‘We learned to be compassionate’: pre-service teachers’ perceptions of teaching immigrant children

ABSTRACT

Demographic changes continue to challenge educators across the United States. Currently, five million English language learners (ELL) attend the country’s public schools, and immigrant populations are expected to increase by 85% by 2060. Despite teacher education programmes offering English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses to prepare pre-service teachers to attend to the high demand of immigrant children, these courses often do not prepare them to be culturally competent. A longitudinal qualitative case study was applied to investigate pre-service teachers’ perceptions of teaching immigrant children during one academic semester through cultural competence lenses. The case was an upper-level undergraduate Foundations of ESOL course in a Southwest Florida public university. After the aggregated data was organised and coded, three themes emerged, indicating that the participants developed three competencies during the academic semester: (1) Self-awareness allowed them to see themselves through the experiences of immigrant students; (2) Compassionate competence emerged from the significant impact that understanding immigrants’ lives and struggles had on the participants’ perceptions of teaching immigrants; and (3) Culturally responsive awareness revealed the participants’ understanding of the importance of becoming culturally responsive in their future classrooms. Implications are discussed, and recommendations are offered based on the study’s findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural competence
• pre-service teachers
• immigrants
• ESOL
• qualitative longitudinal research
• case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ELLs are immigrants to the United States and other national-origin minorities whose native language or language spoken at home is not English (The School District of Lee Country 2020).

Despite using terminologies like ‘Immigrant children,’ ‘English Language Learners,’ and ‘culturally and linguistically diverse populations,’ the participants of this study mostly used ‘immigrant children/students’ to designate ELLs, CLDs, and nation-born sons and daughters of immigrants to the United States. Thus, this study uses ‘immigrant children’ to unify the terminologies that the participants of the study used from this point onwards.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clarisse Halpern

Clarisse Halpern is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Culture at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her scholarship focuses on multicultural and multilingual education, international students and faculty mobility, immigration issues in education, academic freedom and human rights, culturally responsive teaching, teacher preparation programs, diversity and inclusion in higher education, and comparative education studies.

Joseph Trunfio

Joseph Trunfio holds a Masters in Educational Leadership and worked as a research assistant in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Culture at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Hasan Aydin

Dr. Hasan Aydin is a human rights defender and a Professor of Multicultural Education in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Culture at Florida Gulf Coast University. His scholarship focuses on multicultural education, bilingual education, Kurdish language, and cultural rights, human rights, social justice, diversity and equity in education, educating refugee students, citizenship education in a global context, and international education. His most recent book (co-edited with Winston Langley) is titled Human Rights in Turkey: Assaults on Human Dignity, published by Springer Press. He is also a founding editor and editor-in-chief for the Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies and the American Journal of Qualitative Research, and an associate editor for Intercultural Education.