Browsing by Subject "Education, Bilingual--Texas"
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Item A third grade bilingual teacher's knowledge and practices for developing reading comprehension(2014-09-29) Guerra, MiriamItem Bilingual education policy in Texas: pride and prejuicio(2007) Pérez, Alma Sánchez, 1945-; Valenzuela, AngelaThis dissertation conducted a qualitative case study of the Texas Coalition for Bilingual Education (TCBE) to discover how it worked to promote and protect bilingual education programs and by extension educational opportunities of English Language Learners (ELLs) with particular attention to how members coalesced to mitigate the sociopolitical contextual factors that impacted bilingual education policy in Texas. The historical legacy and present creation and administration of policy, legislation, funding and implementation, including monitoring were included. The ELL population continues to rapidly increase while effective and additive bilingual education policy is on the decline; the academic achievement of ELLs is deteriorating in the face of substantiated civil rights violations, growing antiimmigrant sentiment and a contentious legislative atmosphere. My research indicates that bilingual education policy in Texas faces a wellfinanced threat from Structured English Immersion (SEI) proponents who try to justify the funding inequity for bilingual education. A court-ordered monitoring system for bilingual education has been replaced by a No Child Left Behind Act (2001) mandate that neither secures nor ensures equal education opportunity for ELLs (Pompa, 2006). Current bilingual education training programs are underfunded and under-populated when the growing enrollment of immigrant students, creates a critical demand. I employed a constructivist/interpretivist framework in this qualitative single case investigation. Additionally, Critical Race Theory framework (Noboa, 2002; Dicker, 2003), was utilized to demonstrate how racial identity, Latino leadership, coalitional strategies, social justice goals and political organizations addressed the issue of bilingual education policy reformation in Texas. I also employed the "weak ties" "strong ties" lens (Granovetter, 1973; 1983) to examine how these organizational representatives worked within and without the coalition to maximize limited resources. I collected data through interviews, court transcripts, observations of public meetings and trial proceedings, videos, archived documents and web casts. This research has implications for educational practices and future research because of the vulnerability of the ELL population and the devastating impact the present path will have for them and for all of Texas. Today's scholars, particularly Latinos, must be expert investigators in order to support the "best practices" in bilingual education, its attendant funding, policy, implementation and enforcement.Item Conciencia con compromiso : maestra perspectives on teaching in bilingual education classrooms(2009-05) Prieto, Linda, 1975-; Valenzuela, Angela; Villenas, Sofia A.This dissertation is a qualitative study that focuses on ten pre-service teachers as students in an undergraduate teacher preparation program at a 4-year university in Texas and follows four of them into the classroom as novice teachers. The primary data consists of paired (auto)biographical dialogues, oral (her)story interviews, ethnographic classroom observations, and participant interviews. Cross-cultural insights provided by this work aim to inform multicultural approaches to teacher education and novice teacher induction by providing tools for identifying and integrating the cultural resources of maestras in school contexts. Participants in this study learn to become maestras in the home at an early age by contributing to the household and caring for others in various ways, including as bicultural brokers, translators, surrogate parents, and by tutoring relatives, family friends, and neighbors. The term maestra includes both Latina bilingual education pre-service (student) teachers and Latina novice (first- and second-year) teachers. Analysis indicates that the maestras draw upon their "funds of knowledge" or cultural resources as they formulate their philosophies of education in making decisions about majoring in bilingual education. This study also found that they relate their "pedagogies of the home" or cultural strategies for survival and lived experiences to the academic theories learned at the university and the knowledge gained through their classroom student teaching as they decide whether or not to pursue a career as bilingual education teachers after graduation. I argue that maestras are receptive to becoming critically conscious educators as they articulate their situatedness as gendered, raced, and classed Latinas. However their situatedness is not integrated with their teacher preparation or their novice teacher induction. U.S. public school culture does not understand or facilitate processes for maestras to create transformative practices. Thus the maestras in this study create their own on-the-ground consciousness raising. Implementing opportunities for maestras to uncover, reflect, discuss, and act upon their varied perspectives allows them to formulate culturally sensitive pedagogies for affirming diversity at every level in schools and in the larger society. Retaining highly qualified maestras is critical to increasing Latina/o students' opportunities for academic access and success through the Pre-K--16 educational pipeline.Item Cross case analysis of three middle school mathematics teachers(2014-09-29) Quiroz, SandraItem "Equal access to mandated testing": policies, disciplinary discourse, and practices of performance in the lives of English language learner youth(2004) Black, William Robert; Scribner, Jay D.; Valenzuela, AngelaItem The effects of labeling Hispanic English language learners as learning disabled(2014-09-29) Rodriguez, Sandra Irma