“I Realized that I Was Doing Things Backwards”: New Bilingual Education Teachers Reflect on Themselves and the Profession in a Time of Crisis

ABSTRACT

There is little research on the experiences of new bilingual education teachers in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. This case study analyzes the written reflections of 20 first-year Spanish/English bilingual teachers in New York City, in which they shared their experiences and perspectives as bilingual educators during emergency remote teaching in the initial months of the pandemic. Findings suggest that despite experiencing uncertainty, grief, and other challenges, these new bilingual educators enacted a humanizing pedagogy where they gained a deeper understanding of their students and their families; they reinforced the significance of emotions in teaching and learning; and they experienced that their bilingual language practices were essential during this challenging period. This study presents important implications for educators in preparation programs who wish to support future bilingual teachers and help them reflect on the values, practices, and experiences of the racialized bilingual families they serve; on the academic and social-emotional well-being of their students and teachers; and on the importance of bilingual education in the new reality introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Online learning is an approach in which the teacher delivers content online, and the students attend classes online, as opposed to being physically present in a brick-and-mortar school. Emergency remote teaching is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternative online delivery mode due to crisis circumstances that provide temporary access to instruction (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020).

² Mutch (2015) conceptualized “times of crisis” as large-scale, disastrous, traumatic events triggered by nature or by humans that cause unexpected damage or ongoing disruptions in communities.