Sociocultural Competence in Teacher Education

Abstract

For the past few years we have been developing a longitudinal study of biliteracy development in children by following, all within the same dual-language school, a case study cohort of 20 students throughout their elementary school years. This cohort sample represents considerable diversity in terms of ethnicity, social class, and language proficiencies upon starting school, with just a few children fluent in both Spanish and English as early as kindergarten. The study reveals that all students, not only those in our study sample but in the entire school, and regardless of their sociocultural characteristics or initial language profile, became literate in both languages. Our analysis identifies several characteristics that give the school its additive personality. For present purposes, we highlight only three such characteristics. One is that the school features, in contrast to most high-poverty schools, a highly qualified and diverse teaching corps, most of them (88%) female, as is the norm. All of the instructors are certified bilingual teachers--most hold a master's degree or higher--and have taken academic courses in both Spanish and English and have taught in a dual-language program for more than 9 years. This highly qualified staff not only help give the school its academic emphasis and direction, its academic identity we could say, but also facilitate a particular social setting, cultivating a supportive environment for the development of biliteracy in all students in which the teachers, among other things, protect the students (and themselves) against the often blatant attacks and insults by English-only advocates. A second characteristic relates to the deliberate development of confianza (mutual trust), a term borrowed from our analysis of household funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, in press). In the original work, we used it to refer to the necessary trust households need to establish social relations of exchange; in fact, we referred to confianza as the glue that held the households' multiple (and sometimes fragile) social networks together. Here we extend this concept to refer to the nature of the social relationships among administrators, teachers, and students that help establish the particular of the school; a culture of caring, if you will, to borrow from Noddings (e.g., 1992), that came to characterize the school and helped define who these teachers are in relation to each other and to the children (see also, Bryk & Schneider, 2002). In particular, the administrators entrust the teachers to help make pedagogical and policy decisions for the school. This trust helps teachers define themselves as a particular type of professional, and as a particular type of person, with the necessary funds of knowledge to make curricular decisions that help define the nature of the educational relationships in the school. A third characteristic is that of ideological clarity. The teachers became well aware of how much teaching is a political activity, especially after defending the children's language rights in their efforts to preserve the current dual-language arrangement. It would be accurate to state that the administrators and teachers are constantly vigilant of any attempts to either alter the dual-language agenda of the school or impose an English-only curriculum and do not hesitate to activate the school's social network of parents and other allies to defend the school. In this setting, therefore, biliteracy is, without vacillation, a clear academic goal promoted through a duaManguage pedagogy and sustained by an ideology that favors the development of both languages in all children. The school, consequently, is not only successful in producing biliterate students, a rare achievement in U.S. schools, but also successful despite the heavy ideological and programmatic pressures of the state to dismantle bilingual education, a consequence of the state's English-only language policy, and the current emphasis on high-stakes testing, also conducted only in English. …

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