INTESOL 2019: Teachers as Leaders for Change This year’s conference will highlight teachers’ ability and potential to enact positive change in the lives of English learners. From early childhood through high school, in higher education and adult education, teachers play integral roles in daily placement and instructional decisions, in influencing awareness of their colleagues and communities, in advocating for more equitable policies and practices, and much more. In many ways, teachers are uniquely positioned to act as catalysts of change, to support and amplify nascent change where they see it, and to rally stakeholders to broad support of change at scale. Teacher educators and teachers of English learners can bridge values and ideals with practice, courageously and reflectively integrating more student voices and experiences into their learning communities. This conference aims to showcase this important work.
Our beliefs about bilingual students and bilingualism (our language ideologies) matter for students’ success. Yet exploring teachers' language ideologies is a nuanced long-term endeavor. This interactive workshop will provide a facilitated space for teachers, school/district leaders and instructional coaches to begin to draft a plan to help their schools/districts create expansive dialogic experiences for teachers to examine their linguistic ideologies. Participants will consider the dominant ideologies in their schools and how to start conversations on their campuses about deficit discourses. We will explore potential texts or experiences to help teachers at your schools think critically about their own classroom practices. The workshop is anchored by brief presentations of results from two recent empirical studies by CU Boulder researchers that explore tensions and nuances of teachers’ shifting language ideologies about emergent bilingual students: one took place in the PLC meetings of a team of high school biology teachers, the other looked at teachers’ reflections over the course of the semester in their first class of a master’s degree program.
Dr. Deb Palmer is a Professor of Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder, with over 20 years experience in the field of bilingual education.
Saturday November 2, 2019 3:00pm - 3:45pm EDT
Veterans Hall 1
