ADVOCACY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING

ADVOCACY IN ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TEACHING
AND LEARNING
Edited by Heather A. Linville
and James Whiting
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7
EXPLORING ADVOCACY IN AN
ELEMENTARY ESL AFTERSCHOOL
PROGRAM IN THE UNITED STATES
Empirically, What’s There?
Jackie Ridley, Nicole King, Esther Hye-min Yoon,
and Youngjoo Yi
Given the quickly changing and largely hostile nature of politics at the national
and local level in the United States following the 2016 election, the study of
advocacy has become an increasingly important aspect of English language
teaching (ELT). In this political environment, “a quality education and school
experience for immigrant and refugee youth should thus remain a central con-
cern for educators and community stakeholders in public schools” (Amthor &
Roxas, 2016, p. 155). Language teachers in a variety of learning and teaching
contexts will play an important role in the educational experiences of all stu-
dents, but most significantly English learners (ELs) new to the U.S. As posited
by TESOL research, English language teachers play a vital role in advocacy for
these ELs (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2008; Whiting, 2016). However, how do
teachers in context define advocacy? How do they enact advocacy? Given the
paucity of empirical research in these areas, this study seeks to address these
questions in an informal, afterschool English language learning context.
In this chapter, we report findings from a qualitative research study in which
we examined how advocacy issues were manifested by four English as a second
language (ESL) teachers (colloquially called “tutors”) and their students at the
North Riverside elementary ESL afterschool program for refugee and immi-
grant youth in a Midwestern U.S. city (all names of participants and places are
pseudonyms). In focusing on how tutors describe and conceptualize their roles
as advocates for refugee and immigrant ELs and how they “notic[ed] challenges
to ELLs’ educational success and [took] action” (Linville, 2014, p. 2), this study
sheds light on the local, emergent, and dynamic nature of advocacy in informal
ELT settings (e.g., afterschool programs) and problematizes current definitions
of advocacy in context. The following research questions guided our inquiry:
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88 Jackie Ridley et al.
(1) What is the tutors’ understanding of their role as advocates for ELs, if any,
and how does this understanding influence their efforts of advocacy at North
Riverside?
(2) How and to what extent do the tutors enact advocacy, if at all, in the context
of the ESL afterschool program?
Advocacy for English Learners
Advocacy for ELs critically locates the social and material inequities present in
increasing monolingual, English-only practices and policies. Staehr Fenner (2014)
defines advocacy for ELs as “working for ELs’ equitable and excellent education
by taking appropriate actions on their behalf” (p. 8). Linville (2014) suggests
advocating for ELs includes:
Speaking up, sharing information, or providing resources, for ELLs and/or
their families, with other potential co-advocates at the classroom, school,
community, state, or national level, in order to improve ELLs’ treatment
and access to educational resources with the larger goal of improving their
life chances.
(pp. 2–3)
In agreement that advocacy efforts are not a “one-size-fits-all approach” (Staehr
Fenner, 2014, p. 8), Dubetz and de Jong (2011) found advocacy activities vary
depending on the teacher and context, both in and out of school. Their literature
review on bilingual teacher advocacy suggests advocacy efforts take place in class-
rooms where students have space to construct and to voice stories that resist a deficit
view of ELs. As part of this effort, teachers must build curriculum that acknowledges
and connects to the unique linguistic and cultural experiences of their students.
In addition, de Oliveira and Athanases (2007) observed that new teachers who
recently graduated from a teacher education program regularly engaged in vari-
ous efforts of advocacy, such as allowing ELs to practice and use English in a low
risk environment, rejecting monolingual biases, tailoring classroom instruction and
intervention for ELs, and promoting discussions of important socio-political issues
related to their lives. However, these advocacy efforts were challenging to enact
and often came with a price: teachers described how advocacy was mediated by
the exhaustion of working in “contexts not always supportive or well-resourced for
ELLs” (de Oliveira & Athanases, 2007, p. 213).
With regards to advocacy beyond the classroom, Haneda and Alexander (2015)
reported that ESL teachers who displayed high levels of intercultural competence
regularly engaged in out-of-school advocacy efforts, such as visiting student homes
and holding workshops for parents in their communities. O’Donnell and Kirkner
(2014) studied the impact of a family involvement program for Latino students,
their parents and their teachers. The authors found that parents involved in this
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Exploring Advocacy in an Elementary ESL Afterschool Program in the United States 89
bilingual, collaborative training program learned how to better advocate for their
children, and both parents and teachers reported improvements in the quantity
and quality of family-teacher communication, family involvement in school, and
in overall home-school relationships.
While these studies collectively indicate that advocacy activities and efforts
vary depending on the teacher and the context, research is beginning to explore
advocacy in informal ELT settings. To this end, we report how four tutors at an
ESL afterschool program enact advocacy for ELs on a day-to-day basis.
Theoretical Framework
Critical Applied Linguistics (CAL), following the work of Freire (1970), lies
at the intersection of many critical areas within the broader domain of applied
linguistics. Pennycook (2001) defines CAL not merely as the addition of critical
dimensions to applied linguistics, but as an effort to problematize the givens in
this field. Emphasizing how “critical theory springs from an assumption that we
live amid a world of pain, that much can be done to alleviate that pain, and that
theory has a crucial role to play in that process” (p. 3) He also stresses the “criti-
cal” component of CAL and insists CAL should progress beyond the alleviation
of pain to transformative change by finding ways to contextualize and to map
global and local relations.
From the perspective of Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP), Godley and
Minnici (2008) describe how language has the potential to “identify and critique
dominant language ideologies,” engage in “dialogism,” and discuss “students’ exist-
ing understandings and uses of language” (p. 323). This conceptualization of CLP
builds on the work of Freire (1970), who viewed language as integral to existence:
“To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it” (p. 88). As language is not
simply a static acquisition, but a timely site of struggles that permeates the class-
room walls, there is a need to challenge and to question the givens. In this chapter,
data analysis focuses on how ESL tutors constructed and enacted advocacy in and
through language. Findings from our study thus inform how English teachers can
think “about and beyond the relations between structure and agency” (Pennycook,
2001, p. 143) to engender contextualized advocacy.
Methodology
Context and Participants
The context for this study is a grant-funded afterschool ESL program at North
Riverside elementary, a public school in a mid-sized Midwestern city. The pro-
gram was initially operated by a local community college’s language institute in
response to the request of parents who attended an adult ESL class offered in
the North Riverside community. While the program is still operated out of the
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college’s community and civic engagement division, the program is now funded
through the U.S. Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning
Centers Program, an initiative under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that
provides grant funding to states to create before and after school activities that
advance student achievement. Grant funds are awarded on the state level, and
individual programs or organizations may apply for funding through their state’s
Department of Education.
The North Riverside program is unique from other afterschool contexts in that
it is designed exclusively for refugee and immigrant students in second through
fifth grade who are learning English as an additional language. Inclusion in the
program is determined by state-mandated standardized tests: students who dem-
onstrate the “highest need” for support in their English language development
based on their test scores are given priority for admission. While the majority of
the forty-five students enrolled in the program speak Arabic, Nepali, or Spanish,
over a dozen different languages and home countries are represented by both stu-
dents and tutors on-site. All students who attend the afterschool program qualify
for the state’s free or reduced school lunch program.
The focal participants are four tutors at the North Riverside ESL afterschool
program: Luke, Amelia, Sadie, and Julia. They are all white, native-English
speakers between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, and each participant has
worked for the ESL afterschool program at North Riverside for over a year. Luke
is a tutor and the site coordinator for North Riverside, and he is thus responsible
for hiring and managing the ESL tutors and for the daily programming schedule.
As tutors, Amelia, Sadie, and Julia are responsible for providing homework help
and targeted reading support to a group of students from a particular grade over
the course of the year. Before becoming a tutor at North Riverside, Amelia was
a site coordinator for an afterschool program at a nearby middle school. With the
exception of Sadie, who holds a state-issued teaching license and has experience
in several U.S. classroom settings, all of the tutors at North Riverside reported
that they lacked classroom teaching experience and “formal” teacher training,
and the North Riverside afterschool program does not have official training for
its tutors. However, all four tutors who participated in this study had previous
ESL teaching experience in various classroom contexts domestically and abroad.
Data Collection and Analysis
Data for this project was comprised of three main sources: audio recordings
of open-ended interviews, participant observations at the afterschool program,
and the first author’s field notes. In interviewing, the first author did not use
a structured protocol, but rather allowed participant interest and responses to
dictate how the interview unfolded. Data analysis and data collection occurred
simultaneously and recursively throughout the study: interviews and field notes
were reviewed within twenty-four hours of recording with special attention to
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data relevant to the research focus, and audio recordings with salient points were
transcribed in part or in whole. Transcriptions and field notes were then coded
and analyzed for patterns on an ongoing basis (Blommaert & Jie, 2011).
As significant themes emerged, the first author continually read and reviewed
the entire data corpus and wrote conceptual memos (Hammersley & Atkinson,
2007) in an attempt to create an accurate narrative of teacher advocacy at North
Riverside. Throughout this iterative analytical process, the following themes
related to tutors’ conceptions and enactment of advocacy emerged across
transcripts and were coded accordingly: advocacy as welcoming, advocacy as
voicing, and advocacy as promoting student learning. Advocacy as welcoming refers
to tutors’ desires and active attempts to create spaces where students feel wel-
comed, cared for, and accepted. Advocacy as voicing occurs when tutors act on
behalf of their students. Finally, advocacy as promoting student learning encompasses
tutor efforts to advocate for and take actions to promote the equitable and high-
quality education of ELs in formal and in informal contexts.
Findings and Discussion
Advocacy as Welcoming
Being a welcoming, accepting presence for the students at North Riverside was one
of salient themes in the tutors’ articulated conceptions of themselves as advocates. In
the following examples, the tutors explain their active, purposeful efforts to welcome
students at North Riverside. Luke and Julia explicitly emphasize how welcoming is
especially crucial since most of society rejects refugees and immigrants. The excerpt
below from a conversation with Luke exemplifies how he understands and enacts
advocacy as welcoming:
I think there’s a certain number of times refugees or anybody in particular
can be told ‘no’ or be told “I don’t want you,” and as refugee status they’ve
been told that many times throughout their lives. So, then to finally get
somewhere where they’re told “yes” and “you’re accepted” is not only the
objective of our program, but of me as person.
Julia also describes how she views herself as a cultural liaison and welcomes ELs
in her role as a tutor at North Riverside:
I’m just an advocate for people from different cultures in general [. . .] I feel
like I can be a liaison or at least be like, “hey, I know that sometimes you
feel like you’re not welcome here but you are,” you know? So that’s my
favorite part, is helping them feel like this is a place where they belong, and
if they need anything, that there are people that will help them.
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In describing herself as an advocate for her students, Sadie explains how she
views advocacy as welcoming to be the “natural consequence of caring.” When
I pressed Sadie to explain this connection, she elaborated:
If you truly care for a child and they’re going through something that they
need help with, you’re going to want to find a way to help them through
that. That’s definitely—that would be a natural step. If you care about
them, you’re going to want to do everything you can to help them.
These excerpts reveal that for these three tutors, advocacy, welcoming, and caring are
inseparable. It is also evident that Luke and Julia specifically are attuned to the largely
hostile discourses surrounding refugees and immigrants in the current socio-political
climate of the United States, and they use this awareness to inform their efforts as
advocates for the students at North Riverside. As Amthor and Roxas (2016) explain,
“when wider social discourses are imbued with anti-immigrant sentiment, schools
need to still provide the space where educators have an important and powerful reach
to impact the adaptation and well-being of students” (p. 171). Luke, Julia, and Sadie’s
efforts to create a welcoming environment for refugee and immigrant ELs is thus an
agentive and crucial advocacy effort.
Advocacy as Voicing
Tutors at North Riverside also reported voicing, or “speaking for youth in need”
(Athanases & de Oliveira, 2007, p. 128), in the way they regularly engaged in
advocacy on behalf of their students. Advocacy in ELT contexts involves “stepping
in and providing a voice for those students—and their families—who have not yet
developed their own strong voice in their education” (Staehr Fenner, 2014, p. 8).
One of the most frequent contexts tutors reported voicing for students was in con-
versations with classroom teachers and school personnel. Amelia and Luke shared
about how they advocate on behalf of students with classroom teachers.
In the following excerpt, Amelia describes a particularly powerful example of
how she acted as an advocate on multiple levels for one student through voicing:
With teachers, I try to advocate for grace and patience. There is one girl who
constantly gets detention because she’s always late and that’s because her apart-
ment is kept completely dark and there’s no clocks and nobody in her family
tries to help her wake up, so it’s really hard for her to wake up. So, when I
advocate for her, to her I’m talking about “you need to find a way to make this
work, like, this is something that you have to push through and figure out.”
But then on the teacher’s side with the administrators I can explain this is a
genuine thing that she doesn’t have the ability to solve exactly, and detention
really isn’t solving the problem. So, by me advocating for her, not only did the
detentions stop, but the principal actually bought her an alarm clock.
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Luke, who has also spent time in students’ homes, identifies some of the different
ways he advocates for students through voicing:
I’m an advocate for them on a tutor level, when tutors want certain kids to
be kicked out I can speak to some of those issues, because I know things
going on behind the scenes. And, when evaluators come out and see prob-
lems, I can really speak to them and just give a little bit of context. Even
when teachers come to me and ask about behavioral problems or if kids
should be on an IEP [individualized education plan], they want my advice.
So, I can really speak for kids and just say I think their sole problem is
English learning, or some of the kids, they just need glasses. We were able
to speak to a need as simple as that.
In the quotations above, Amelia and Luke indicated several ways they advocate
for students through voicing. First, the tutors explain how they advocate for stu-
dents with classroom teachers and school personnel. Similar to the implications
found by de Oliveira and Athanases (2007) and Staehr Fenner (2014), it is evi-
dent from the stories Amelia and Luke shared that their individual relationships
with students and involvement with families allowed them to be more aware of
students’ needs and enabled them to advocate appropriately and effectively on
behalf of students. Specifically, their students needed glasses, not an IEP, and an
alarm clock, not detention. Second, their willingness to stand up to co-workers,
classroom teachers, school administrators and program evaluators is no small feat,
as “critiquing institutional practices and building alternatives” is often rare among
ESL teachers, especially those who do not feel empowered to deviate from school
norms (de Oliveira & Athanases, 2007, p. 210). In speaking on behalf of students
to other authority figures, Amelia and Luke advocate for the voices of students to
be present in the practices and policies for the ELs at North Riverside, resulting
in improved instructional and institutional decisions.
Further, Julia reports how she advocates on behalf of her students not only
with teachers, but with their parents: “With their parents, [I offer] reassurance
that there are things that their kids can do really well, so we don’t need to
focus on the things that they don’t know how to do, even though they need
improvement.” Julia helps her students’ parents combat predominant defi-
cit educational ideologies about multilingualism. According to Nieto (2006),
drawing on students’ strengths and talents in education “requires a rejection
of the deficit perspective that has characterized much of the education of
marginalized students” (p. 6), and acknowledging that ELs can bring valu-
able linguistic, cultural, and experiential resources to the classroom. As Julia
encourages parents to take an asset-based approach to their student’s language
learning and skills, she helps them to “recognize and celebrate the linguis-
tic and cultural resources that emergent bilinguals bring to the classroom”
(Dubetz & de Jong, 2011, p. 251).
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Advocacy as Promoting Student Learning
The tutors also discussed the importance of student learning as part of their efforts
of advocacy. While tutors tended to focus more on the social and relational
aspects of teaching, student learning regularly came up as an area of concern dur-
ing interviews and informal conversations. For example, Julia’s response when I
asked her about job satisfaction demonstrates how students’ academic growth was
a point of encouragement for her as a tutor:
Miss Sanders was telling me how Geeta got the highest score on their math
test, and actually all of my students did pretty well. Miss Sanders was like, ‘I
don’t know what you’re doing with them but it works.’ Or even Arturo has
grown a lot: A month ago we were reading a book and I had to say every other
word for him, and last week he was reading all the sentences by himself. When
I can see that my students have improved, I’m encouraged and motivated.
Also emphasizing the importance of student learning, Sadie describes how she
wished she had more time to deliver targeted lessons (colloquially referred to as
“teacher time” at North Riverside) to her students:
I would also love to have [daily programming] be longer so that I can have
my own teacher time, and be able to do my own version of intervention with
my students, since I am a teacher. Then, I can kind of target what they need
even more closely. I would love for there to be more time to do stuff like that.
Sadie’s desire to provide instruction that “targets” what her students need “even
more closely” than the present tutoring curriculum is indicative of her commit-
ment to her students’ academic achievement. If indeed “advocating for equity
begins with a focus on student learning” (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2008, p. 67),
both Julia’s and Sadie’s commitment to student learning and growth is an impor-
tant enactment of advocacy.
In her efforts of advocacy to promote student learning, Amelia explains how
she focuses less on academic achievement and more on helping students learn to
solve problems for themselves:
I want the kids to be empowered and to not make themselves victims or to
make excuses. It’s important to recognize, and that’s why I do lots of work
talking about goals and obstacles. There’s always goals and obstacles in your
life, and there are obstacles in my life, too. The obstacles in our lives are
different, but we all have obstacles to overcome.
As a teacher advocate in this situation, Amelia employed Staehr Fenner’s (2014)
concept of “scaffolded advocacy” where advocacy involves “support[ing] ELs
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and their families to be able to advocate for themselves” (p. 17). Though research
has shown how caring for refugee and immigrant students can often manifest as
lowered expectations (Amthor & Roxas, 2016), Amelia resists this trap and holds
her students to high standards while also showing genuine empathy and care.
Advocacy in Action: Pedagogical Implications and
Future Directions
For the tutors at North Riverside, advocacy permeates every aspect of the after-
school program, as welcoming, as voicing, and as promoting student learning. Put
simply, “advocacy involves ESOL teachers noticing challenges to ELLs’ educational
success and taking action” (Linville, 2014, p. 2) in contextualized learning sites and
with understanding of ELs’ past, present, and desired future pathways. Our findings
suggest all teachers of language learners, regardless of formal or informal teaching
settings, can develop a nuanced understanding of their students and of the contexts
in which they work. However, even as teachers enact meaningful advocacy within
their teaching and learning contexts, the sustainability of their efforts will be in part
dependent upon “administrators at both school and district levels develop[ing] a
comprehensive understanding of what the education of ELs requires” (Haneda &
Alexander, 2015, p. 157). The extent to which school districts work with teacher
education programs to prepare teachers for the multifaceted nature of advocacy will
be determinant of how advocacy is realized in practice (Haneda & Alexander, 2015).
These partnerships in and of themselves have the potential to help promote advocacy
as welcoming, voicing, and student learning.
Findings from this study have applications for teacher education programs and
for teachers in various ELT contexts. First, this study underscores the need to
directly prepare teachers—especially those who will work with ELs—for advo-
cacy work. Teachers who have been taught to take action on behalf of their
students and who are prepared for the potential challenges they will encounter
in their work as advocates are more likely to initiate, endure and succeed in
advocacy efforts (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2008). Second, this study emphasizes
the role of caring in teacher advocacy. The tutors at North Riverside demon-
strate how caring for ELs includes respect for, knowledge of, and a willingness
to engage in outreach on behalf of students and their families (Nieto, 2006).
Teacher preparation and professional development programs should emphasize
how caring for students is an integral part of not only being an effective teacher,
but being an effective advocate as well.
Finally, the testimonies of the tutors in this study reiterate the relationship between
teacher confidence and high quality preparation in pedagogy and content knowledge.
As Staehr Fenner (2014) describes, “the greater a teacher’s preparation for working
with ELs, the more professionally competent that teacher feels to teach them and the
more responsibility that teacher takes on for ELs achievement” (p. 16). As an integral
aspect of ELT advocacy is providing and promoting high-quality education for ELs,
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equipping pre-service teachers with the knowledge, experiences, and skills essential
to teaching ELs must remain a keystone of teacher education programs.
In this chapter, we discussed how the tutors at North Riverside conceptual-
ized and engaged in advocacy for refugee and immigrant ELs in informal spaces.
However, we did not fully explore the possibilities and effectiveness of tutors’
advocacy efforts, nor the conditions that make advocacy challenging for the
tutors at North Riverside. Therefore, we hope future research on advocacy in
ELT in both formal and informal spaces will promote a more nuanced, dynamic
and localized understanding of this complex and important topic. Explorations
into the possibilities, challenges and effectiveness of advocacy will develop a more
comprehensive understanding of how teachers can act as advocates within local-
ized teaching and learning contexts on behalf of all students.
Reflection Questions
1. How do you define advocacy in context? How is teacher advocacy for ELs
in informal learning contexts similar to and different from advocacy in more
formal contexts?
2. What are potential challenges to advocacy work in your teaching context?
What are some practical steps you can take to engage in advocacy in your
teaching context?
3. To what extent do you think advocacy in ELT is connected to social justice?
How can teacher education programs better equip teachers to be advocates
for ELs in formal and informal contexts?
References
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Re-imagining a more inclusive vision for immigrant and refugee students. Educational
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Athanases, S. Z. & de Oliveira, L. C. (2007). Conviction, confrontation, and risk in
new teachers’ advocating for equity. Teaching Education, 18(2), 123–136. https://doi.
org/10.1080/10476210701325150
Athanases, S. Z. & de Oliveira, L. C. (2008). Advocacy for equity in classrooms and
beyond: New teachers challenges and responses. Teacher College Record, 110(1), 64–104.
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