were significant in the implications for merging critical and care theories to pedagogy that they suggest.

Theoretical Framework

Responses to the drastic increase of ELL students in American schools have been mixed, and while considerable research exists on which instructional strategies and curricula provide the best learning outcomes for English language learners2, the politicization of serving diverse students, particularly language minority students, has meant this research has not always been embraced by policy makers (Soto 1997). This has translated into a challenge for teachers to occupy a middle ground between highly responsive approaches (e.g. bilingual programs) and immersive approaches perceived by lawmakers and the public as efficient (e.g. English only, rapid immersion). Teachers must attend to their students’ demonstrated needs, while remaining accountable to the standards of “excellence” that policy-makers set for them; all without disenfranchising already marginalized ELL students.

We believe education is capable of combating the norms of an inequitable society in which many groups are marginalized by power structures predisposed to exclude and disenfranchise them (e.g. McLaren & Lankshear, 1993; Giroux, 1983, 2006). Pedagogy working from a central premise of critical theory has aimed at constructing both a picture of what historically marginalized students need in the classroom, and how to reach them effectively (e.g. Freire, 1970; Cummins, 1996,

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2000; McLaren, 2001; hooks, 1994). For ESL teachers, a high value should be placed on practices that aim to raise a student’s social consciousness, and position them as leaders capable of challenging societal norms. There should also be a high emphasis on the use of culturally relevant pedagogical techniques and curriculum, which invites students to actively engage in schooling by utilizing content that is meaningful to their experiences and cultural backgrounds (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Banks, 2004).

While understanding ESL instruction as a critical challenge to existing social norms is essential and widely acknowledged, we also find to fully understand efficacious ESL teacher belief systems, one must account for the emotional connections that grow out of the interpersonal relationships inherent in a pedagogy of transgression (hooks, 1994). With this in mind, educational care theory (e.g. Noddings 1992, 2005; Camangian, 2010; Rolon-Dow, 2005; Valenzuela 1999) as well as the idea of the critical witness (Dutro, 2009) play a significant role in the way we understand the dispositions of the teachers in this study. Care theory, as envisioned by Noddings (1992), suggests that care for students’ moral and emotional well being, as well as their academic learning, is central to the identity, role and practice of teachers. While Noddings’ call for caring does include attention to empowerment, as she argues that, “People of all groups need to have a sense of both efficacy and responsibility… need empowerment; that is, they need the kind of education that will help them take responsible control of their own lives as nearly as that is possible,” (Noddings, 1992) it has also been criticized for allowing care to become an aesthetic, subtractive force. Valenzuela (1999), Camangian (2010), and Rolon-Dow (2005) all seek to attend explicitly to this concern, focusing on redeeming the concept of care within the context of engaging with historically marginalized students. In doing so, they contribute a political dimension to this ethic of caring-arguing for care as a structural, and necessary, act. Valenzuela and Camangian, particularly, develop an idea of critical care as it manifests in students’ voices. An extension of this theorized notion of care is Dutro’s (2009) idea of teacher as critical witness. Critical witnessing represents a form of caring advocacy. As students are immersed in classroom activities, and teachers are exposed to their affective experiences and stories through the shared discourse of the classroom, the potential exists for the teacher to become a critical witness; to attend closely to these stories and experiences, listening in such a way that they resonate with the teacher’s own, while at the same time recognizing the positioning and inequity that may be revealed. As a result, the teacher-as-critical witness

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becomes both an attentive listener for the student, as well as a concerted advocate for equity on their students’ behalf. We suggest teacher belief systems should be theorized with more complexity than any one approach presently offers. Thus, we incorporate understandings of multiple discourses, an ethic of care, and critical witness advocacy into a new, negotiated critical pedagogy. Essentially, as teachers negotiate state and district policy mandates, there occurs a process of compromise in which emancipatory, critical pedagogical impulses are bolstered by the existence of an ethic of caring (Noddings, 1988), allowing teachers to create an authentic space necessary for reaching and empowering students of multiple discourse backgrounds (Gee, 2008; Valenzuela, 1999), serve as critical advocates for how they are being positioned by institutions and structures (Dutro, 2009), and still meet the demands of accountability policies and prescribed practices and curricula.

Methods We originally began our research by exploring barriers existing between meeting the needs of individual students and striving to meet institutional policy mandates. However, as we began data collection, a forced dichotomy became evident between our initial question and the data. Meanwhile, something much more telling was apparent: the way in which some exemplary ESL teachers build relationships to critically care for their students. To this end, the findings presented here address the question: How do ‘effective’ ESL teachers – as identified by district leaders – balance meeting the personal and emotional needs of their students while also holding them to high academic standards? Our qualitative study spanned the 2010-2011 school year. We used a case study model focusing on ESL teachers (n=6) located at three different schools in order to better understand how three very different schools responded to the needs of their ELL students. Throughout the year, we interviewed each focal teacher two or three times, and observed each classroom five times. In all, our primary records include fifteen interviews and thirty classroom observations. In order to obtain reliable data for our classroom observations we utilized techniques of prolonged observation, observations at different times of day, location, and course subject. Also, we conducted member-checks with our participating teachers as a means to ensure our initial understanding was valid and aligned with the participants’ intent (Miles and Huberman, 1994; Carspecken, 1996).

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Upon completing data collection, we conducted a series of re-readings of primary records and then reconstructed our codebook using an inductive-based coding scheme (Maxwell, 2012; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Strauss & Glaser 1967). Throughout the process of analysis, as a means to conceptualize factors at play for each teacher, we continually updated teacher summary forms and completed a case-ordered matrix display to identify burgeoning patterns and common themes involving teacher dispositions and expectation (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Last, we explored the validity of assertions by crosschecking our coding for teacher negotiation, holistic student support, and teacher advocacy with material exemplifying institutional barriers and rigidity, along with district mandates. There was variation within each case and how each teacher expressed the ways in which they negotiated, advocated, and met student needs; as such, our findings presented here express the ideas most common amongst our participants. Participants In the fall of 2010, we collaborated with the director of the ESL/Dual Languages Department in a major school district in a metro area in the Inter-Mountain West. With their assistance, we located three ESL departments at the high school level with reputations of demonstrating a strong commitment to their schools, students, and the objectives of the district. From these three programs, we identified six teachers who taught an array of diverse courses, ranging from Algebra I to senior level creative writing, to the expected English language development courses. While the variability of the courses provided insight into how ESL teachers were utilized from school to school, the major emphasis was to observe courses they taught specifically and solely to English language learners. The participating teachers in this project were all certified to teach English as a Second Language, and highly qualified to teach other subjects, or else held dual certificates. Two of the teachers were certified in three areas including science, language arts, and social studies. Of the six teachers, four were male and two female. All identified as white, though two were born in Europe. English was the primary language of all but one teacher; meanwhile, three teachers were fluent in a language other than English: one Russian, one Spanish, and one who knew multiple languages, including Spanish, Hmong, and Thai. Four of the six teachers had already received tenure and were practitioners for more than five years. The two newer teachers were both in their first year with the district.

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Sites The three high schools, Washington, Dove Brook, and Central varied considerably within the urban district. Dove Brook has approximately 2,000 students, of which 41% are non-White, 31% are on Free or Reduced Lunch (FRL) and 10% are classified as ELLs. Washington has approximately 600 students, of which 87% are non-White, 88% FRL, and 45% are classified as ELLs. Last, Central has approximately 1,000 students, of which 45% are non-white, 59% FRL and 17% are classified as ELLs. The diversity in school settings allowed us to observe how different impacted schools utilize their resources toward their ELLs (officially classified as ELL) population. Moreover, the schools also differed in their climate and ways they embraced the language minority community. Dove Brook is a school in transition, seeing a higher number of non-white students enrolling each year for the past five years. The school is very conscious of its student body, and strives to enforce a high level of academic standards and places a strong emphasis on succeeding on standardized tests. Central High School is quite similar to Dove Brook, but serves about half as many students. It is in an area where the flow of wealth to suburbs is evident; a reality exacerbated by a statewide ‘open-enrollment’ policy that allows parents and students to opt out of their neighborhood school, enrolling at any public school they desire. Taking advantage of such policies, however, is highly correlated with social and economic capital, meaning that this policy in many ways facilitates ‘white flight.’ As a result, the number of non-white students has risen, as has the number of students receiving free or reduced lunch. Lastly, Washington High School is much smaller than either of the other schools, and almost the entire student body identifies as Latina/o. It is a neighborhood school, where nearly all of the students attend due to the school’s proximity to their homes. The school has a strong sense of pride, but has seen enrollment drop as test scores continue to rest below the district average, and more affluent or well-informed students take advantage of open enrollment to exit the school. In each of these schools, the life and dynamics of ESL teachers, and for ELL students, showed both regularity and variance. Demographics and native language among ELL students, as well as access to resources, varied, but for all of our participants in each of these schools, the experience of ESL instruction and curriculum was marked by restrictive policies and curricular demands that left both teachers and students navigating lives of marginalization.

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Findings

As previously noted, we initially sought to explore how ESL teachers mitigate the pressures presented by district mandates. However, chronicling these teachers’ classrooms and listening to their voices exposed new ways of understanding their professional dispositions. The teachers did not necessarily perceive themselves as agents of equity, but rather people simply doing what was best for their students. Many of the participants did not in any way articulate their identities or roles as advocates of social justice, or suggest that their job was to transform an unjust system for their students. Instead, these practitioners saw caring for their students as their central obligation and commitment, and in practice, this meant taking on a stance of advocacy. They did so by asserting three fundamental characteristics of teaching English language learners with a critically caring disposition: (a) build and support relationships with students both within and outside of the curriculum; (b) advocate for the affective needs of students, mitigate potential stresses and represent the student interests within the school community; and (c) employ personal agency to negotiate district requirements while also addressing students’ holistic needs. Our intent here is to elaborate and trace out these three aspects of a critically caring disposition, identifying the ways in which this manifested for our participants, and pointing towards the ways this may look for teachers at-large. a) Build and Support Relationships with Students Both within and Outside of the Curriculum The opportunity to build and support relationships with students both within and outside of the curriculum was foundational for our focal teachers. These teachers’ narratives illustrate just how integral relationship building was to the success of their instruction, and the fulfillment of their identities as educators. This impetus took two forms, care-about and care-for students (Noddings, 1992). First, the teachers illustrated caring-about students by continually checking in with them, and monitoring their success in all aspects of the students’ school-life experience. Second, the teachers enacted caring-for students by supporting students through difficult times, and endeavored to connect students’ personal background with content. Ms. Thomas at Dove Brook High school provided a clear example of this mentality when she noted that, “That’s all that I do. I mean, really. This is all about relationships… that’s what keeps me up at night, not, ‘Oh, dear, Tien doesn’t understand past tense versus future tense....’ What keeps me up at night is, ‘Is this

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student going to graduate as a happy, productive member of society?”’ Meanwhile, Mr. Kraner affirmed that ESL teachers must strive to ensure that their students feel comfortable and accepted at school. Mr. Kraner stated that,

I want them to feel comfortable telling me, just about anything, because this is, you know, the place where they can get some answers to what is going on in the rest of the school, and they’re not going to feel comfortable in a big classroom saying these things… So I try to be, as, as open as I can so that I can let them in and hear what’s going on with their lives and try to help them with that.

Furthermore, Ms. Thomas shared that her efforts to adapt and shape the curriculum in the classroom in culturally relevant and meaningful ways were driven by a concern for the students as individuals, noting that an ideal curriculum would place developing a sense of “who you are as a person,” centrally, because she saw this as a prerequisite to any further substantial learning. Mr. Kraner demonstrated similar sentiments in his curricular construction, giving students an opportunity to develop their literacy within a new discourse that they themselves were curious about, by exploring, “something in their life that was important…really personalized things.” Our focal teachers built meaningful relationships with students by monitoring their students’ success and progress. Monitoring took many forms, from simply checking in with some students not directly taking ESL courses, to having an open door policy from a half hour before school through lunch and staying available up to a half hour after school. All six teachers stated that monitoring was a responsibility they took on, ranging from checking in with other teachers to being in contact with students’ families. At Dove Brook, Ms. Thomas and Mr. Jimenez created a system of monitoring that streamed out of a class designated to support ELLs with their mainstream course work. Ms. Thomas and Mr. Jimenez purposely situated the class at the end of the day. The class served as a way to check in with the students and provide a space for them to help one another. In observations of five of the six teachers we observed classes wherein students enrolled in the class collaborated with one another, the teachers, often times going so far as offering the space to friends not designated as ELLs. Ms. Thomas and Mr. Jimenez kept an open door policy to any students, and frequently helped students in many content areas including biology, algebra, economics, and mainstream English courses. Thus, the ESL classroom became a network of

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support and a safe place to seek advice from both teachers and classmates. Monitoring was a means through which teachers could leverage their relationships with students in support for them beyond their classroom context. For Ms. Thomas, this involved ensuring that students who often traveled through school experiencing invisibility, alienation from both the academic content, their teachers, their peers, and the community of the school as a whole, had bridges to make connections. She articulates her attempts to respond to this: “Other teachers, other colleagues, and they’re not being malicious but there’s, there’s a world of ignorance in… about what we do, and the big bridge that we’re trying to build now that I’m sure you’re going to get into is, trying to foster the leadership school wide so that we’re not doing it all.”

Our focal teachers built strong relationships with their students and opened their classroom to all. They aimed to connect their marginalized students and department to the whole staff and fellow students, and ensured their students felt a sense of belonging in the school culture and community.

b) Advocate for the Affective Needs of Students, Mitigate Potential Stresses, and Represent the Student Interests within the School Community The ESL teachers in this study see their role as advocates for the affective needs of students, both in mitigating potential stresses and marginalizing forces for them, and in representing their interests within the school community. It became apparent that advocacy was central to the perceived identity of these ESL teachers. At the macro level, the teachers advocated on behalf of their students in the school and community. We documented teachers asserting themselves within their schools and challenging administrative actions in their students’ interest. For example, one afternoon early into the second semester of the year, Mr. Anderson learned that twelve of his students were misplaced in a math classroom due to a fellow teacher’s unwillingness to instruct ELLs. When prompted to discuss how this occurred, he explained how it resulted from a series of unfortunate situations, where math teachers made ad hoc schedule changes among several class sections, leaving a group of ELLs with a teacher unwilling to work with this population of students.

Mr. Anderson: The teachers that normally teach the ESL sheltered math got pulled into this RAMPUP. A teacher who is not a great teacher ended up teaching all of the ELL's.

Researcher: How did they decide that?

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Mr. Anderson: It was like random, boom, these guys are teaching this and ah

we have these other teachers. Researcher: So is this teacher really hands off? Mr. Anderson: Yeah and he is very, very strict and he does not do

modification or sheltered techniques for these kids. Most of them either failed or got a D.

Mr. Anderson resolved the issue by incorporating these students into his own Algebra class, differentiating as needed on his own time. Mr. Anderson explained, “One afternoon Ms. Lather came down and told me what was happening and I said, “Nah uh.” At this time I was co-teaching an intermediate Algebra class, so I went into the AP and said give them [a group of misplaced ELLs] to me.” Thus, guaranteeing an equitable curriculum was internalized by the ESL teacher as a necessary component of his duties in properly serving his students. At the micro level, four of our focal teachers acknowledged many forms of student’s personal testimony and experiences, always aiming to support the students’ academic, personal, and emotional needs. Faced with a school institution focused on policy and accountability success and often blind to the way it marginalizes cultures, and its own messaging of what success means, our teachers sought to assert themselves as a barrier between the pressures of school and their student’s lives. Mr. Kraner spoke with great concern over the ways in which traditional academic requirements, “sets [ELLs] up to feel like they’ve failed.” The empathy inherent in this position was apparent as Mr. Kraner spoke as one of his students, voicing their feelings he observed and worried they were dwelling as an outcome of struggling in English-only classrooms; “I didn’t really do it, I didn’t do what the teachers wanted me to do.” An ethic of care drives his own analysis, and his concern for the micro levels of well being his students demonstrate. Mr. Jimenez built on this deep, empathic concern, framing his interventions into his students’ difficult personal experiences as, “carrying that weight,” or to, “bear that burden,” seeking to displace the structural pressures of schooling away from them so that they could focus on their learning and being teenagers. As a result of this positioning, our teachers took on the role of critical advocate, speaking for their students in spaces where their voices or experiences may not otherwise have been valued. Mr. Jimenez positioned himself as both teacher and confidant to his students, and as a result served as advocate. Speaking specifically

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of one student, Mr. Jimenez noted that a challenging home situation had put her well behind in her classes. Rather than simply commiserate or ignore her claims, the ethic of caring within Mr. Jimenez’s belief drove him to act as a critical witness, coordinating and advocating for a smooth transition upon her return to the classroom:

Obviously we don’t want to just move her through without any kind of accountability, but at the same time, just helping [other teachers] to understand that there are so many factors going on that, hoping it will help her out, and the same thing when she comes in here, just trying to give her, just try to be patient with her and give her the time that she needs to obviously get the work in, but also to be back here mentally, because there’s just so much going on it’s very hard if you push that too quick, you know, and I don’t want to, but I definitely want to make sure that she is successful.

This process of listening, empathy, and action allowed Mr. Jimenez and the other instructors to give voice to their students’ personal and emotional needs in very real ways, following pathways of advocacy that may not have been apparent, or even possible, for these students on their own. c) Employ Personal Agency to Negotiate District Requirements while also Addressing Students’ Holistic Needs Negotiating between addressing individual needs and meeting curriculum requirements comes at a toll, and occasionally teachers felt pressed to do both. Mr. Anderson explained that sometimes not meeting the curriculum alignment plan came at the expense of making the content comprehensible to his students. He stated, “Oh, I would say that is my weakness, um, going after the content standards. I know I should get my nose more into them, but my standards are the triad of teaching ESL in order to make the material comprehensible.” Ms. Lather, Mr. Jimenez and Ms. Thomas echoed Anderson’s claim. Ms. Thomas in particular affirmed that caring-for her students social, emotion, and academic needs trumped her focus on standards, and her colleague Mr. Jimenez noted that his experience was often highly constrained, and highly unsatisfying. “So the instruction that you think your kids need,” he reflected, “you kinda have to set that aside and say here’s what’s important on CSAP, [the exam predating PARCC] here’s what they think that’s important.” He continued, lamenting the amount to which testing, structures and policy constraints affected ELLs:

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And with ESL kids it’s a little bit more, because there’s so many things we’re testing them on, that really, you look at the test and you feel like really, am I getting an accurate reading because I feel like I get two weeks of instructional time and then it’s a test, and it’s almost like jumbling different things around. So that would be one, I think just testing different areas and the AMOUNT of testing that happens almost sacrifices the instructional time, I think. That’s the biggest thing I noticed.

Yet in the face of all these pressures, teachers were still able to find ways to situate themselves as advocates for their students, leveraging their personal agency into an efficacy that powered their practice and allowed them to negotiate district requirements while also addressing students’ holistic needs. In the curriculum, teachers meshed district standards with students’ background knowledge to guarantee a robust and comprehensible curriculum. Yet while they knew that district content benchmarks must be met in preparation for standardized assessments, teachers’ thoughts and concerns began and ended with the students’ personal needs. Mr. Kraner, faced with a mandated research project, negotiated the parameters so that it attended to student’s personal growth and interests as well as district learning targets. He explained; “When later on, a teacher asks them to write...about something they don’t care about, yeah, they know how to do it… but they also know… what do we do now in life, you have a problem, you ask people, you look on the internet and say, “OK, where can I find a reliable source, what can I learn about this?” … I want them to have that SKILL in life too.” With students writing formal papers on topics ranging from skin-care to the Sudan, the syncretic– bridging the personal and the academic (Gutiérrez, 2008) – nature of the assignment represents the moves we documented teachers making to negotiate content demands with students’ background knowledge, experience and interests; a process vital not only to student achievement, but also to a teacher’s satisfaction with his/her practice and feelings of efficacy within that practice. These ESL teachers acknowledged many forms of student testimony and experiences, and by leveraging these, were better able to support students’ academic, personal, and emotional needs. Though they knew that they must meet the district content benchmarks in preparation for standardized assessments, the teachers’ thoughts and concerns tended to begin and end with the students’ immediate, demonstrated needs. They supported students through difficult times (both academic and personal), and worked to engage and connect students’ experiences with the content. Ms. Lather adjusted her 11th grade English/ESL 4

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class curriculum in order to both meet the needs of her students and the districts curriculum alignment plan. The district called for the reading of narratives about the Holocaust. Knowing that many of her students were immigrants, Ms. Lather used the unit as an opportunity to provide space for the students to construct narratives of their own experiences in an academic form. In doing so, Ms. Lather affirmed the students’ personal experiences within course content, while also demonstrating that this was a space for personal reflection and support as well. This syncretic approach showed a desire for her students to be fluent across contexts, and positioned Ms. Lather as someone who would listen and support her students in the dual process of sharing and navigating the stories of their daily, personal lives, and supporting their growth as academically proficient writers. Of our six focal teachers, one expressed opinions that showed little evidence of negotiation from expected to actual practice. This was evident in observations, where the engagement levels of students were considerably lower then when those same students were observed in other contexts, and lesson delivery was considerably more teacher-centered, and mandate driven, than in any of the other classrooms. At the same time, this teacher still demonstrated an ethic of caring in his reflections on his own behaviors and engagement outside of instructional time, seeing this as a role separate from the curriculum. Meanwhile, at Washington High School a new ESL teacher was hired at the beginning of the year. The tenured staff chose to assign her study skills classes and co-teach a social studies class to allow her to learn more about the individual students and focus on addressing their specific needs. They feared that the negotiations and compromises required in meeting the district standards would be overwhelming to a new teacher without a clear sense of personal agency or efficacy, and the individual needs of ELLs would be lost as accountability pressures hindered her growth. When empathy and care were present in teacher’s reflection and discourse, their ability to positively adapt, differentiate, and shape their curriculum to negotiate district policy with student needs was considerably improved. When this was not present, pedagogical offerings suffered. With this in mind, we suggest that if care were a part of structured reflective conversations among educators, particularly those working with ELL and other historically marginalized students, all teachers’ engagement and praxis would be greatly improved by the addition of empathy, efficacy, and critical care that such reflection foregrounds.

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Discussion

In spending time at each school and with each teacher, it became evident that negotiation and compromise with respect to curriculum and mandates were essential, but it was the ways in which efficacy was found that were most intriguing. The narratives of the six teachers we worked with speak to how ESL programs, and all educational arrangements, do more than simply function as agents of language acquisition/curriculum transmission–rather they are opportunities for teachers to service their students’ holistic needs; academic, emotional, social and personal. We suggest this orientation represents critical-care, and is a pedagogical identity and approach that deserves more explicit attention in educational conversations, as it is vital to meeting the needs of all types of historically marginalized students. Achieving equitable education for all students, particularly the historically marginalized, a category that includes ELLs, necessitates pedagogical techniques that make learning relevant to the students’ personal backgrounds and experiences. The syncretic nature of Mr. Kraner’s research project, and Ms. Lather’s narrative unit on the holocaust, speaks to Ladson-Billings’ description of how culturally relevant teaching helps students develop necessary academic skills, “by building bridges or a scaffolding that meets students where they are (intellectually and functionally), culturally relevant teaching helps them to be where they need to be to participate fully and meaningfully in the construction of knowledge” (Ladson-Billings, 2009). While culturally relevant teaching is inherently critical in methodology, its sole aim is not to simply expose power structures. Instead, this vision of pedagogy presupposes an element of caring for individual students and students’ experiences; precisely what we observed in these ESL teachers’ practice. At times, these ESL teachers may have been hypercritical of district mandates, but in leveraging their own agency and students’ personal experiences and needs, they demonstrated an efficacy that allowed them to utilize the district material as vehicle to access their students’ personal experiences. Yet in the current historical moment, even such a culturally relevant approach may appear to be not critical and effective enough for these students’ needs (Paris, 2012). Despite demographic changes throughout America, a variety of policies aim to actively disenfranchise ELLs, particularly Latina/os (Prop 203, CA; HB 2281, AZ; SB 1070, AZ; HB56, AL). These recent bills and propositions all showcase the negative sentiments towards bilingualism and the Latina/o ethnicity most associated with it, imposing social and political pressures on ELLs and their families, quickly turning school into a potentially traumatic, colonizing

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space of cultural erasure. Faced with the challenges of learning a new language and mainstream cultural practices, as well as the stress and emotional demands of high stakes testing in that new language, limited job opportunities, institutional racism, and for some almost insurmountable pressure and worry over the legality of their documentation, the need for empowerment and efficacy building amongst ELLs becomes even more clear. With administrative and political forces largely uninformed on how to attend to ELLs, and other historically marginalized groups of students, the children become noted for what they lack, rather than the deep and intriguing literacies, experiences, and cultures they possess (Garcia & Guerra, 2004). This troubling situation, however, is commonly met with pity and subtler ‘multicultural’ efforts that are nonetheless still aimed at assimilation. While the scope of our study may not fully explore the many dimensions of such a social dilemma, we believe a critical-care advocacy position, and the use of a critical witnessing orientation, may be a means toward articulating such a culturally sustaining, decolonial praxis in the interests of these students. As we begin to explore this claim, we should note that in our participants’ estimation, it was unrealistic to seek revolutionary change in school structures as they worked with students day to day. This, of course, seems contradictory, but while facing the crux of teaching, which occurs at the often contradictory intersection of professional responsibility and student’s socio-emotional needs, our participants were not overly politically motivated by issues of social justice but did recognize the current paradigm continues to privilege certain forms of knowledge and ways of being that will continue to marginalize their students. Rather than acquiesce to these pressures and decontextualize curriculum material for test prep, or react politically, seeking to expose the power dynamics at work in district curriculum plans to their students, our focal teachers employed a different point of departure, that of caring relationships, as their starting point. Providing opportunities and creating a space where the students could freely explore the emotions and stories that flowed out of and resonated with their own experiences, the teachers, motivated by the personal relationships they had built and genuinely interested in and concerned with their students voices and what they had to say, continually demonstrated their own attention to the socio-emotional aspects generated by this testimony and could be shared through such authentic, syncretic work. In essence, through critical-care and a motivation to see their students’ humanity acknowledge and validated in the classroom, teachers, whether they were deeply aware of the political and cultural implications of their actions or not, both created a space and sustenance to multicultural voices, and resisted colonizing forces that would have promised to otherwise erase their students. The

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point of origin for this efficacy and decolonial practice, rather than political motivation, was caring for these individuals, serving as critical witness, building supportive, sustainable relationships, and hearing their voices, both academic and personal, was vital to their professional, and personal, identities. With all this being said, to achieve such empowering practice, teachers must leverage care and witnessing into a critical advocacy and efficacy that will allow them to turn curriculum and classrooms into arenas of transformative learning, a challenging task with respect to current trends and policies – such as Race to the Top, and No Child Left Behind before it – that intentionally or not, pressure teachers towards teaching to the test, as Dutro explains, “Attentive listening is made all the more challenging in a policy context that focuses on standardized test scores as the primary measure of student, teacher, and school success and in which the pressures of accountability are felt most keenly in… schools,” (Dutro, 2009). Thus within this context, it is imperative that teachers define their identities and their efficacy, and build their curriculum, from a space deeply rooted in empathy and caring, beginning with a confirmation of the individual, and compassion for their students humanity (Noddings, 1992; Liston, 2009), which is precisely what our participants, driven by this motivation, found themselves doing. Mr. Anderson did not simply change his students’ classes, he advocated on their behalf in order to create an environment that would allow the students to flourish. Ms. Thomas and Mr. Jimenez helped their students construct an academic program that became a community, fostering a supportive environment that allowed the students to look out for one another and trust the adults of the ESL department would push back against and educate others in the school. Meanwhile, Mr. Kraner made academic standards that appeared out of reach for ELLs look as if they were hand crafted for his students success. In all these various ways, these narratives demonstrate how teachers can position themselves, even when they do not articulate their primary role as such, as advocates and practitioners of equity, cultural sustenance, and social justice pedagogy (Banks, 2004). By using relationships as a point of origin, as the anchor for deep commitment, a critical-care orientation seems capable of making the institutional marginalization and injustice that pervades our schools relevant, immediate and personal to a broad range of teachers who may otherwise not have recognized it, and thus represents our best hope for a ground upon which to engage teachers with the task of decolonizing the educational experiences of their historically marginalized and urban students.

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Before concluding, it would be worthwhile to momentarily explore a few avenues for further research exploration our findings and subsequent analyses and arguments point towards. First, as our study did not involve any student outcomes, the function of critical care and witnessing for the students (as it creates new relationships and opportunities for engaging ELL students critically with new discourse practices in culturally sustaining ways) deserves further ongoing exploration. This has already begun to some degree in Ernest Morrell (2008) and Patrick Camangian’s (2010) work. Additionally, while we have discussed using care and student-teacher relationships as the point of origin for initiating decolonial praxis, we fully acknowledge and argue this is not a sufficient end point – care itself is a complicated idea, and in order for it to operate as a revolutionary act (Ginwright, 2010), and not a patronizing force, it must be constantly interrogated and further theorized in decolonial and culturally sustaining ways. We did not delve deeply into our participants’ beliefs around culture and difference. Further research exploring teachers’ conscious recognition of the critical-political role they enact, and how one might move teachers from being one who cares to becoming caring activists, conscious of and motivated by their student’s marginalization, as well as their relationships, would be highly insightful. Moreover, a similar question of growth extends in the arenas of teacher education and development: how might we develop an intrinsic interest and affirmation of the humanity of students in teacher candidates and practicing teachers who may find themselves either fixated on the content, or uninterested in the interpersonal aspects of education, feeling these should be left to counselors? We argue the pressures facing urban youth demand that such orientations are unacceptable, and so questions of how to develop these identities and beliefs become an imperative. Finally, we must examine the consequences for teachers who are constantly engaged in this process of negotiation and advocacy. What is the cost of “carrying that weight,” of witnessing students’ challenging moments, and becoming deeply invested in students’ lives? How does this cost of caring affect the unfortunately high rate of teacher burnout and attrition? More work deserves to be done to explore these questions, as well as what might be done to support teachers in navigating this necessary, but challenging, emotional intersection of pedagogy and care.

Conclusion

Within the framework in which ESL programs (and other curricular services for historically marginalized students) exist, we believe there is positive work being done in the form of largely unrecognized critical care and witnessing, and it

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behooves our efforts in promoting equity to highlight and explore these successes. In doing so, we not only give credence to exhibited accomplishments in classrooms, but also exemplify and reinforce what is at the heart of the educational endeavor, and what we should be striving for with all students, whether historically marginalized or recipients of institutionalized privilege. All students deserve an educational system that endorses and sponsors caring, attentive relationships, and classrooms that empower individuals’ unique voices and humanity. Critical care, exercised as a driving force and form of advocacy and efficacy, is a way past the (false) dilemma of either providing a ‘rigorous’ academic experience, or attending to students socio-emotional needs. Despite the fact that our schools serve increasing numbers of historically marginalized students, they remain spaces governed and dominated by colonizing, problematic ideologies, positioning students in ways that minimize their voices, and encourage teachers to distance themselves from deeply engaging with their students. We believe these sorts of implicit demands – to separate the personal from the academic – lie at the heart of the opportunity gap. Yet even teachers who may lack rich critical awareness are well versed in the human need to care for youth. With this in mind, critical-care is an essential and important disposition to be actively cultivated in educators, and more richly explored and foregrounded by teacher educators.

Endnotes

1.We understand the debate concerning which acronyms are acceptable and/or most current. However, we chose to use the terms offered by the district and teachers we worked with in this project. The district identified the student as “ELL” and the department as “ESL”; therefore we are using the same terminology. 2. A full review of such literature is beyond the scope of this paper, but examples include, but are not limited to, the following: Almanza de Schoenwise, E., & Klingner, J., 2012; August & Shanahan, 2006; August, et al. 2005; Cummins, 2000; Domínguez & Gutiérrez, 2014; Iddings, Combs, & Moll, 2012; Lesaux, et al, 2010; Martínez, 2013; Pacheco, 2012; Razfar, 2010.

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