Manka Varghese

Teacher education

Daniels, J. & Varghese, M. (2019). Troubling Practice: Exploring the relationship between Whiteness and practice-based teacher education in considering a raciolinguicized teacher subjectivity. Educational Researcher . In this essay, we argue that teacher education is increasingly marginalizing the relevance of teacher subjectivity and recentering Whiteness, especially in its uptake of practice-based teacher education. Whereas teacher subjectivity has been pushed to the margins of recent conversations about teacher education—and has therefore narrowed our understanding of the ideological and practical affordances and constraints of practice-based teacher education—we show that it must be centered in teacher education and understood as fundamental to all teachers’ embodied practice. We draw from literature exploring critical Whiteness studies, raciolinguistics, poststructural understandings of teacher subjectivity, the experiences of teachers of Color and practice-based teacher education. By showing how a raciolinguicized teacher subjectivity has been marginalized, we simultaneously argue for the centrality of the role of subjectivity in shaping teaching and, therefore, in defining critical dimensions of what and how novice teachers need to learn.

Varghese, M., Daniels, J., & Park, C. (2019). Structuring disruption: Race-based caucuses in teacher education programs. To appear in Special issue: Preparing Asset, Equity, and Social Justice Oriented Teachers Within the Contemporary Political Challenges to University-based Teacher Education Programs. Teachers College Record, 121(6). Teacher education candidates are in different places in terms of developing their identities and relationships to equity and social justice. Various approaches have been taken within university-based teacher education programs to engage with candidates, wherever they are in this development. One such approach has been engaging or drawing on teachers’ own lenses, especially through challenging and understanding their racialized selves. This conceptual article examines how race-based caucuses (RBCs) in one teacher education program attempted to shift candidates’ understandings of their racialized selves as related to their teacher identities. This conceptual article examines how race-based caucuses (RBCs) in one teacher education program attempted to shift candidates’ understandings of their racialized selves as related to their teacher identities. For the candidates of Color, the “overwhelming presence of Whiteness” in the teacher education program and in the schools required the RBCs to focus on reframing deficit narratives of teachers of Color to an asset-based view of their value and contribution to the teaching profession. The RBC provided space for White teacher candidates to explore the consequences of Whiteness for their future identities as teachers and for the kinds of communities that they could and wanted to cultivate with students. Messiness and challenges abounded in both RBCs. Emotions—and especially emotion labor—were central to RBCs. For teacher candidates of Color, facing one’s own oppression was painful but also presented opportunities for them to articulate emotions and experiences in relatively safe spaces. In a different way, the RBCs resulted in significant emotional upheaval for White teacher candidates that shifted into deeper self-reflection and sense of awareness and allyship (for some)—although in a few cases, RBCs led to even deeper resistance.Race-based caucusing is a messy and challenging practice that can provide opportunities to reflect constructively on emotions and produce emotional upheaval for teacher candidates. Teacher educators and programs must approach RBCs with an orientation toward hyperreflexivity.

Philip, T., Souto-Manning, M., Anderson, L., Horn, L., Carter Andrews, D., Diemer, M., Stillman, J. & Varghese, M. (2018). Making justice peripheral by constructing practice as “core”:  Challenges to teacher education and public schooling with the increasing prominence of core practices. Journal of Teacher Education. Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this manuscript, we argue that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we begin by examining the linkages between the core practices movement and organizations that advocate market-based solutions to education. We then explore how constructs of practice and improvisation and commitments to equity and justice are taken up, and with what implications and consequences, in core practices scholarship and its applications. In conclusion, we consider how work being done around core practices might contribute to a collective struggle for greater equity and justice in schools and in society.

Teacher education in bilingual and multilingual settings

Varghese, M. & Snyder, R. (2018). Critically examining the agency and professional identity development of novice dual language teachers through figured worlds. Special Issue: Teacher Agency and “Pedagogies of Hope” for Bilingual Learners (in a Brave New World). International Multilingual Research Journal, 12(3), 145-159. DOI: 10.1080/19313152.2018.1474060 Drawing on the concept of figured worlds, we examined how four preservice teachers in a monoglossically oriented teacher preparation program developed their professional identities and sense of agency as dual language teachers. Figured worlds are socially constructed and culturally recognized realms with a story line and actorswho also actively change these story lines in the course of narrating them and participating in them. Drawing on interviews and observations, we showed how four teachers’ personal linguistic, racial, and cultural backgrounds interacted with external affordances, including their own language ideologies and those present in their contexts, leading to the (re)construction of their figured worlds of dual language teaching. These figured worlds were mainly reshaped to include family connections and student empowerment and made salient the limitations of the teachers’ engagement with the centrality of race, power, and immigrant rights in their language ideologies.

Han, H. & Varghese, M. (2018). Language ideology, Christianity, and identity: Critical  empirical examinations of Christian institutions as alternative spaces. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education. The teaching and learning of languages has been mainly investigated within educational institutions, especially by applied linguists. However, religious spaces such as churches and church related programs have historically and contemporarily served as importance alternative spaces for such teaching and learning to take place. At the same time, such institutions and theway that language teaching and learning unfold in these spaces necessitates both a critical and empirical examination which makes salient the role and consequences of power. The focus of this special issue is to provide examples of studies which seek to fill this gap by both making salient the themes of language socialization, language ideology, identity, Christianity, ethnography andsystems of power as well as showing how four studies speak to the aforementioned gap and these themes.

Kayi-Aydar, K., Gao, X., Miller, E., Varghese, M. & Vitanova, G. (2018). (Eds.) Theorizing and analyzing language teacher agency. Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.I n an effort to theorize and expand understandings of language teacher agency, in this edited volume, numerous authors offer empirical and conceptual work that focuses on different dimensions of language teacher agency as well as factors that shape or contribute to it. As we began this project, one of our primary concerns and goals was to understand how language teachers around the world “exert judgment and control over their own work” (Biesta, Priestley, & Robinson 2015) with their own subjectivities in the contexts of internationalization and globalization of language education, language policies, dominant language ideologies and ideological debates, and ongoing political tensions worldwide. This volume includes authors from multiple contexts who advance our understanding of language teacher agency. The diverse work in the volume not only contributes to the still limited research on language teacher agency but also gives voice to many second/foreign language teachers around the world.

Varghese, M., Motha, S, Park, G., Reeves, J. & Trent, J.  (Eds.). (2016). Special Issue: Language teacher identity in (multi)lingual educational contexts. TESOL Quarterly (50)3. Our decision to propose a special issue of TESOL Quarterly on language teacher identity (LTI) grew out of our growing recognition of the profound embeddedness of LTI within the research, teaching, and policy practices of (multi)lingual professionals and the immense interest generated by LTI work within the disciplines that engage with language education. We use (multi) in (multi)lingual to underscore our desire to move beyond a monolingual lens in TESOL and to highlight potential extensions to the notion of multilingualism, such as (pluri), (trans), (ethno), and (racio). This allows us to complicate the everchanging, situated, and fluid nature of LTI beyond the essentialist categories often associated with the profession. These extensions, in particular, acknowledge language teachers (LTs) as denizens and creators of conversational borderlands (Anzaldua, 1987).

Varghese, M. (2008). Using cultural models to unravel how bilingual teachers enact language policies. Language and Education, 22(5), 289-306. There have been calls to examine how language policy is mediated at the local level. Although there have been studies that have foregrounded the local, there have yet to be those that look at how language policies become adopted by individual teachers through a process of their personal and professional socialisation. Through the framework of cultural models and using ethnographic methods, I examine how four novice bilingual Latino/a teachers in three different schools in the United States come to share a cultural model of dual language education. At the same time, I highlight how the differences in their adoption of a particular policy are constituted by both their personal and professional experiences as well as the organisational structures in which they find themselves in. This study contributes to the understanding of how language policies are adopted by bilingual classroom teachers as well as to the discussion of the future of bilingual education in the United States.

Varghese, M. & Johnston, B. (2007). Evangelical Christians and English language teaching. TESOL Quarterly. Evangelical Christians are an enduring and growing presence in the field of English language teaching worldwide, and in the TESOL organization in particular. Yet to date, hardly any empirical research has been done on this population of teachers, or on the links between English teaching, religious beliefs, and mission work worldwide. This paper reports on a qualitative study of ten ESL/EFL teachers-in-training at two evangelical Christian colleges in the U.S. Using interview data, the study explores the religious beliefs of the participants and the complex, varied, and often still developing ways in which these beliefs relate to their perspectives on mission work and on the relationship between religious faith and English language teaching. We conclude by identifying key moral dilemmas raised by the participants’ values as related to several of the dominant discourses present in ELT.

Varghese, M. (2006). Bilingual teachers-in-the-making in Urbantown. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. This study based on ethnographic methods explores how the professional identities of a group of bilingual (Spanish/English) Latino/a teachers-in-the-making in an urban public school district in the United States are formed and enacted. It illustrates the national and local discourses that influence novice bilingual teachers in their professional identities. But it also focuses on the structural influences and the ways that teachers respond to such influences. The study found that teachers developed a complex, sometimes conflicted, sense of their professional identities and these were mediated by their responses to their marginalization, their professional development, local setting(s) and their personal histories. Another important finding of this study was the resulting variation of professional identities the teachers enacted due to a host of influences, causing some to leave the profession and others to stay. This research suggests viewing professional development for bilingual teachers as a place where discussion and dissent is encouraged, and a process of what teachers may become rather than solely what they should know. It also underscores the importance of viewing professional development and the making of bilingual teachers as an interaction of structural and agentive influences.

Stritikus, T., & Varghese, M., (2005). “Nadie me dijo (Nobody told me)” Language Policy Negotiation and Implications for Teacher Education. Journal of Teacher Education. 56 (1), 73-87. Nationwide and statewide shifts and ambiguity in language education policy have created substantial instability for teachers. Through a cross-case study and analysis of bilingual teachers in two states, this article shows how these teachers participate in responding to and making decisions regarding language policy. This article shows how and why an understanding of language policy and the decision making involved with it is a crucial dimension of the professional roles of teachers who have second-language learners in their classrooms. Thus, the authors broaden the discussion on the teacher preparation for the instruction of English-language-learner students, which has narrowly focused on an awareness of language and methods, to include the dimension of policy making.

High school and college pathways

Varghese, M. & Fuentes, R. (2019). College capital and constraint agency:  First generation immigrant emergent bilingual students’ college success. Teachers College Record, 122(1).

Language minoritized and emergent bilingual (EB) students have historically and frequently been underexamined in the context of research on minority students’ pathways in higher education. Understanding the school to college pipeline for emergent bilinguals (EBs) is becoming a critical area of study to help identify and address the barriers that they experience as they attempt to transition to and navigate postsecondary education. Despite there being a greater knowledge of the barriers experienced by EBs in getting to college, less is known about the resources they bring and their agency, the way they actually mobilize the resources that they possess in negotiating their success to get to and complete college. This study examines why and how some EB students can successfully navigate their environments in order to apply for, get into and complete a selective four-year college. It is guided by two over-arching questions: (1) What forms of capital do first generation immigrant EBs draw on to apply for and navigate selective four-year college? (2) How do first generation immigrant EBs navigate and complete selective four-year college? We examined the pathways of EBs through a conceptual framework which frames their college success as being a result of the relationship between what we refer to as their college capital which they have access to and that they draw on, and their constraint agency. Through interviews, this study analyzes 33 first generation undergraduate immigrant EBs’ transition to and completion of tertiary education, with further analysis being supplemented with in-depth case studies of five out of the 33 EBs. Additionally, we interviewed 14 university administrators and instructors involved in the admission and instruction of EB students on campus. EB immigrant students drew on different forms of college capital, which included traditional and non-traditional. Students who drew more on traditional kinds of capital participated more in high participatory agentive ways while students who drew more on non-traditional forms of college capital participated more in low participatory agentive ways. Both forms of participating (low and high) lead to students navigating and completing four-year college. We suggest that more differential forms of help, resources and EB student focused partnerships between high school, community colleges and four-year college which include working on their agentive selves are needed as well as challenging the racism and linguicism that holds White monolingual students as the norm to configure policies and services that will help EBs’ postsecondary pathways.

Varghese, M. (2012).  A linguistic minority student’s discursive framing of agency and structure. In Y. Kanno & L. Harklau (Eds.), Linguistic minority immigrants go to college: Preparation, access, and persistence. Routledge.

In this chapter, I draw from an interview with a successful linguistic minority student at a four-year-college. Using Mills and Gale’s (2007) notion of constraint agency and a Bakhtinian lens and analytical tools of discursive construction and strategies, I show that it is not necessary to view agency as a set of completed actions but it can be revealing to show how students articulate their agency discursively through a narration of themselves and their paths to college. In this analysis, I show the discourses that are both available to this student as well as those she draws upon in the way she talks about her ability to navigate her postsecondary context. Such an analysis underscores the importance of how students can articulate themselves as powerful agents (or not) and what they draw on in terms of their beliefs and resources in such an articulation.

Kanno, Y. & Varghese, M. (2010). Immigrant and refugee ESL student’s challenges to accessing four-year college education: From language policy to educational policy. Journal of Language, Identity and Education 9 (5), 310-328.

Research on English as a second language (ESL) students in higher education has traditionally focused on their academic writing, leaving larger issues of their college access and success unexplored. This article examines the challenges that first-generation immigrant and refugee ESL students face in accessing four-year college education through a qualitative interview study at a U.S. public university. Drawing on Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction theory, we argue that what inhibits ESL students’ access to and participation in four-year college education is not simply their limited English proficiency but also the structural constraints unique to this population, their limited financial resources, and the students’ own tendency to self-eliminate. Based on our results, we call for a shift in higher education policy from one focusing narrowly on remediating ESL students’ limited English proficiency to a more comprehensive set of policies that address the structural and economic, as well as linguistic, factors that together inhibit ESL students’ college access and participation.

*Oropeza, M., Varghese, M. & Kanno, Y. (2010).  Linguistic minority students in higher education: Using, resisting, and negotiating labels. Equity & Excellence in Education, 43(2), 216-231.

Linguistic minority students have been both under-researched and underserved in the context of research on minority students’ access to and retention in higher education. The labels ascribed to them have typically failed to capture the complexity of their identities. Additionally, much of the literature in higher education on minority students’ access and retention has focused on structural barriers rather than on how students negotiate these barriers. By bringing linguistic minority students into the forefront of this conversation, we show how four linguistic minority female students draw on their community cultural wealth and different forms of capital (Yosso, 2005) to access and navigate college while experiencing differing advantages and disadvantages based on institutional labeling. By employing critical race theory and its conceptualization of capital, we illustrate how students use, resist, and negotiate labels in attempts to access resources and services at a four-year institution. We conclude by calling for more research on this population as well as additive university practices and policies that reflect the richness of linguistic minority student identities.

Conceptual

Motha, S. & Varghese, M. (2016). Rewriting dominant narratives of the  academy: Women faculty of color and identity management.  Race, Ethnicity and Education, 21(4), 503-517. DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1248826. Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s counterstory, Yosso’s community cultural wealth and Alsup’s borderland discourses, the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented.

Varghese, M. M. & Park, C. (2010). Going global: Can dual language programs save bilingual education? Journal of Latinos and Education, 9(1), 72-80. In this commentary, we extend the cautionary tales regarding dual-language programs raised by several scholars by considering the interface of such programs with global education. We consider the possible pitfalls of uncritically framing dual-language programs within the global education movement in the United States, especially in light of how this new framing will affect the educational opportunities and experiences of Latino/a students throughout the country. Key words: Latino/a students, bilingual education, dual language

Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B., & Johnson, K. (2005). Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 4(1), 21-44. Language teacher identity is an emerging subject of interest in research on language teacher education and teacher development. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which teacher identity is theorized. The present paper explores ways of theorizing language teacher identity by presenting three data-based studies of teacher identity and juxtaposing the three different theoretical frameworks that they use: Tajfel’s (1978) social identity theory, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of situated learning, and Simon’s (1995) concept of the image-text. It is seen that each theoretical perspective allows us to investigate different substantive and theoretical aspects of language teacher identity, and that there are strong conceptual resonances among the different approaches. While in isolation each theory has its limitations, an openness to multiple theoretical approaches allows a richer and more useful understanding of the processes and contexts of teacher identity.

Brutt-Griffler, J., & Varghese, M. (Eds.) (2004). Bilingualism and Language Pedagogy. Tonawanda, NY: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Bilingualism and Language Pedagogy brings an understanding of language as a social practice, and bilingualism as the study of bidirectional transitioning, to the examination of bilingual settings in the U.S., Europe and developing countries. The volume suggests that language pedagogy needs to reflect new understandings of bilinguals. Focusing both on bilingual linguistic competencies among bilingual practitioners and students. The volume situates teachers as mediators and explores the key roles that they have as language and content educators. In discussing the experiences of learners, it takes up the linguistic competence of bilinguals, highlighting how their language use constitutes a resource for meeting the demands of social interactions, and foregrounds the significance of developing academic language proficiency in English among minority children to decrease the barriers facing them in residential and academic settings.

International settings

Love, S. & Varghese, M. (2012). The historical and contemporary role  of race, language, and schooling in Italy’s immigrant policies, public discourses and pedagogies. Special Issue: Challenging Ant-Immigration Discourses in School and Community Contexts. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 14(2), 1-19. Available at http://ijme journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/491/746.  In this article, we use the framework of critical race theory (CRT) to show how race, language, and schooling have played out in the historical project of the Italian nation-state. We then demonstrate how this historic racialized identity construction is currently excluding immigrants from Italian national identity. Finally, we argue that CRT can be a valuable alternative to intercultural education in that it both addresses the educational needs of immigrant and minority students in Italian schools and challenges racist and anti-immigrant discourses circulating in the broader society.