Into the Figured Worlds of First Grade Teachers: Perceptions and Enactments of Instructional Grouping and Differentiation for English Learners in New South Classroom Contexts

1 online resource (189 pages) : PDF

2014

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The seven-month participatory qualitative inquiry (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011) explored how a first grade team in a metro Charlotte elementary school perceived and enacted instructional grouping and differentiation for English Learners within a prescribed literacy curriculum. Informed by a Vygotskian theoretical framework for understanding the social construction of teacher identity (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998), the study examined how institutionalized practices interacted with teachers' lived experiences and professional subjectivities to mediate how they made sense of and potentially improvised their teaching of the English Learners in and outside of mainstream classrooms. Data analysis revealed the complexities of teachers' professional selves as they made sense of their teaching within the structure of "Balanced Literacy." Findings included teachers' recasting of English Learners as "struggling readers;" the ambiguity of ESL within the context of the standardized reading curriculum; and, finally, the conflicting subjectivities of teachers as they negotiated the remediation of English Learners.

doctoral dissertations

Teachers--Training of
Reading
English language--Study and teaching--Foreign speakers

Ph.D.

Ability Grouping
Balanced Literacy
Differentiation
English Learners
Esl Program Models
Reading Instruction

Curriculum & Instruction

Salas, Spencer

Heafner, Tina
Perez, Theresa
D'Amico, Mark

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2014.

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Plaisance_uncc_0694D_10578

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:431