Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Urban Education

Advisor

Laura Ascenzi-Moreno

Committee Members

Michelle Fine

Jennifer Collett

Subject Categories

Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education | Curriculum and Instruction | Education | Teacher Education and Professional Development

Keywords

language ideologies, computational and digital literacies, bilingual education, teacher education, curriculum, equitable education

Abstract

Literacy and language are linked in its usage, perception, and practice. As new forms of engaging with literacy are explored, digital practices and tools are being employed as useful supports for students and their language practices (García et al., 2017). As emerging technologies are further introduced in educational spaces, education programs have a role in shaping how computational and digital literacies (CDLs) are integrated and how teacher candidates and teachers learn about them, especially those who are being trained to become bilingual teachers or will inevitably work with emergent bilinguals and linguistically diverse learners[1], as the intersections between CDLs and language are key to supporting these students. Equally important to CDL integration in teacher education is educators’ opportunities to reflect on their own language ideologies in connection to curriculum design in their training.

Through intentional course design, this study aims to explore how educators in a bilingual graduate course explore their own ideologies about language as they draw from computational and digital literacies to create curricula for their P-12 students as part of the City University of New York’s Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) initiative.

This research uses an ecosystem of critical educational frameworks for its conceptual underpinnings and methodological practices, further explored throughout the work, as well as grounded theory for analysis (Charmaz, 2010). This study explores the ways in which educators understand and conceptualize language ideologies and the pedagogical practices that surface through those conceptualizations. Thus, the findings in this study weave knowledge and pedagogical practices in relation to one another:

  1. Drawing from digital and computational literacies created opportunities for students to build understandings about the course content and their ideologies.
  2. Lived experiences build understandings of content and ideologies, as they are used to sensemake information.
  3. Conceptualizations use existing understandings to shift, cement ideologies, and/or produce emerging pedagogical shifts.
  4. Ideologies that speak back to language, identity, learning, and the responsibilities of an educator or school staff inform emerging and/or long-standing pedagogical stances and pedagogical practices.

This work argues that language ideology shapes curricular design, and that as digital and computational literacies are being integrated in education, opportunities to reflect on language ideologies and their connection to curricular design are crucial. These opportunities of intentional reflection for educators create moments to explore how learning is conceived and practiced across teacher education programs in the CUNY system and can support how other teacher preparation programs also integrate computational and digital literacies.

[1] Throughout this paper, linguistically diverse students refers to: emergent bilinguals, either labeled as English language learners or English-speakers learning a new language, more experienced bi/multilingual students (Garcia, et al., 2017) and those not labeled as language learners or bilingual, but who have different ways of speaking one named language such as English (Baker-Bell, 2020; Lyiscott, 2018).

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