Racializing ESOL Teacher Identities in U. S. K—12 Public Schools

Abstract

Through a year-long critical feminist ethnography, this article examines the challenges faced by beginning K – 12 ESOL teachers in the United States as they grappled with the signifi cance of their own racial identities in the process of negotiating the inherent racialization of ESOL in their language teaching contexts. I foreground the signifi cance of race in the teaching, language, and identities of four K – 12 public school teachers; three White and one Korean American, whose orientations were specifi cally antiracist. The study examined the implications of teachers’ privileged status as native speakers of standard English, a raced category, within an institutional culture that underscored the supremacy of both Whiteness and native speaker status. The study found the teachers’ practice to be complexifi ed by their attentiveness to their own and their students’ racial identities and by their consciousness of the situatedness of their practice within a broader sociopolitical context. The fi ndings also illustrated the ways in which the teachers negotiated spaces in which they could challenge the silent privilege accorded to Standard American English by problematizing school policies surrounding World English and African American Vernacular English. Implications for theory, practice of teaching English to speakers of other languages, teacher education, and professional development are discussed. So I got the book Counting in Korea. … On the cover, there’s a picture of a [boy wearing a] traditional Korean outfi t. All the kids looked at it and said: “He looks like you.” So he looked at it and said: “He’s stinky! Stinky boy.” And he pushed it away.