Date of Graduation

5-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

College/School

School of Education

Department

International and Multicultural Education

Program

Catholic Educational Leadership EdD

First Advisor

M. Sedique Popal

Second Advisor

Rosa Jimenez

Third Advisor

Kevin Oh

Abstract

Community-based organizations offer English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) support to community members due to a severe shortage of trained and certified Teaching English Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teachers (Sutcher et al., 2019). Many of these organizations rely on volunteers to teach and tutor students enrolled in the programs they offer. Volunteers play an invaluable role in providing ESOL support and instruction, but many lack the necessary preparation and training (Henrichsen, 2010). Untrained and unprepared volunteers can ultimately result in cultural mismatches and ineffective instruction, adversely affecting learners (Durham & Kim, 2019). Training in culturally responsive teaching strategies can prepare teachers and tutors to work with culturally and linguistically diverse learners. However, limited literature examines community-based ESOL teachers’ and tutors’ access to culturally responsive training. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to explore how community-based ESOL teachers and tutors conceptualize culturally responsive teaching before and after a six-week Culturally Responsive Teacher Training Intervention. The intervention was composed of six 60-minute workshops that addressed a variety of themes related to culturally responsive teaching practices. These workshops were tailored to the community-based ESOL work the participants did with school age youths with refugee backgrounds. Five ESOL teachers and tutors in a community-based after-school program participated in this selective mixed method study. Quantitative data was collected in the form of participant responses to the adapted Culturally Responsive Teaching Survey administered prior to the intervention, while pre- and post-intervention interview data and the researcher’s ethnographic fieldnotes comprised the qualitative data. The researcher analyzed the data through the lenses of culturally responsive pedagogy and Ginsberg and Wlodkowski’s (2000) Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching. Findings demonstrate that participants deepened their conceptualization of culturally responsive teaching after participating in the intervention. Results also exposed the culturally responsive teaching practices that participants were already using prior to the intervention. Future research should continue examining the impact that explicit instruction on culturally responsive teaching practices has on ESOL teachers and tutors in community-based ESOL programs.

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