Becoming Bilingual Special Educators through Alternative, Synchronous-Service Preparation

Background/Context: As teacher shortages prove to be a persistent problem across the United States, there is a growing reliance on alternative certification pathways to fill educator vacancies, especially in subject areas like bilingual education and special education. By placing beginning teachers immediately in full-time positions as teachers of record, these alternative, “synchronous-service” programs constitute a unique phenomenon in teacher education in which learning to teach and teaching occur simultaneously. Although decades of scholarship have debated the merits of “alternative” teacher preparation pathways, limited research has directly examined the implications of preparing teachers responsible for the education of multiply marginalized students through alternative routes. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study considers what it means to become a teacher of emergent bilingual students and students with disabilities through alternative licensure. Leveraging critical and queer perspectives on teacher learning, the study asks: What are the shared dilemmas of practice that beginning bilingual special educators experience during the first six months of their alternative preparation program? Research Setting and Participants: This study was conducted in the context of a graduate-level foundations of bilingual education course at a public research university in a Northeastern U.S. city. Nineteen teachers from two cohorts agreed to participate. Participants primarily identified as bilingual, Latinx, female Teachers of Color who attended as students the local school district in which they were now teaching. Research Design: Data comes from a qualitative longitudinal research project that aimed to journey with bilingual special educators through their synchronous-service preparation over the course of three years. Guided by a Freirean culture circle design, the study specifically reports on teachers’ dilemmas of practice during the first six months of their program, surfaced through weekly journal entries, class culture circle sessions, final course projects, and postcourse focus groups. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings suggest that teachers experienced dilemmas around how and to what degree to provide bilingual students home language support, navigating the boundaries of their ambiguous responsibilities at the intersection of language and disability, and reconciling deep commitments to communities with the challenges of synchronous-service preparation. Better understanding these dilemmas holds implications for teacher educators to facilitate more intentional preparation around the policy work of bilingual special educators.