UCLA

In response to persistent inequities in the education of English learner-classified (EL-classified) students, scholars have increasingly called for the preparation of educators who are able to disrupt dominant hierarchies of language and knowledge in schools. One concept that has been developed to describe what it takes to disrupt these hierarchies is ideological clarity (Bartolomé & Balderrama, 2001), which refers to a process of critical and consistent reflection on ideologies underlying practice. Though scholars assert that ideological clarity will act as a catalyst for more equitable practice, this scholarship rarely makes explicit the policy contexts in which educators work. This is a glaring oversight, given that, in some cases, these policies have proven to act as a constraint on educators’ ability to engage in the kind of equitable instructional practices that scholars of ideological clarity praise. At the same time, educational language policy can also be an important lever for remediating inequities for linguistically marginalized students. In this dissertation, I explore the intersection of the processes of ideological clarity and policy sensemaking in the context of English language development (ELD) policy, a core component of contemporary policies intended for EL-classified students. In this relational and exploratory qualitative study (Ravitch & Carl, 2016), I illuminate the strategies that equity-focused educators engaged in to navigate the complexities of ELD policy. I identified four policy navigating strategies that reflected a spectrum of advocacy for EL-classified students: building allies, buffering, building student and family agency, and reimagining. Additionally, I found that educators were more willing to experiment with their agency in the context of ELD policy when they treated their own professional vision as an important object of their reflection when they were engaged in ideological clarity. In outlining the implications of these findings, I emphasize that while educators can resist harmful implementations of ELD policy, engaging in these strategies can carry varying personal and professional risk for educators. Thus, I also call for teacher educators, policymakers, and researchers to advocate for systemic changes that would make these strategies less necessary, or at least less risky, for educators who are pursuing educational language equity for EL-classified students.