ConfirmingChanclas: What Early Childhood Teacher Educators Can Learn From Immigrant Preschool Teachers

Abstract

The immigrant teacher perspective has been largely missing from local and national debates on early childhood pedagogy and has certainly been marginalized in debates about language in early childhood settings. Interviews with dozens of preschool teachers in multiple U.S. cities about children of immigrants' language choices at school (as part of the Children Crossing Borders study) revealed a specific immigrant teacher critique of typical English language modeling techniques. These immigrant teachers reposition children's home languages as a valuable form of expression and thus argue for a more empathetic and constructivist view of children of immigrants. Hearing the perspectives of immigrant preschool teachers is especially important for early childhood educators who are preparing young teachers to serve a growing number of children of immigrants in early childhood settings. This article asserts that early childhood educators need to talk honestly with students about the implications of their responses to children of immigrants in the classroom and in doing so, can benefit from consulting the personal experiences and perspectives of practicing immigrant preschool teachers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 55 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.