Immersion As A Lifeway The Cultural Sustainment And Humanization Of Mandarin Dual Language Immersion Teachers PDF Download

While dual language immersion (DLI) programs have emerged as one approach to promote culturally and linguistically sustaining education, teachers are not prepared to instruct students who live in the intersection of ability and linguistic differences. Dual language learners (DLLs) with disabilities often do not have access to culturally and linguistically rich classrooms. The present study takes a Chinese-English DLI charter school in a Midwestern city as a microcosm to investigate Chinese-English DLI program teachers' perceptions and practices of agency for inclusive education, as well as personal and contextual factors that influence their agentive inclusive practices. Findings, drawn from extended field observations, semi-structured interviews, and policy documents, reveal that teacher participants had a low sense of agency, especially when negotiating with administrators about top-down polices. Driven by their previous teaching and schooling experience, they implemented varied agentive inclusive practices in their individual classrooms. However, when working with DLLs with disabilities, their collective decisions and actions were inclined towards exclusionary practices. Two personal factors contributed to their low sense of agency for inclusion and even enabled their collective agency for exclusionary practices, including (1) a low sense of autonomy in collaboration, and (2) mixed attitudes towards inclusion and a deficit view of disability. Three contextual factors confined, discouraged, and negated teachers' agentive efforts towards inclusive education, including (1) resources and time strained school condition, (2) a school culture of elite bilingualism, and (3) accountability-explicit policies that erase and remove DLLs with disabilities from bilingual space. I ultimately argue that DLI program teachers need support and training to reposition self as an agent of change, develop transformative reflexivity to unlearn internalized structural norms, cultivate a collective vision of inclusive DLI education, and work collaboratively and strategically to challenge and dismantle the white, middle-class, nondisabled, and English-speaking value centered DLI policies.