Mechanisms of Education Policy and Practice: A Dynamic Interplay of Race, Language, and Ability

Research at Alder Research Informing Our Work Home Mechanisms of Education Policy and Practice: A Dynamic Interplay of Race, Language, and Ability Through a qualitative case study analysis, this paper contextualizes the dynamic interplay of race, language, and ability through a conceptual framework grounded in raciolinguistics and principals of DisCrit theory, to answer the following research question: What are the tensions between the way a language radicalized student labeled as disabled is institutionally positioned by mechanisms of education policy and practice and the ways the student positions themselves? Findings shed light on how ideologies intersect and overlap to disenfranchise one student through institutional mechanisms of education policy and practice. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KNtjnI1ME4e-SA8QIzcG1CGYQYRdRvRsqHv6k8hK1B4/edit#slide=id.g26e537a9f5e_0_1303    

Negotiations of Language Policy in School at the Intersection of Race, Language, and Ability

Research at Alder Research Informing Our Work Home Negotiations of Language Policy in School at the Intersection of Race, Language, and Ability The session explored a case study of how language policy is enacted and negotiated by administrators and students classified as long-term English learners and disabled. Using two sections of the English Learner Federal Program Monitoring instrument, Dr. Ivan Rosales Montes surfaces the ways language policy is intertwined with disability markers at one school in California. An aim is to surface how leaders working within current policies and structures might be able to inform practice to minimize the organizational harm in the education of youth.  

Beyond the Bits and Pieces: Working with Novice Teachers to Reconceptualize Language in Practice

Research at Alder Research Informing Our Work Home Beyond the Bits and Pieces: Working with Novice Teachers to Reconceptualize Language in Practice Chapter in edited volume: Equity in Multilingual Schools and Communities: Celebrating the Contributions of Guadalupe Valdés, edited by Kibler, Walqui, Bunch, Faltis This chapter describes our work as teacher educators supporting novice teachers as they conceptualize language development and design and facilitate interactive learning experiences for their multilingual students. We highlight the role that Guadalupe Valdés scholarship has played in framing our approach to teacher education and the ways we have intentionally pushed against deficit-oriented language ideologies and reductive approaches to teaching multilingual students. Link to information on the book: https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?k=9781800417199

Sense-Making in an Inequitable World: Mis/alignment Between Traditional Mathematics Classrooms and Knower-types

Research at Alder Research Informing Our Work Home Sense-Making in an Inequitable World: Mis/alignment Between Traditional Mathematics Classrooms and Knower-types Dr. China Stepter’s presentation looks at the interplay between math classroom types (traditional v. student-centered approaches) and knower-types. Previous work has shown a gendered difference in students’ preferences for the different instructional approaches to teaching and learning mathematics, with students who prefer student-centered approaches exhibiting more of a desire to actively engage in mathematical sense-making rather than memorization and fact recall. This preference has impacted both students’ learning and performance in mathematics, in addition to their intentions to pursue STEM-based careers. This work brings an additional lens, focused on social identity markers, to offer new insight into the persistent differences between student-groups’ measured math performance on standardized tests. Dr. Stepter argues that without a meaningful, large-scale shift away from traditional approaches, educators, policymakers, and school systems alike will continue to restrict and push students with socially marginalized identities out of advanced math pipelines. Dr. Stepter looks particularly at the ways that students with socially marginalized identities apply agentic reasoning and problem-solving skills to various social aspects of their lives and how this shapes the critical and active sense-making that they prefer in math classrooms.