Bryant Jensen

Hawaiʻi Creole, known as “Pidgin,” developed when speakers of various languages came to the islands as plantation workers and their children grew up speaking Pidgin. Discrimination toward Pidgin influenced language policies that marginalized Pidgin and its speakers. This study focused on four teachers’ perspectives of Pidgin and its marginalization and use in classrooms. The educators were engaged in professional development on small group discussion. Data sources included transcripts of discussions about Pidgin and its use in the classroom, teachers’ written reflections, and comments on each other’s reflections. Results indicated that the teachers observed the perpetuation of negative views about Pidgin. One teacher recounted that she initially appropriated these negative ideas, but changed her views while in college. Although some were initially unsure about Pidgin’s role in their classrooms, by the end of the professional development they appeared to have positive views about promoting all of their students’ linguistic repertoires.

Animating equity in teaching and learning depends on teacher dispositionsorientations to self, others, and society that underlie how we think and act. Teacher dispositions are virtues or qualities of moral character that modify the ways we interact with students and educator colleagues. Although interest in measuring to improve teaching and teacher education has grown recently, most measures lack validity evidence for practical usefulness. Integrating Messicks unified validity framework with Janssen et al.s notion of practicality (as face validity), we find through an iterative, mixed-methods analysis of interviews with equitable educators and survey responses from teacher candidates that incorporating recognizability, relevance, and feasibility concerns of equity disposition concepts (i.e., Social Awareness, Meekness, Advocacy for Students) within survey items enhances item-to-factor structure of a self-report measure. We discuss implications (a) to develop and appraise formative measures and (b) to support teacher learning and development to become equitable educators.

We identify contributions in this special issue in terms of two essential ways of threading systemic change for language equity in schools: theories/concepts from school governance down to classroom practice, and values/morals from practical realities in classrooms up. We characterize language equity as a sense of belonging and meaningful participation in academic activity for linguistically-minoritized students, and show how threading concepts and values for systemic change requires concerted collaborations with educators as well as interdisciplinary frameworks and research methods. Further collaborations are needed to explicate moral commitments for language equity, to align concepts and values, and to examine coherence in school policies and classroom practices.

Some argue that supporting minoritized students academic language (AL) development fosters equity in education. Others contend that AL is hegemonic, and that attempts to teach it perpetuate inequities across racial, ethnic, social class, immigrant, and related sociocultural and linguistic student differences. In this article, we frame the topic of this special issueinterdisciplinary approaches to equity in teaching ALand show how authors across positions and analytic methods examine the goals of teaching AL and recommend ways for educators to foster meaningful language awareness for students. Although substantive, unresolved disagreements between positions remain; we identify points of agreement as well, which we present to educators as interdisciplinary principles of equity in teaching. Namely, educators should 1) understand how language is more than just vocabulary; 2) recognize academic features in students everyday talk; 3) develop awareness of language and its contexts of use with students, and 4) foster critical language awareness.

Teaching reading to children from minoritized communities in ways that are both effective and meaningful is demanding and complex work. It requires educators to integrate their knowledge of (a) the various skills involved in reading, (b) assisting children to learn to read, and (c) the everyday sociocultural practices and identities of young readers. Weaving firsthand experiences of the 2nd author, Dr. Patricia Edwards (or Pat), as a young Black girl in the Deep South in 1955 with moral philosophy and a review of extant research, we identify 3 principles for transforming opportunities for Black children to become successful readers. That is, we assert that teaching reading equitably (a) requires the exercise of <i>teacher dispositional virtue</i>; (b) requires support for teachers to make <i>reasoned pedagogical judgments</i> on behalf of Black and other minoritized children; and (c) provides teachers and their students alike with <i>moral rewards</i> that are inherent to the practice of equitable teaching. We offer actionable recommendations for teachers, school leaders, parents, and teacher educators.

This study examines transcripts of collaborations among an experienced team of sixth-grade teachers in southern California to determine the extent to which the framework for Pedagogically Productive Talk (PPT; Lefstein, Vedder-Weiss & Segal, 2020) is a useful tool for examining teachers collaborative discourse. Based on our analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, PPT contributed to a thorough and meaningful analysis of the substance and progression of teacher collaborations. This case study highlights the value of efficient focus on a robust problem of practice and provides an operationalization of the PPT framework that tracks discourse over the course of one meeting.

Language in education for children and youth from low-income communities of color, including those learning English as an additional language, has been fraught for decades with ideological entanglements, conceptual ambiguities, and empirical limitations. Meanwhile, the teacher learning challenge to implement equitable teaching practices remains largely unresolved. With an eye towards improving <b><i>equitable classroom talk</i></b> (ECT)i.e., meaningful participation in disciplinary practices through communal and connected language interactionsfor all students from minoritized communities, we integrate research on additional language development, disciplinary practices, sociocultural classroom interactions, and teacher learning. We recommend researcher-educator collaborations (a) develop indicators of ECT, (b) use lesson videos to make ECT visible, and (c) develop and test materials to support and scale teacher learning to enact ECT.

Teaching reading is more complex than reading, especially when teaching students from minoritized communities. Teaching reading equitably requires educators to integrate their knowledge of skills involved in reading, assisting students to learn to read, and everyday sociocultural practices and identities of readers. In this article, I examine what research has found across methodological traditions regarding teaching reading equitably, as well as what still needs to be explored. For the science of reading community, I frame equitable teaching as effective in assisting student reading performance and meaningful in terms of integrating values and practices from minoritized students everyday lives. Drawing largely on interpretive research, I identify sociocultural processes in teaching reading that connect with minoritized students everyday identities and experiences, support student initiative and expression, and foster collaborative relationships in the classroom to assist student participation and performance in reading. To advance the science of teaching reading equitably, I recommend that pluralistic research build generalizable evidence regarding effects of equitable teaching on reading and language gains for minoritized students, mechanisms in teaching reading equitably, and processes and materials to support teacher learning to sustain implementation of equitable practices to teach reading.

We trace the development and analyze the generalizability of the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI), an observation system designed to measure cultural dimensions of classroom interactions. We establish CASI measurement properties by analyzing panoramic videos of 4th and 5th grade classrooms from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and argue for its significance in terms of achievement opportunity for minoritized students and needed evidence regarding equitable teaching. We frame ten dimensions of sociocultural interactions within three domains: Life Applications (i.e., connections with what students know and do outside of school); Self in Group (i.e., interdependence to motivate learning and foster social identities); and Agency (i.e., how freedom and choice are managed).

We demonstrate how measurement error is associated with raters, lessons, and lesson segments, and discuss implications for CASI refinement, as well as appropriate instrument uses to enrich learning opportunities for minoritized students across a variety of classroom settings.