Teaching for Equity in Complex Times

In schools serving high concentrations of bilingual learners, it can be especially challenging for teachers to maintain commitments to equity-minded instruction while meeting the demands of new educational policies, including national standards. This book details how one school integrated equity pedagogy into a standards-based curriculum and produced exemplary levels of achievement. As the authors illustrate, however, the school’s dual commitment to bilingual education and standards-based reform engendered numerous complex tensions. Specifically, the authors describe teachers’ attempts to balance demands for rigor and content coverage within their high-performing school and with their diverse student population. They identify specific tensions that emerged around the following issues:

• the degree of academic struggle that is generative for student learning and the point at which such struggle becomes counterproductive
• the holding of high expectations for all learners and the provision of differentiated, student-centered learning experiences
• the CCSS emphasis on engaging students around more complex text and the contested determination of what constitutes complexity in text and in teaching
• the influence of high-stakes accountability on school norms and practices, including teachers’ interpretations and enactment of new national standards
• the performance pressures placed on teachers in today’s educational policy context

This timely book illustrates what can happen when a school’s teachers embrace equity pedagogy while navigating policy-related pressures. It offers a cogent counternarrative to traditional accounts of standards-based reform, especially for emerging bilingual students.

Jamy Stillman is an associate professor of educational equity and cultural diversity at the University of Colorado Boulder. Lauren Anderson is an associate professor of education at Connecticut College.

"This book should be required reading for any member of the education community working to advance policy and professional practice that attends to the holistic development of EB students in today’s schools."

—Teachers College Record

"...this book is an important contribution that furthers understandings of policy implementation in bilingual contexts. As such, policy makers would benefit from its reading. Additionally, the book will serve well not only in teacher education courses, but its relevance and readability also make it applicable for practicing teachers."

—Bilingual Research Journal

"Teaching for Equity in Complex Times is a rich ethnographic account of a successful bilingual school. By revealing the tensions involved in maintaining commitments to both multilingual and multicultural education and to national standards, this book offers welcome guidance on dialogical teaching to socially committed teachers and teacher educators."
—Linda Valli, University of Maryland

"Stillman and Anderson’s thoughtful and timely book shifts the education policy conversation and offers design- and justice-oriented educators and researchers the tools to understand how teacher and student learning becomes consequential when equity is both an orienting frame and object of learning. The authors make visible the ways racialized and language ideologies are imbued in the very policies and pedagogical practices designed to support learning for emergent bilinguals. A must-read for those interested in transformative teacher learning."
—Kris D. Gutiérrez, Carol Liu Professor, GSE, University of California, Berkeley