Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

Becker, Mariana Lima; Oliveira, Gabrielle

doi: 10.1177/01614681241311634pmid: N/A

Background:Guidelines for the successful implementation of two-way dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs foreground the role of program leadership, hiring and preparing culturally and linguistically competent teachers, family involvement, and the alignment between curriculum, assessments, and instruction in both languages. Absent in this framing for program implementation and success are the voices, lived experiences, and everyday contributions of immigrant children who take part in such programs.Focus:Grounded in a critical orientation to immigrant childhoods, this article explores how a group of 70 Brazilian immigrant children (ages 5–7) navigated a new two-way DLBE program (Portuguese–English) in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. By looking into how the children interacted and participated in class, we foreground how they contributed to the maintenance of the program as two-way DLBE implementers.Research Design:This article draws from a larger ethnographic research study conducted over three school calendar years (2018–2021). It leverages field notes from weekly classroom visits in the two-way DLBE program and semistructured interviews with 18 school staff members. Data sources were coded using thematic analysis, with attention to how immigrant children’s actions contributed to teachers’ instruction and how these contributions were perceived by educators and other staff members.Findings/Conclusions:Brazilian immigrant students in K–2 classrooms contributed daily to the implementation of their two-way DLBE program through language brokering across Portuguese- and English-medium classrooms, facilitating peer participation in class, and invoking transborder memories in ways that complexified the ongoing classroom discourse. However, two-way DLBE educators and other staff members characterized newcomer students from Brazil as bringing key linguistic assets to school while positioning the children born in Brazilian immigrant households in the United States as “caught in-between” languages and undermining the program implementation. These findings suggest the need for a holistic focus on immigrant childhoods in two-way DLBE programming.

Nachman, Brett Ranon

doi: 10.1177/01614681241311637pmid: N/A

Background:Parents have long held an important role in their autistic children’s lives. As autistic individuals enroll in higher education institutions at much higher rates, new issues emerge. In particular, autistic college students and their parents must reconcile the major transition with the extent to which parents must be involved and exert their influence.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:This phenomenological study set in a community college aimed to answer this question: How do autistic students, their parents, and college staff make meaning of parental involvement during autistic students’ transitions into postsecondary education? Parental involvement is of great relevance not only to autism-specific college support programs, such as the one featured in this study that helps students and parents negotiate these relationships, but also to colleges writ large. To disentangle the nuanced elements of parental involvement, I incorporated interdependence theory that explores the impacts of each stakeholder group’s outcomes on one another. Uncovering these dynamics may help in identifying realistic solutions that honor stakeholders’ various priorities and allow autistic students to leverage greater agency in their college journeys.Research Design:This study was set in a community college boasting an autism-specific college support program featuring programming to support autistic learners in their college experiences, inclusive of issues around independence and advocacy. Employing a descriptive phenomenological approach allowed for deconstructing the nuanced interactions among parents, adult autistic children navigating college, and college staff. Here parental involvement served as the phenomenon of focus. Participants included 13 autistic college students, 5 mothers, and 15 college staff. Students engaged in surveys, interviews, observations, and written reflections, whereas mothers and college staff participated in interviews.Conclusions/Recommendations:Parents and their children—autistic college students—must constantly re-evaluate and recalibrate their relationships as students gradually gain more independence. This study illuminates how institutional supports and stakeholders, including those associated with the autism-specific college support program, enable autistic college students to demonstrate growth in their agency. This study puts forward many recommendations for varied stakeholders, including, but not limited to, elevating self-advocacy training in forming students’ transition plans (high school personnel) and engaging in role-playing activities (parents and children). Regarding future research, takeaways call for longitudinal work to track autistic students’ distinct presentations of independence over time, as well as embedding journals or other reflective materials for parents to make sense of their communication patterns with their children.

Kavanagh, Sarah Schneider; Gotwalt, Elizabeth Schiavone; Guillotte, Amy; Bernhard, Tess

doi: 10.1177/01614681251318871pmid: N/A

Background:In 2008, Grossman and McDonald called for the development of a common language of “core practices” for describing the practice of teaching. They argued that a shared language of practice would help teacher educators and teachers work together on practice and develop nuanced, complex, and shared conceptualizations of instruction.Purpose:This article interrogates the claim that core practices promote shared language development by investigating a practice-based professional development (PD) program on project-based learning (PBL). Within the PD program, we study how teachers’ conceptualizations of high-quality teaching shifted and how this related to their use of core practices language.Research Design:This qualitative content analysis examines if and how teachers’ conceptualizations of high-quality teaching and their use of core practices language shifted across pre- and post-PD interviews.Conclusions:After the PD program, teachers’ conceptualizations of high-quality teaching had changed. However, despite this shift, teachers rarely used the language of core practices when describing their teaching. These findings raise questions about the relationships between core practices of teaching, professional language, and teachers’ conceptualizations of teaching. The authors discuss these questions and offer a framework differentiating core practices from best practices. The framework compares divergent purposes for developing a shared language to describe the practice of teaching.

Wang, Xueli; Wickersham, Kelly; Contreras-García, Nicole; Zheng, Peiwen

doi: 10.1177/01614681251317828pmid: N/A

Background or Context:Mental health has become an increasingly significant priority for postsecondary education institutions, including community colleges that enroll a higher proportion of students of color, low-income students, older students, and those who work while attending college, all of whom may experience greater mental health challenges. Despite a growing body of work around this topic, much of the focus is on the issue’s prevalence and emergent initiatives. There is a pressing need for more holistic and asset-based empirical research that explores students’ knowledge and experiences in identifying the types of support necessary for their well-being and educational success.Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study:The study is aimed at elevating students’ strengths and knowledge in addressing social forces, barriers, and inequities toward enacting transformative change in supporting students’ educational journey and well-being. Engaging and collaborating with students from a Midwestern community college, we sought to capture their insights and experiences with various services and supports for mental health. Our research is guided by the following question: How do community college students’ knowledge and experiences illuminate ways to dismantle institutional barriers and build forward momentum for mental health and college success?Research Design:Grounded in a larger, transformative mixed methods project, our qualitative study drew on semistructured individual and focus group interviews with a total of 27 students from the research site. These interviews delved into student experiences, institutional structures and policies, and additional factors that intersect with mental health to identify what types of services and practices would best support students and their forward momentum. We use the model of momentum for community college student success to bring attention to mental health within holistic, intersecting contexts and domains underlying students’ educational journeys and success, along with the sociohistorical trauma-reducing framework to engage and collaborate with students’ experiences and agency toward healing and transformative change. These complementary frameworks allowed us to undertake our study with nuance and care, and in ways that center students’ knowledge and strengths throughout the research process.Conclusions or Recommendations:Our study reveals two major findings: First, the current college mental health resources, although helpful with minor challenges or crises, were largely surface level, limited in their potential to provide broad access and holistic support services for addressing the wide and deep range of students’ contexts and needs. Second, the larger institutional environment has not yet translated into educational spaces that are truly embracive of mental health in light of students’ backgrounds and beliefs that fuel hesitation. Institutions must continue the work they have started by recognizing and approaching mental health as an inseparable part of a whole that shapes students’ momentum and pathways within and beyond community college. In doing so, they can assess, address, and transform structures to ensure that students receive the critical empathy, care, and support needed to move forward and succeed.

Harbatkin, Erica; Burns, Jason; Cullum, Samantha

doi: 10.1177/01614681251318876pmid: N/A

Background or Context:Although a positive school climate is critical to school effectiveness, little is known about whether a focus on school climate may facilitate successful turnaround in the nation’s lowest performing schools. The research suggests two distinct but overlapping ways in which climate may explain a turnaround intervention’s effectiveness. First, schools with a more positive climate at the outset of reform may be better equipped to enact change under turnaround. Second, a turnaround model that explicitly targets climate may improve school outcomes through improvements to climate, such as by setting a clear mission, clarifying staff roles, and prioritizing working conditions.Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study:We examine whether school climate appeared to play a role in the effects of a state-level school turnaround intervention implemented in about 100 schools over two implementation cohorts in Michigan.Research Design:Drawing on statewide administrative data linked with unique teacher survey data in Michigan, we carry out two sets of analyses. First, we use comparative interrupted time series (CITS) models to examine whether turnaround schools with a more positive climate fared better under turnaround than schools with a more negative climate. Second, we conduct a mediation analysis to explicitly test whether dimensions of climate mediated the relationship between turnaround and student achievement.Conclusions or Recommendations:In our CITS analysis, we find that students in schools with a more positive school climate appeared to fare better than their peers in schools with a less positive climate, particularly in math. Our mediation analysis findings suggest that certain elements of climate—relationships and school leadership—also mediated the relationship between turnaround and student achievement. Our findings have implications for school improvement planning, for the design of evaluations of school turnaround initiatives, and for data collection by states aiming to improve their lowest performing schools.

Woglom, James F.; Jones, Stephanie

doi: 10.1177/01614681251317579pmid: N/A

Designing pedagogical spaces that affirm and embody the aesthetic theories that guide practitioners in art education (and education broadly speaking) isn’t always easy. Those theories call for experimentation, creative expression, protest, rejection of repetition, and a collective creation of newness and difference. In other words, these theories call for pedagogues to be comfortable with the unpredictable and emerging ways of being and becoming within specific entanglements of place, children, materiality, discourses, bodies, sound, affect, and so much more. In this graphica piece, the authors illuminate an enduring pedagogical event that was designed for and unfolded at an informal, no-fee, community-based education center for youth [second author] directed for six years. Affectionately called “The Clubhouse,” this neighborhood-embedded space centered critical aesthetic, relational ways of being that we have conceived of as a what if world. While James (first author) was aware that their carefully planned sessions with the youth were being carried away by the animated entanglement of children, music instruments, and an affirming space, and was uneasy that the “noise” produced by those participants might be bothering others or distracting from James’ own presumed learning objectives, they carried on and lived through theories of aesthetic education joyfully. The piece suggests that constraining forces that push toward compliance keep living theory and living theory joyfully at bay.Maxine Greene, Felix Guattari, Herbert Marcuse, and Jacques Ranciére make guest appearances in this graphica, like wise and brilliant mentors offering affirmative and ethical ways of thinking, being, and doing with these young music-makers who have faced so much institutional rigidity and educational repetition. We also hope readers will enjoy and make new and different meanings with the inclusion of the Grateful Dead as a long-enduring band-event that has always been about creating newness and difference through experimentation far beyond conventions of art.Researchers and practitioners can hopefully glean powerful glances into critical feminist posthumanist arts-infused research. They might also recognize the theoretical and practical promises of being with children in the noisy, unpredictable, and sometimes – maybe oftentimes or always – unsettling spaces created when we follow the courage and hope it takes to live out theories of justice and equity through aesthetic theories. Maybe, just maybe, in doing so, we can lean into our own mutant-speculative pedagogies and experience a little more justice and joy where we are.

Paul, Dierdre Glenn

doi: 10.1177/01614681241311638pmid: N/A

This was the first time in my recollection that the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) (in its 2023 report entitled “Teacher Prep Review: Strengthening Elementary Reading Instruction”) tried to explicitly tie literacy-specific teacher preparatory programs’ lack of adherence to their debatable standard with the programs doing an actual disservice to Black and Brown schoolchildren nationally. As an educator devoting much of my scholarly work and research to the education and schooling of children of African descent, that was the proverbial “bridge too far.” So, I set out to get answers to the following questions:• What does NCTQ do, and why should we take heed?• How were program quality determinations ascertained?• Could NCTQ rankings potentially impact our teacher education programs?