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About the project
This project was a case study of two bilingual teachers and their collaboration with other teachers during the education of newly arrived students in two Norwegian schools.
Aim
The overarching aim was to construct knowledge about bilingual teachers and how they collaborated with other subject teachers to meet the educational needs of newly arrived students. Applying a dialogical lens to collaboration, I investigated conversations between bilingual teachers and other teachers in formal and informal settings.
Research design
The study was designed as a case study of two bilingual teachers, one at a primary school and the other at a lower secondary school. In addition to audio-recording naturally occurring conversations, I developed a shadowing technique to gain insight into how the bilingual teachers moved through their working day.
Funding
The PhD project was financed by Hedmark University College and connected to the doctoral programme of the Faculty of Education at the University of Oslo during the period 2008–2013.
Results
- Bilingual teachers are ambulating teachers because they move around more than other teachers between classrooms, group rooms and teachers’ team rooms as well as between many subjects, grades, languages and cultures. Usually, they teach a few students at a time a couple of hours a week, which makes it challenging to create continuity in the teaching.
- Different ideologies of bilingualism and bilingual teaching influence the collaboration between bilingual teachers and other teachers. The bilingual teachers and other subject teachers lack continuous conversation, and the conversations that occur are usually short messages that are seldom of an academic nature.
- Bilingual teachers may come into loyalty conflict between the school and the home when, for example, they are asked to function as interpreters during parent meetings.