Supporting and Advocating for Immigrant and Refugee Students and Families in America’s Urban Schools: Educators’ Agency and Practices in Everyday Instruction

Abstract

Persistent educational inequity for immigrant and refugee students and their families calls for instructional practices centering on access, quality, and social justice. Drawing on two qualitative case studies, this article examines how three U.S. urban school teachers attended to the systemic inequalities and unique challenges confronting immigrant and refugee students both inside their classrooms and outside the school. Our analyses show that the teachers strategically enacted various critical instructional practices, including linguistically responsive pedagogy, translanguaging, and sociopolitically responsive pedagogy. The teachers’ agentic practices have important implications for teacher education and professional development for immigrant and refugee learners in urban settings.

Introduction

With the rise of humanitarian crises during recent years across the globe caused by modern warfare, conflicts, oppression, poverty, and disasters, issues of migration and displacement are drawing increasing attention to education. In 2016 alone, the United States welcomed 116,138 refugees, mainly from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Since 2017, the Trump administration has significantly lowered the refugee ceiling, with 76,200 refugees admitted from 2017 to 2019 (Krogstad, 2019) and with 15,000 targeted for 2021 (Williams & Smith, 2020). More than half of these refugees settled in 10 states, such as California, Texas, and New York. Many of the low-income newcomers resettled in high-poverty urban centers, either by choice or by policy design. While their linguistic backgrounds are increasingly diverse, with more than 200 languages represented, less than 7% of refugees are reported to speak “good” English (Gándara, 2018; Li, 2018). In the meantime, persistent opportunity gaps are reported between these urban students and their non-urban counterparts (Miller et al., 2019). These emerging patterns of resettlement and persistent urban-suburban opportunity gaps highlight the urgency for American societies and their education systems to address the linguistic, educational, and social needs of these students and their families.

In this article, we explore how three U.S. urban teachers worked to support their immigrant and refugee students and families inside and outside their classrooms. Urban educators face tremendous challenges in their work because urban schools are often subjected to structural inequalities that result in their unequal access to resources and to deficit ideologies that blame disadvantaged students, families and communities for the barriers imposed on them (Ladson-Billings, 2021; Milner, 2012; Milner & Lomotey, 2021; Warren & Venzant Chambers, 2020). We drew on two qualitative case studies that were conducted in two different urban schools in the United States to showcase promising practices in countering the constraints of urban education and the challenges faced by their immigrant and refugee students. Our goal is to document the teachers’ various levels of effort to counter subtractive educational practices and foster caring relationships with students and families that center on access, trust, and advocacy.

Literature Review

Educational Challenges Imposed on Immigrant and Refugee Students and Families

Previous research on urban education and the education of immigrant and refugee students has identified several major issues faced by this disadvantaged student population: (a) deficit views from schools and society, (b) home/community-school linguistic and cultural disconnect, (c) unequal access to resources, and (d) subjection to subtractive educational practice. Immigrant and refugee students and their families are often subjected to dominant discourses and deficit assumptions through which they are viewed as less than the mainstream group or their life as not normal (Nieto, 2007). Such deficit views often neglect “the community cultural wealth” (Yosso, 2005) that these students and families bring to school and prevent these students and their families from having equal “access to education, healthcare, employment, and housing, among other material conditions” (Nieto, 2007, p. 300). Consequently, immigrant and refugee students and their families, rather than structural factors and discriminatory institutional practices, are often blamed as the root causes of social problems and their own underachievement in schools (DeMartino, 2020; Li, 2008b, 2021; Valenzuela, 1999).

Another challenge that this group faces is the linguistic and cultural disconnect between the school and community that alienates them and deprives them of opportunity for upward social mobility. Shaped by monolingual and assimilationist ideologies prevalent in both education and society, schools often adopt language and education programs that focus solely on developing students’ English language proficiency and devaluing the bi/multilingual repertoire that the students bring to the school. Li’s (2018) study of five refugee families in one U.S. urban school district showed that due to a lack of linguistic and cultural support for their children in and out of the urban schools they attended, the children and families experienced cultural conflicts and language and literacy fracturing that devalued their native languages. As well, they were systematically marginalized in the urban school structure, like “a guest in another person’s house” (Li, 2018, p. 476). Despite the families’ deliberate strategies and activities to support their children’s educational transition, such efforts often went unnoticed by the teachers and staff in school.

Further compounding these problems faced by immigrant and refugee students is that urban schools often lack adequate resources to support these low socioeconomic status (SES) immigrant and displaced families and to attract, retain, and train an adequate teaching force for better working with these students. (Milner, 2012; Warren & Venzant Chambers, 2020). As a result, urban students are often subjected to subtractive educational practices that lack academic rigor and authentic care for the students’ socioemotional wellbeing (Valenzuela, 1999; Valenzuela & Rubio, 2018). Coupled with the constraints in hegemonic educational policies and practices (e.g., monolingualism and racism), ensuring immigrant and refugee learners’ success calls for innovative educational practices and approaches that center on access, quality, and equity. There is a need to move beyond the prevalent blame-the-victim approach to push the field toward a deeper conceptual understanding of structural inequalities in urban schools and address the challenges faced by immigrant and refugee students and their families.

Critical Instructional Practices for Working with Immigrant and Refugee Students

A range of pedagogical approaches and models (i.e., culturally, linguistically, and sociopolitically responsive pedagogies, critical transnationalism, and pedogogy of cultural reciprocity) have been developed or utilized to address the multi-pronged challenges faced by minoritized learners such as immigrant and refugee students. Building on the existing body of asset-based work that offers hopeful and positive propects of teachers’ instructional change, we use a collective term, critical instructional practices, to refer to educators’ everyday teaching decisions and activities that address inequalities confronted by minority learners in their classrooms. In what follows, we synthesize these critical instructional practices, which will serve as the lenses through which we analyze the teachers’ agentic actions in their daily instruction.

Concerned about educational inequalities faced by minoritized learners in U.S. schools, scholars argue for asset-based approaches that attend to issues of cultural plurality in the process of teaching and learning, sustain the cultural practices of minoritized students and their communities, and leverage the funds of knowledge of minoritized communities (Gay, 2000; González et al., 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012). Teachers with such asset-based mindsets often adjust their instruction for students’ different cultural ways of participation and learning and therefore build linguistic and cultural bridges between school, home and communities. In this vein, urban teachers that practice asset-based teaching are “cultural workers” who not only learn about their students’ cultural practices and social realities outside of school, but also integrate these cultural knowledge and practices into their everyday teaching to successfully educate these students (Li, 2013b).

In addition to promoting asset-based practices that sustain immigrant and refugee students’ cultural ways of learning, since the late 1990s, scholars and educators have also called for linguistically responsive instruction that makes content instruction more accessible to these learners by attending to the language challenges that they face in mainstream classrooms (Lucas & Villegas, 2011). Since language-related issues are too often lost in the larger conversation about culturally responsive teaching, Lucas and Villegas (2011) argue that teachers must attend to learners’ second language learning processes in the instructional process, including both social and academic language demands associated with the learning tasks, extra-linguistic supports that learners need during learning, and students’ strategic use of first languages in second language learning.

Coming together with this shift to linguistically responsive instruction was the multilingual turn in language education that embraces a translanguaging lens on learners’ multilingual repertoire (García, 2009). Translanguaging refers to bilingual or multilingual speakers’ flexible use of linguistic resources from what are traditionally labelled as multiple discrete languages for effective communication. This lens of translanguaging disrupts monolingual ideologies that devalue linguistically minoritized students’ fluid translingual practices and unsettles power relations among linguistic communities that have long impacted these students’ schooling experiences. Research has documented the affordances of translanguaging pedagogy with immigrant and refugee students. García and Sylvan’s (2011) study at one high school in New York City showed that the school fostered plurilingualism capitalizing on the immigrant students’ translingual practices in meaning-making in the classroom, which contributed to the students’ overall academic achievement and affirmed their linguistic and cultural identities.

Extending culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, Bajaj and colleagues (Bajaj et al., 2017; Bajaj & Bartlett, 2017) argue for the need to reconceptualize immigrant and refugee students’ transnational experiences. Similar to deficit views of cultural and linguistic identities, these students’ transnational connections are often seen as deficits rather than assets for learning (Lightman, 2018; Sánchez & Kasun, 2012). Therefore, scholars propose that teachers learn to recognize students’ transnational funds of knowledge and weave them into the tapestry of classroom activities and interactions through innovative pedagogical planning (Li, 2021; Malsbary, 2018). Bajaj and Bartlett (2017) put forward the notion of “critical transnational curriculum” to highlight the importance of capitalizing on students’ transnational knowledge and experiences in their schooling. Otherwise, these students will “never have equal educational opportunities unless their previous experiences are properly assessed, understood, and recognized” to call for capitalizing on their transnational experiences (Bunar, 2019, n.p.).

Finally, ensuring transformative changes for these disadvantaged students must entail engaging learners in tackling “the broader contextual and societal factors in learning” to challenge the power relationships and the deficit views that describe them as failures and the root cause of social ills in urban society (Li, 2013a, p. 141). To do so, teachers must develop empathy and become advocates for these students in and out of school. Bajaj et al. (2017) suggest that teachers with an advocacy mindset adopt socio-politically responsive pedagogy to (1) raise their critical consciousness of issues of inequalities in their lives, (2) build connection between schools and the communities in which immigrant and refugee learners live, and (3) address material concerns which these immigrant and refugee students and their families face in their lives. Research has documented a variety of such sociopolitically responsive pedagogical practices, such as providing extra academic support for students in need, advocating social support for students’ unique needs such as dealing with trauma (Weaver, 2016), advocating for the language and service rights of the family (Isik-Ercan, 2012; Li, 2008a), and challenging the fairness of assessment practices (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2010).

It must be noted that due to the multiplicity and polysemy of structural differences across different urban school contexts, urban school teachers often enact these practices differently in different contexts, depending on the mutual interactions of the contextual factors and their personal and professional experiences. They do not simply adopt one approach but exert their professional agency to amalgamate diverse elements from different critical pedagogical practices that they deem appropriate for their students in their specific instructional contexts to move beyond the blame-the-victim approach to immigrant and refugee students’ education.

Drawing upon this body of scholarship on critical instructional practices for immigrant and refugee students, we report on our findings from two case studies to share pockets of success by teachers in difficult circumstances to offer glimpses of hope during these unsettling times. Our inquiry was guided by two central questions: What daily practices and strategies do these teachers in urban schools use to support immigrant and refugee students’ diverse needs? How do they use their daily practices to counteract the inequalities and challenges that their students face?

Teacher Agency Within the Structure of Urban Inequalities: A Dialectical View of Urban Education

In this inquiry, we take up a dialectic view of urban education as comprising both structure and agency (Sewell, 1992). According to Sewell (1992), structure, in the form of the schemas and resources or generalizable procedures of reproduction of social systems, both shapes people’s practices and is also shaped by them. While we acknowledge the structural barriers that impact the educational process, opportunities, and outcomes of minoritized and disadvantaged students in urban schools (Ladson-Billings, 2021; Milner, 2012; Warren & Venzant Chambers, 2020), we do not see them as deterministic in shaping students’ failure as inevitable. Rather, we emphasize the agentic roles of the stakeholders in the urban education systems as change agents (Li, 2013a). Urban teachers are capable of reading and responding to the structural barriers present in urban schools and designing pedagogical practices and projects to work against various structural sanctions within urban school systems. In this sense, we see urban educators as knowledgeable and enabling human agents who are “capable of putting their structurally formed capacities to work in creative or innovative ways” (Sewell, 1992, p. 4).

Bridwell-Mitchell (2015) theorizes that teacher agency can both change or maintain institutionalized instructional practices. A body of research studies have documented how teacher agency may transform the persistent constraints of urban education. For example, Tan and Barton (2010) reported that a white male science teacher engaged in anti-oppressive teaching by using the pedagogical strategies of figured worlds to purposefully validate his racial minority and low-income students’ nontraditional funds of knowledge (e.g., popular culture and personal experiences) and ensure their learning success. In another study, Niesz (2003) showcased how teachers at one Philadelphia middle school actively subverted the school’s top-down mandates on test preparation and instead engaged their racially and linguistically diverse students in authentic learning experiences. These examples of teacher agentic actions in urban education suggest that while being sanctioned by the various policies and cultural practices, many teachers “are endowed with the capacity to engage in highly autonomous, discerning, and strategic action” to resist the structural barriers inherent in the urban education systems (Sewell, 1992, p. 15).

It is important to note that neither structure nor agency is static or homogeneous. According to Sewell (1992), structure itself is characterized by multiplicity and polysemy in that it varies significantly across different institutional spheres and even within a given sphere due to different rules, schemas, and resources present in these different institutions. Consequently, the specific actions that people take may vary and are culturally and historically shaped by the contexts in which they are situated. As Sewell (1992) argues:

It is equally important, however, to insist that the agency exercised by different persons is far from uniform, that agency differs enormously in both kind and extent. What kinds of desires people can have, what intentions they can form, and what sorts of creative transpositions they can carry out vary dramatically from one social world to another depending on the nature of the particular structures that inform those social worlds. (pp. 20-21)

In this vein, urban educators’ agentic actions to counteract the structural barriers faced by their students and families may vary according to the particular districts and schools in which they work. By showcasing some promising instances of teachers’ diverse pedagogical practices in different contexts, we hope to illustrate also the “collective struggles and resistances” that are implicated in urban education across America, regardless of context (Sewell, 1992, p. 21).

Methods

Research Contexts and Participants

In this analysis, we present two qualitative case studies to illustrate how urban school teachers worked to support and advocate for their immigrant and refugee students and families. The first case study was conducted in an urban school district in upstate New York. The City International School (all names are pseudonyms), a school that Milner (2012) would call “urban emergent,” was an elementary school designated for students of refugee backgrounds. At the time of the study, over 500 students were enrolled, mostly children of refugees coming from over 30 countries. Over half of the school’s population were designated as needing English as a second language (ESL) support and 96% of the children were eligible for the free breakfast and lunch program. The school was on the list of schools that did not meet the Adequate Yearly Progress goals under the No Child Left Behind Act. Situated in a large urban center with its unique, diverse demographics, the school adopted what Li and Jee (2021) call a pan-diversity approach to diversity in that all children were seen as the same and students and staff were discouraged from discussing or asking about cultural differences. The schools were short of teachers and many teachers also reported lacking teaching resources.

The participant of the first case study, Mr. Thomas, who was white and middle-class, was an ESL teacher in this school. He was a seasoned teacher who had been teaching in the school district for more than 16 years. Although born in the city, he had previously had the opportunity to live in the Philippines for two years. In college, he had also traveled extensively to the Middle East and Africa and visited many countries, such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Egypt, among others. After returning to the city to settle down, he became a certified secondary teacher. Sixteen years ago, when he saw the needs of ESL students, he began to teach ESL. At the time of the study, it was his third year at the City International School, teaching a class of over 40 ESL children with different levels of prior schooling experiences.

The second case study was conducted in New York City. The Metro Global High School, a school that Milner (2012) would call “urban intensive,” was located in a large school building (shared with two other small schools) in the downtown area of one of the city’s boroughs. The school served mainly recent immigrant students who had been living in the United States for less than four years. At the time of the study, the school had about 350 students from over 30 countries. Because of the superdiversity of its student population in terms of language, culture, national origin, and religion, the school adopts instructional approaches that capitalize on heterogeneity, students’ multilingual repertoires, language-integrated content instruction, and project-based instruction. Thanks to the school’s innovative pedagogical approaches, students in Metro Global High School routinely outperform their counterparts in other schools and graduate at a higher rate than their counterparts in other schools.

Two teachers, also white and middle-class, were selected as participants for the second case study. Mr. Wilson, a biology teacher, had 13 years of teaching experience. Formerly an environmental consultant, he had decided to become a teacher after realizing that his corporate job was not aligned with his passion for science. “It’s very much detached from what I think science is. I like science. I like the scientific method. I like the process. I like the discovery.” Additionally, he had found his experience as a teaching assistant in his senior year of college and throughout graduate school to be the most rewarding experience. Following his enthusiasm for both science and teaching, he applied for the Teaching Fellows program, completed the program, and became a biology teacher.

Mr. Baker, a history teacher with four years of teaching experience, had come to Metro Global High School after working as a special education teacher for one year. In addition to his credentials in social studies and special education, he had also completed a certification program in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) at a local city university. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Baker, along with their colleagues in the English, math, and music classrooms, taught the same group of students. The majority of their students spoke Spanish as a first language and the rest spoke Chinese, Arabic, or Bengali.

Researcher Positionality

Both researchers were immigrants who came to North America from China for better educational opportunities. Both came from low-SES backgrounds in their home country and were able to pursue higher education due to their equal access to quality education and dedicated teachers who helped transform their academic trajectories. Therefore, even though we are now in privileged positions as university professors, we approached this inquiry with a strong equity stance for disadvantaged students like low-SES immigrants and displaced learners. While we view schools as social structures that work to maintain and reproduce the inequalities in society, we do not see them as unchangeable or static. Rather, our own personal experiences of rewriting our educational trajectories show that the agency of stakeholders such as teachers, students, and parents can play a significant role in resisting the school reproduction of social class and educational opportunities. In the meantime, as university researchers and teacher educators who prepare mainstream pre- and in-service teachers to work with racially, culturally, and linguistically minoritized learners, we have witnessed many empowered educators with critical dispositions who have leveraged their practices to counter the inequalities imposed on their disadvantaged students. It is with these personal and professional experiences and convictions that we report on the teachers’ critical instructional practices to beat the odds in America’s urban schools.

Data Collection

The first case study is drawn from a larger, multiple-case study of four teachers utilizing interviews as the data collection method. Mr. Thomas underwent a 90-minute, semi-structured interview focused mainly on his professional background and training, teaching experience, reading instructional practices, and practices in supporting his ESL students inside and outside the classroom.

The second case study collected data, including interviews and documents. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with each teacher. The first interview, conducted at the beginning of the study, focused on the teacher’s educational background, professional training, and professional experience. The second one, conducted at a later stage of the study, focused on perspectives on language, language learning and integrating language and content. Each of the interviews lasted 60 to 90 minutes. In addition to interviews, the researcher also collected the teachers’ instructional materials including unit plans, daily instructional slides, classroom handouts, and students’ assignments.

Due to access issues, one limitation in both cases was that we did not conduct field observations of the teachers’ instructional practices and therefore were unable to triangulate the interview data with other types of data. However, the in-depth interviews and documents provided important and rich data on the teachers’ daily pedagogical decisions and strategies in meeting their students’ diverse needs and challenging the inequalities that they faced.

Data Analysis

The interviews were transcribed and analyzed thematically following Miles et al.’s (2019) four steps of qualitative data analysis: data reduction, coding, data display, and conclusion drawing. Our data analysis consisted of two phases. During the first phase, each teacher’s practices were coded separately. Since our analysis focused on understanding the teachers’ pedagogical practices in attending to the social, linguistic, and educational needs of their immigrant and refugee students, we coded the data first by labeling the broader categories of their practices in relation to the critical instructional pedagogies, using codes such as “culturally responsive pedagogy”, “linguistically responsive pedagogy”, “translanguaging”, “critical transnationalism instruction”, and “sociopolitically responsive instruction.” In addition, we coded the data by identifying the purposes of their actions in relation to the newcomers’ specific challenges, using codes such as “resources/material concerns,” “home-school disconnect—linguistic and cultural discontinuities,” “deficit views,” and “trauma”.

During the second phase of the data analysis, we compared across the cases to identify overlapping and distinct practices among the three teachers. We identified two shared themes across their practices,“linguistically/culturally responsive instruction” and “advocating for students and families”; and three distinct themes, “addressing social and material concerns,” “employing translanguaging,” and “building on students’ transnational funds of knowledge.”

Urban Educators’ Critical Instructional Pedagogical Practices for Immigrant and Refugee Students and Families

Our analyses show that the actions of the three focal teachers, who shared a disposition toward social justice, varied from attending to students’ linguistic needs, capitalizing on their transnational experiences, to connecting subject content learning with sociopolitical issues impacting the students.

“We Have to Do Two Grades in One”: Mr. Thomas Attending to the Linguistic and Social Needs of Refugee Learners in and out of School

Mr. Thomas’s school, the City International School, was known as “a miniature United Nations” in the district with children coming from more than thirty different countries and speaking many different languages. The school was also very transient in that students moved in and out frequently. Due to the unique demographics of the school and lack of instructional support from the school and district, many teachers felt that they were just trying to “survive day by day.” Not surprisingly, Mr. Thomas’s own classroom was like a mini U.N. with children from diverse racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, including those from Bantu Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Vietnam, Yemen, and Russia. These children also came with different levels of school exposure prior to coming to the school. Subjected to displacement, poverty and state neglection and lack of access to education, some of the refugee students had never been able to go to school prior to their arrival to the U. S., while some had attended regular schools in their home countries. All of them, of course, were just starting to develop their English proficiency. Of particular issues faced by his students, Mr. Thomas recognized that for the refugee students who came from refugee camps often suffered from trauma and exhibited different socioemotional needs as some students “just totally shut down … put their heads down. They cannot read or say [anything].”

Mr. Thomas therefore decided that his main instructional goal was to address both the linguistic and academic challenges that his students faced in his classroom. Even though some of his students had to learn English letters “from scratch,” he hoped to teach them some basics as quickly as he could so they could learn on their own and also “start teaching themselves.” Pedagogically, he combined both a whole-language, meaning based, approach to reading with the phonics approach mandated by the school system. In his view, traditional phonics teaching such as learning through singing the alphabet would take “years just to get through the combinations before they can actually read a word, and the kids don't like it. They are bored.” And for his students, there was a sense of urgency “because we haven’t any time to lose it. We try to walk quickly.” He also noticed that many of his students lacked reading practices with books. He was a firm believer in reading, which he described as “really, really important.” With his beginner students, he started with Dr. Seuss books such as Hop On Pop to get his students to understand the linguistic elements of English in context with picture support:

I have them read the books almost right away… and even when they think they are reading and kind of half looking at the pictures, they think they’re reading. So I’m starting that very quickly.

He combined this meaning-based reading approach with explicit attention to language. He stated,

I teach them letters, and I teach the short and long vowel sounds and I teach phonics through reading…you know, so you have to use it, and the kids have to have a clue, and then when they’re writing…then I teach them certain rules, what I call “magic rules”…

To support kids’ reading, Mr. Thomas “got the parents involved right away” by having the children go home and read to the parents: “I tell [the parents] there is a book coming home every night. I said [the student] can always take a book from me, ask her if she has a book…So I do it. I make sure that all the books are going home.” With parents who could not speak English, he used interpreters to help them understand that their children had to read every day after school. For parents who could read, he encouraged the children to “read this to your parent,” and then come back to him to “trade one book for another.” He continued this practice even during holidays such as Christmas and Easter to ensure that children would not lose any time to catch up. He described,

Last Christmas, I typed out a sheet for each kid [with] some sight words, some running words, not a lot of the books, what they want to do, …their math. And I had a parent sign it. But I tell them to call me straight, so on big holidays you may get a sheet, I want kids to do this.

Besides reading, Mr. Thomas also focused on writing, and as with reading, he had to differentiate his instruction: “I got the two levels, the lower and the higher, so it’s totally different.” In addition to practice using the vocabulary words, Mr. Thomas tried to promote writing for authentic purposes. Sometimes, he asked students to write their own endings to the stories they read. Many times, he tried to engage them in writing for real purposes:

I do a lot of [field] trips and have them write letters … After the naturalist came in and actually taught the kids [about the nature preserves], and then we write letters [to the naturalist] and I like it when the school [receives] letters back, so the kids will get excited about the letters. And once [a suburban high school] came in to do their plays, you know, I tried to assign the kids to write to one of the kids from [the school]. Then those kids often wrote back… a few times.

In addition to reading and writing, Mr. Thomas also tried more innovative methods for students to understand academic content such as science. For example, in order to study some science tables and a unit on microcosm he brought in realia (e.g., pet animals) so the children could work with real examples. In another unit on nature preserves, he applied for a grant and used the funds to create a pond with a range of aquatic life and was able to purchase a microscope, “so you put the microscope … and we look at them all!” He noted that to be able to “bring in things so we look at them, that’s so important.” In addition, he also invited non-ESL students to come in to talk about pond animal life.

Given that he had children with diverse proficiency levels and in need of individualized attention and instruction, he actively used volunteers to support his students’ reading, writing, and math:

I use my volunteers like this because writing is so intensive, it’s hard for me to do it, even 7 kids, so I have the volunteer do one or two…I have a reading [volunteer] when the kids were working at the math too, whatever about…[Having volunteers is a] really big help for these kids. They like the kids, and I just leave instructions for the kids, the volunteers. I write out a plan for them, take a few minutes and then they do that, so it’s helping them too.

Mr. Thomas’s support for the children, however, went beyond academic affairs inside the school. As a resident of the city, he was deeply aware of the inequality prevalent in the city. In his own words, the city had “two class systems” with the elite children (including his own) receiving private education, while the children subjected to poverty were crammed into public schools with large classes, limited resources, and fewer teachers. Due to the state’s budget cuts to schools, his school, for example, had recently cut several ESL teachers and the school nurses in addition to other services while crowding “more and more kids in the class.” Therefore, he realized that as a classroom teacher, he had to do “more than anybody else or others.”

Mr. Thomas set out to right the “extremely unequal”, “bad system” by attending to the refugee children’s access to resources and finding alternative ways that allowed them to bring their strengths and assets to the community. For example, he attended to material resource inequalities by donating clothing and organizing a school-wide clothing drive and received a big collection of clothes to give away to needy families of the school. In addition, he saw that the refugee children did not have the same access to extracurricular activities as their middle-class peers in the city, “They don’t have any sports…No extracurricular, just about no sports.” Therefore, he enrolled many children in a soccer program and personally drove the kids to their practices:

They got no transportation, they got tough jobs, you know, their hours may be difficult, they might be lonely. That’s why I try to get them into a soccer program…we are trying to get funding. I tried some of [the state’s] institute [funding], because the problem is most kids cannot do that because they cannot get down there. They ask me to take them, but I cannot. I cannot go on and take all the kids twice a week.

In addition to soccer, he also tried to encourage the children to attend other after-school programs. Recognizing that these groups came from cultures that were “very community-oriented,” he saw these programs as a good way for children and families to integrate into the community and for the community to learn about their cultures and strengths and hence help them better deal with trauma and isolation. Some of his students had seen relatives killed in war or crime and therefore struggled socio-emotionally at school. Even though teachers tried to do a lot of teaching every day in school, some kids might not have been able to learn that day. Therefore, he tried to support the families outside of school:

My Bantu Somali families of five [children] I had last two years…I think with them, they are not integrating into the community as much…I put them at an afterschool [program]. And you see [the results] right away. And this group wants to talk. So I may get them with native speakers in [the program].

In sum, even though Mr. Thomas was confronted with a shortage of resources and support in his “urban emergent” school, and was left on his own with 40 plus students, sorting through the complex challenges of language, literacy and content instruction, Mr. Thomas provided a wide range of support to his students and their families in their learning of the English language, literacy, as well as adjusting to the new culture. It must be noted that while Mr. Thomas recognized and also worked to counteract the structural inequalities that his students’ face (such as poverty, instability, and trauma) and the challenges that his students faced in their strive for academic success, his instructional practices did not fully leverage the resilience, cultural and linguistic assets, and survivance of his immigrant and refugee students and their families. His lack of attention to students’ cultural and linguistic diversity and their transnational experiences may be related to the school’s pan-diversity approach to diversity (Author, in press) that failed to capitalize students’ community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005).

“Every Teacher is a Language Teacher”: Mr. Wilson’s Linguistically/Culturally Responsive Instruction and Critical Translanguaging Practices

Similar to Mr. Thomas’s classroom, Mr. Wilson’s classroom was like “a mini United Nations.” The class included 22 ninth and tenth graders; most were Spanish-speaking and the rest spoke Chinese, Arabic, or Bengali as their first language, which constituted what Vertovec (2007) calls a context of superdiversity. In response to the linguistic and education needs of the immigrant and refugee students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, Mr. Wilson’s school had adopted a range of linguistically responsive instructional approaches that attended to their linguistic needs, affirmed their multilingual repertoire, and integrated language and content instruction. Because the school adopted a holistic approach that did not separate language learning from content instruction, all the teachers were expected to support their students to develop language proficiency while engaging them in rigorous disciplinary learning. As Mr. Wilson said, “Here in our school, it’s not like, ‘Oh, you learn English here, and then you learn science here.’ Every teacher is a language teacher. Every teacher is an English teacher.”

Mr. Wilson enacted his identity as both a language teacher and a science teacher through linguistically responsive instruction and critical translanguaging practices. Mr. Wilson held a strong belief that all students should participate in the learning process. He intentionally created opportunities for students to “talk to learn” while still “learning to talk.” To facilitate students’ interaction, he designed group presentations, Science Friday seminars, progressive posters, and inter-team science classroom visits. For example, in group presentations, students collaborated with peers in their experiment groups to prepare and present their work at different stages of the experiment. When presenting their projects, students were expected to engage with questions from their classmates. Additionally, students also needed to provide constructive feedback on their peers’ presentations, following a structured feedback sheet.

Mr. Wilson’s emphasis on interaction was informed by his belief that interaction mediates students’ learning. In one interview he evoked Vygotsky’s notion of the Zone of Proximal Development to explain that it is a teacher’s job to provide support to students to get them to where they should be. He was a proponent of the power of questioning in classroom discussions, and stressed that the use of questions should be oriented toward bringing students to “the next level” in learning and making the students feel empowered:

Questioning should always serve two purposes. It should either be something that helps the student feel empowered. So, you ask them a question you know they already know the answer to. But then you should also ask a question that brings them somewhere that they aren’t already. It helps bring them to the next step.

Another strategy that Mr. Wilson used to engage students in meaningful class discussions was through connecting students’ everyday discourses to science discourses. For example, when teaching the concept of average, he started the conversation by asking the students “what’s normal?” because this kind of question would get students excited to talk:

So, I asked them, “When are things normal?” “When are things not normal?” And it's all over the map. They were like, "Well, it's normal if most people are that thing." "Is normal something you want to be?" "Oh, no, I don't want to be normal." And some people said, "Yeah, I want to be normal." So, diving into that more. "Why do you want to be normal?" "Why don't you want to be normal?" And by the time we finished that conversation, they've used the word normal 20 times, and it takes an average of 17 times for somebody to learn something.

After students had a general sense of what “normal” meant, he told his students,

“Now, I'm going to transition to the way scientists talk about what's normal, is that we use average. So, what we're comparing when we compare groups, in our experiments is …is the normal of this group different from the normal of this group? And if they're really different from each other, then we support one hypothesis. But, if their normals are very close to each other, like normal in this group could be normal in this group, then we support the null hypothesis.

Mr. Wilson’s approach to bridge students’ everyday discourse to science discourse created a space in which his students’ ways of knowing and thinking were affirmed and validated as important resources for developing their science literacy skills. He explained that it is important for teachers of immigrant and refugee students to recognize their students’ language ability, interests and enthusiasm for discussion, to start with what they know, and to avoid deficit views of their students:

I don’t want to knock down how other people teach, but I’ve talked to teachers who say, “Oh, they just don’t understand, blah, blah, blah. They can’t do this.” That’s a deficit way of thinking. And you’re never going to get anywhere with that. If they can’t do something right now, it doesn’t mean they won’t be able to do something.

In addition to linguistically responsive instruction with intentional opportunities for students to interact to negotiate meaning and to talk to learn while learning to talk, Mr. Wilson utilized translanguaging pedagogy (a pedagogical practice that encourages multilingual learners’ strategic use of multiple languages as an integrated communication system), one of the school’s instructional approaches to meet the students’ linguistic and educational needs. Although Mr. Wilson spoke English as his first language, he made efforts to study Spanish and Chinese, the languages of the two largest linguistic groups in the school. He studied Spanish in college for one semester and travelled to Costa Rica for a semester in his senior year. In order to better support his Spanish speaking students through their first language, he took a one-on-one class one summer. He also took a few classes in Chinese language. He explained that he often used translanguaging to give students additional support:

I don’t know if you’ve seen that look on kids’ faces when I’m explaining in English and there are no effect changes or the questioning look. I’ll throw in some Spanish because every once in a while, someone will go, “Oh, okay.”

Although Mr. Wilson felt he was not confident enough to speak Chinese as he spoke Spanish, he still tried to use Chinese to aid his interaction with Chinese-speaking students, as he asked, “Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good and just let’s give it a try?”

As such, Mr. Wilson’s instruction featured both planned and spontaneous translanguaging pedagogies (Lin, 2020), which cultivated a translanguaging space in the classroom. For example, he explicitly asked students to use their first languages to translate key science concepts and encouraged them to create bilingual posters to present their experiment proposals. He also purchased bilingual dictionaries for students to use during class. Even though he did not speak Bengali or Arabic, he still encouraged his students to use them, because he knew that “they are much more comfortable in their first language; and it’s important to empower students to communicate using all their languages.” His pedagogies constructed a translanguaging space and norm in his classroom, which countered English-only monolingual ideology and affirmed students’ multilingual assets and identities.

In addition to using translanguaging as a means to make instruction more accessible to his students and affirm their identities, Mr. Wilson also articulated a view of translanguaging as critical love or critical caring in education (Antrop–González & Jesús, 2006) that values students’ identities and funds of knowledge, sets high academic expectations, and acknowledges and works to change the structural position to which minoritized students are subjected. To him, speaking the language of minoritized individuals is a critical linguistic practice of “‘short-circuiting’” racism against them. In the interview, when asked why he chose to speak Spanish with a student during the class, he explained,

Partly me practicing, but also providing a second opportunity for her to get needed information. It’s also an acknowledgement of students’ background if you use their language. Recently, I’ve been reading Trevor Noah’s book, “Born a Crime”, and he talks about learning and speaking in all of the different languages of the tribes of South Africa. Basically, the apartheid government wanted all the blacks to think they were different from one another so they’d be too busy fighting other blacks instead of the white government. Different language reinforces that idea. Since he could speak others’ languages, he describes it as “short-circuiting” their racism. Even if someone looks different than you, speaking their language enforces the idea they are like you and understand you. I like the fact that I can use Spanish to help some of my students feel more comfortable and connect with me, even if just a little bit.

Thus, to Mr. Wilson, his translanguaging practice became more than a pedagogical need. It was also an act of critical caring educational practices that could counter linguistic marginalization and racism in his students’ lives. As Valenzuela (1999) argues, “Students’ cultural world and their structural position must be fully apprehended, with school-based adults deliberately bringing issues of race, difference and power into central focus” (p. 109).

In sum, Mr. Wilson’s instructional practice featured critical, linguistically responsive instruction in which he took an asset-based approach to immigrant and refugee students, positioning them as capable learners, making his science instruction accessible, rigorous, and engaging through dialogic teaching, active questioning, and translanguaging. In addition, his taking up of translanguaging pedagogy featured a critical orientation in that he considered it not simply a tool to utilize students’ multilingual repertiore for meaning making, but more importantly a move to “short circuit” linguistic racism faced by his students.

“Students Need to Develop their Voice”: Mr. Baker’s Enactment of a Transnational Curriculum Through Linguistically and Sociopolitically Responsive Instruction

Mr. Baker was a social studies teacher at Metro Global High School. He explained that because all his students were immigrant learners, he intentionally included transnational curriculum topics in his teaching and capitalized on his students’ nontraditional funds of knowledge. For example, his unit on gender inequality included not only the MeToo anti-sexual harassment movement that originated in the United States, but also the story of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist who won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous and dangerous fight for girls’ right to education. By including transnational curriculum topics like this, Mr. Baker turned his classroom into a space that mirrored the lived experiences of his immigrant students in communities.

When teaching the unit, Mr. Baker also capitalized on students’ lived experiences and cultural understanding of gender in their home countries so that “the unit has entry points for every student in every country to share their experience, share what they already know, and then learn something new.” This pedagogical approach also validated his immigrant students’ nontraditional funds of knowledge by positioning them as legitimate knowledge holders and producers. Mr. Baker explained in the interview,

In every culture there are distinctions between men and women, and they’re often very similar and sometimes different from country to country. So, we start just talking about what those differences are, how do parents treat boys and girls differently? How do schools treat boys and girls differently in your country? Everyone can talk about that…. We have different background information that students have. But the idea that they can use that, they can bring that in, that can be celebrated. Students can learn from each other.

In addition to his intentional and asset-based approach, Mr. Baker’s classes featured both linguistically and sociopolitically responsive instruction, as manifested in the unit “Letters to Representatives.” In this unit, he integrated critical civic education and activism with language and literacy instruction. Students engaged in a range of learning experiences which supported and empowered them to write a letter to their elected representatives about an issue impacting their lives or their communities. They were guided to (a) understand how representative democracy works in the United States, (b) understand that writing letters is a democratic way of pushing for a change, (c) identify an issue that impacted their lives and learn about this issue through research and reading, (d) develop skills for writing a persuasive letter, and (e) write and mail their letters to their representatives about the issue that they wanted to address. Mr. Baker explained that his design of this unit was prompted by his intention to connect social studies to current events and students’ lives and his goal of developing his students’ writing skills:

So, the idea actually came after the 2016 election when President Trump was elected. It was a year where students were paying more attention to current events than maybe other years.… [It was] my first year teaching in this school [and] I had the goal of having a unit where students worked specifically on writing skills, because that particular year they hadn’t done as much writing of longer pieces. I wanted them to work on writing skills…. The other thing is, I have a friend who is a teacher and activist, and she is always trying to get me to write letters to representatives.

Mr. Baker’s unit design intentionally integrated language and literacy instruction into his social studies instruction, with explicit attention to the students’ linguistic needs and to the development of their writing skills. The writing instruction embedded in this unit featured a process-based approach that provided support to students across the various stages of the writing task. For example, after the identification of their focal issue, students were provided with a structured graphic organizer to brainstorm what they should learn and write about the issue. Subsequently, students learned the structure of a persuasive letter through analyzing two letters by Mr. Baker. He intentionally reorganized his letters into four paragraphs, with the claim, evidence, counterclaim or counter argument, and conclusion. Additionally, this unit also included a peer review process that allowed the students to not only provide feedback to peers but also gain a deeper understanding of the writing process. By providing scaffolding such as structured graphic organizers for brainstorming and explicit teaching of the discourse structure of a persuasive letter, Mr. Baker attended to his students’ linguistic needs. His inclusion of the peer review process also positioned his students agentively by allowing them to take ownership of their learning and empowering them to become an agent in the process of learning.

In addition to the linguistic responsiveness of his instruction, Mr. Baker’s focus on critical civic education featured sociopolitically responsive pedagogy (Bajaj et al., 2017). He tried to develop among students a cultural understanding of representative democracy in the United States, as most students had limited familiarity with the American context. He dedicated four lessons to teaching about who elected representative are and what they do, as well as how representative democracy works. He invited staffers from the local offices of their congressional representatives to give students an inside view of representative democracy. He believed that knowing more about representatives and what they do would actually help them “be more brought into the purpose of writing the letter.” Additionaly, he believed the leaders would be “inspirational” to his students, explaining,

In District X, we have XXX who’s Puerto Rican; so, for the Latino students, that’s powerful to see a very powerful, older Latina woman. XXX is an African American man in District X, and District X is XXX who is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. We have many Caribbean students; we have many Latino students; we have many Black students. I just felt that these were people who were potentially inspirational in a time where maybe the only political leader the students know is President Trump, who’s a leader that they don’t identify with either in his background or his beliefs.

Mr. Baker’s focus on critical civic education and letter writing as an act of activism was informed by his belief that “students need to develop their voice, as a writer, as an adolescent, as a member of New York City, as a member of a new community, a member of our school.” Even though his students were non-citizens, he instilled in them the critical civic responsibility that they were the constituents of their representatives, and that their representatives had a responsibility to represent them. To connect students to the agenda of their representatives, he asked his students to look at the twitter feeds of their representatives to see what they cared about. Through these learning activities carefully designed to develop his students’ critical understanding of representative democracy, Mr. Baker empowered them by raising their critical awareness of civic responsibility and sociopolitical issues that impacted their lives and their communities.

Indeed, the letters by his students indicated that they had developed “critical consciousness of issues of inequalities in their lives” (Bajaj et al., 2017), as evidenced in the wide range of issues they requested their representatives work on. These issues were deeply connected to issues related to their home countries, their communities, and their identities. Their concerns gravitated towards issues such as stopping the war and addressing the humanitarian disasters in Yemen, poverty relief for Ecuador, assisting political and economic crises in Venezuela, confronting Islamophobia, exploring a “pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants, global warming, gender equality and anti-sexual harassment, and fixing the city’s ill-functioning subway system.

This analysis shows that Mr. Baker’s instructional approach featured linguistically and sociopolitically responsive instruction that capitalized on students’ transnational fund of knowledge, attended to their linguistic needs, and empowered students through developing their activist literacy, raising their critical consciousness of inequality and critical civil engagement.

Discussion and Implications

This research contributes to our understanding of urban educators’ instructional practices and strategies that counteract the structural inequalities and challenges faced by low-SES immigrant and refugee learners and their families. Our findings show that these teachers are active and deliberate in their daily lesson planning and implementation and reflexive in their pedagogical decisions and actions. Their in-class instruction is connected with both their diverse students’ needs in school and their social realities outside school, as well as their transnational experiences and contexts.

As anticipated, each teacher’s instructional practices are unique to their specific personal experiences and professional contexts. Mr. Thomas, a white, middle-class ESL teacher with significant international experience, saw his students’ linguistic, academic, and social, and material needs first-hand by trying to improve his students’ English literacy as quickly as possible. He also noted their lack of books and extracurricular activities due to the two class systems entrenched in the city and started to advocate for the families outside of school. Similarly, seeing himself as both a language and a content-area teacher, Mr. Wilson actively scaffolded his students’ language learning in science teaching by facilitating social interaction and active questioning. Further, he intentionally employed a translanguaging pedagogy (Garcia & Wei, 2014) to “short circuit” linguistic racism and marginalization faced by his students. In a similar vein, in addition to addressing his students’ linguistic needs, Mr. Baker saw his immigrant students’ transnational experiences as untapped “funds of knowledge” (González et al., 2005) and intentionally incorporated the students’ lived transnational experiences and cultural understandings of inequity (i.e., gender) into his civic lessons. As well, he engaged students in authentic letter-writing projects to local politicians to effect change on real-world issues connected to students’ lives in their local communities.

Indeed, the diverse critical instructional pedagogies that these teachers enacted suggest that their agentic actions differed according to their respective social worlds in terms of the students they represent, the communities they teach in, the subject that they teach, and the schools in which they work (Sewell, 1992). Their agency and instructional practices were also shaped and constrained by their school contexts. Although it seemed that Mr. Thomas’s instructional practices, with an emphasis on supporting students’ learning through attending to their linguistic and social needs to learn the dominant language and culture, might not appear to be “novel”, it is critical to understand that he was working with constraints such as a lack of instructional support from the school and a larger group of students and a school culture that was culture- and color-blind. His agency was enacted through his own effort, despite these contextual constraints. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Baker enacted more holistic, integrated instruction linking language and literacy instruction with content but also with more critical progressive agendas, which was partially attributable to the pedagogical approaches that their school took and the professional development opportunities the school offered. Despite these differences, collectively the three teachers’ stories suggest that teachers possess the agentic capacity to become curriculum makers and can activate their agentic capacity in diverse agentic spaces of their subject matter, classrooms, schools, and students’ communities (Priestley et al., 2016, p. 136).

As a whole, the teachers’ individual agentic actions and practices reflected urban educators’ “collective struggles and resistances” against the structural sanctions in urban society (Sewell, 1992, p. 21). All the teachers attended to the cultural and linguistic disconnect and the associated challenges in academic learning that their students encountered in an unfamiliar and unfriendly school system. They made sure the students could master “the code of power” (Delpit, 1995) through diverse instructional scaffolding, such as balanced literacy instruction (Mr. Thomas), translanguaging (Mr. Wilson), and content-based language instruction (all teachers). All of the teachers combated the deficit views of the immigrant and refugee students by adopting asset-based perspectives on their languages, cultures, and transnational experiences which in turn created a safe space for learning. All the teachers also practiced authentic caring (Noddings, 1992): Mr. Thomas by helping the families with a clothing drive and extracurricular participation; Mr. Wilson by taking extra courses to learn students’ languages; and Mr. Baker by helping his students to form their voices in their own communities. All the teachers also pursued academic rigor through thoughtfully planned content instruction that affirmed students’ diverse languages and experiences including their transnational funds of knowledge. Finally, all engaged in advocacy in different ways for different purposes: Mr. Thomas advocated for extracurricular activities; Mr. Wilson for the place of students’ first languages in the classroom; and Mr. Baker for students’ voices in the community. The results are promising: Many of Mr. Thomas’s students developed a love for reading; Mr. Wilson’s students were positive about their cultural identities; and Mr. Baker’s students gained “critical consciousness of issues of inequalities in their lives” (Bajaj et al., 2017). By attending to students’ linguistic, cultural, and experiential assets and connecting in-class learning with their social realities outside schools, these teachers as “change agents” are ensuring that the students’ schooling empowers them to rewrite different future trajectories (Li, 2013a, 2021).

These teachers’ stories have important implications for teacher education and professional development. Given that urban school teachers are increasingly impacted by funding cuts, resource shortages, and adverse conditions, and the increasing rate of teacher attrition, it is critical to emphasize teacher agency development in their professional learning. Since teachers are central to school-based curriculum enactment, supporting teachers to develop “agentic capacity” to reshape and remake curriculum to resist marginalization and social inequity in their day to day work is of paramount significance. Although how the teachers developed their agentic capability as demonstrated in this report was beyond the scope of this study, their stories suggest the importance of teachers’ life histories and professional preparations as well as their immersive experiences in the communities they teach. As well, it is also important to attend to what Priestley et al. (2016) call a practical-evaluative dimension of teacher agency development which includes teachers’ cultural values and beliefs, ability in forming social support structures (i.e., the curriculum decision team in Metro Global High), and ability to identify material resources for change.That is, teacher education must focus on developing not only teachers’ agentic capacity, but also their understanding of the contextual conditions under which teachers act so they can translate their agentic repertoire into action (Priestley et al., 2016). Future research must further examine how to effectively prepare teachers with these capabilities as well as explore the factors that shape the teachers’ agentic actions in diverse teaching contexts.