Mind the Gap: Destabilizing Dominant Discourses and Beliefs about Learning Disabilities in a Bachelor of Education Program

This study explores teacher candidates’ understandings of children with special needs and learning disabilities; the effect of a special education course supporting a tutoring practicum; and how curricula can critically deconstruct and disrupt dominant, inequitable notions and practices. Data were collected through initial and end-of-course questionnaires and focus groups that took place after the course and related practica had ended. Theory-practice gaps addressed are transferable to teacher education contexts where the focus is on developing future teachers’ understandings of and responses to dis/ability in early childhood education learning environments

Beyond the Pragmatic and the Liminal: Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students Code-Switching in Early-Years Classrooms

This article examines the code-switching (CS) practices of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) young children in kindergarten and grade 1 classrooms. The author argues that their use of CS went beyond relief of psycholinguistic stress or coping with liminality (sense of living between two languages and cultures). Through several narratives constructed using ethnographic data, the author explores CLD students' use of CS to respond to the sociolinguistic and sociopolitical dynamics that they encountered in their early-years classrooms. CS enabled students to address their language and literacy needs, assert their identities, and defy subtractive and assimilative orientations that they experienced with respect to lack of incorporation of their first languages. Further, data affirm Cummins'(2001) assertion that students do not passively accept dominantgroup attributions of inferiority, but actively resist the process of subordination

Strategies to Support Balanced Literacy Approaches in Pre and Inservice Teacher Education

The authors describe the ways in which, as preservice and inservice teacher educators, they conceptualize balanced literacy within an educational climate that values quick fixes, standardized curricula, and high-stakes testing. They proffer a professionalized version of the work of teachers in the classroom that values, fosters, and supports teacher knowledge, discernment, and reflection throughout all stages of teachers\u27 careers. They also present, and illustrate through two case studies, a dynamic reconceptualization strategy that supports novice and seasoned teachers in their decision making