ABSTRACT
Our work is informed by work on faculty learning communities (FLCs) as powerful catalysts for initiating, developing, and sustaining faculty involvement in professional development (Cox, 2001, 2004; Decker Lardner, 2003; Hubball & Burt, 2004; Richlin & Cox, 2004; Richlin & Essington, 2004). FLCs are promising contexts for constructing meaningful local knowledge, challenging assumptions, posing problems, studying faculty/student learning and development, and reconstructing curriculum (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Cole & Knowles, 2000; Cox, 2004). The learning community model encourages institutional cultural transformation by inviting faculty to cross social, disciplinary, pedagogical, and curricular boundaries (Decker Lardner, 2003; Petrone, 2004). In our work, the FLC provided a context through which to engage in a collaborative and self-reflective process of professional development toward culturally and linguistically responsive teaching. As teacher educators and researchers, we share Freire’s (1970) call for praxis: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p. 33). We strive to employ culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogyinstruction that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically, by drawing upon cultural referents in the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Ladson-Billings, 1995), recognizing that students’ languages, cultures, and prior experiences must be at the instructional center in order for meaningful learning to occur. Self-reflection is central to our vision and enactment of critically engaged pedagogy. Over time, our work in the collaborative peer environment of the FLC led to shared selfstudy (Clift, 2004) of the recursive processes of revising and implementing ELL-infused courses based on our developing knowledge and dispositions around culturally and linguistically responsive TE. Within this approach, we blend narrative theory with constructivist learning through collaborative dialogic practice, thus opening spaces for talking and writing in ways that might otherwise be silenced.
