Bilingual teachers’ professional capital

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss bilingual teachers’ professional capita professionalism in relation to ‘travelling teachers’, who only have a few brief weekly encounters with students and colleagues. By applying a triangulation design, bilingual teachers were given a voice through personal interviews, which were combined with selected data from the observations of the teachers during their working hours at the different schools. Our findings support previous research on bilingual teachers’ participation in professional learning communities and suggest that bilingual teachers lack professional capital in some areas. However, we found that the bilingual teachers in this study are in possession of essential and valuable competence not accounted for by the concept; consequently, we argue that the concept of professional capital has shortcomings in terms of providing a comprehensive and complete understanding of teacher professionalism.