Didactical agency in linguistically diverse classrooms. A longitudinal study.

Sweden is experiencing a growing linguistic diversity in schools due to migration. As a result the Swedish National Agency of Education has launched teacher professional development programs in order to help schools better meet the needs, and improve school achievement, of second language learners, particularly those who are newly arrived. These programs, which address teachers in all subject areas, and focus on language dimensions across the curriculum (Gibbons, 2014) and the use of students multilingual resources (e.g. García, 2009), are extensive, often spanning a year, and may involve several schools in one municipality. However, these programs are notably under-researched. The current paper draws on a larger PhD project in which in-service training in one secondary school is investigated from a teacher perspective: what may afford and constrain professional development in this setting in terms of didactical change (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002), and the role of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015) throughout the process. 

In the linguistic ethnographic study (Copland & Creese, 2015), fieldwork was conducted longitudinally over two years, during and after the in-service training, focusing on two secondary school teachers and their instruction in science and mathematics respectively. Data are drawn from fieldnotes, audio-recorded interviews and interactions from the recurrent in-service training sessions, and the teachers' instruction. This presentation will focus one of the teachers. The findings show how the teacher's agency is discursively constructed, and how the process of didactical change relates to organizational and structural constraints regarding the newly arrived. These findings point to the vital role of teachers' didactical agency, a new notion developed in this project, i.e., the possibility of making and reflecting on new didactical choices in the complex process of didactical change. This study contributes much-needed longitudinal data on professional development for teachers in general and in linguistically diverse contexts in particular.