The 2025 TESOL convention gave me a good sized room to talk about early-service K-12 teachers’ preparedness to address the needs of their disabled multilinguals’ needs. Disability topics usually draw a small but dedicated crowd of language folks. I had an audience of thirty super engaged teachers who asked great questions and nodded along with my participants’ frustrations at trying to work within and around procedural breakdowns in services for disabled multilingual learners. Read my session description for more information:
Language teachers do not often feel prepared to address disabled students’ needs due to lack of training (Joyce, 2018; Lazda-Cazers & Thorson, 2008) and because disability concerns are outsourced to specialists (Kangas, 2017). To illuminate teachers’ experiences, I conducted a year-long study of three U.S. based early-service K-12 teachers’ perceived preparedness to address their disabled multilinguals’ needs. I followed the teachers’ trajectories as they navigated their first fully autonomous foray into teaching multilingual students following an intern year spent co-teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the 2021-2022 school year began, I asked the teachers to complete a narrative frame (e.g., Barkhuizen & Wette 2008) asking them to reflect on topics including but not limited to their early awareness about disability concerns in K-12 populations and how well they felt their certification program prepared them to address accessibility and disability inclusion. Then, periodically during the school year, the teachers journaled about any experiences they had that year addressing the needs of disabled multilinguals in their classrooms. At the end of the year, I brought the teachers together for a focus group to reflect on the experience of their first year specific to disability support and inclusion. All the data in this study has been collected and some of it has been analyzed for preliminary results (the remaining data will be fully analyzed by the end of fall 2024). Preliminary results show that the three teachers shared acute feelings of underpreparedness to address the needs of disabled multilinguals in their classrooms. They cited administrative bureaucracy, lack of communication between stakeholders, and perceived distance to specialists (e.g., difficulty tracking down the one person needed to complete a particular evaluation or sign a specific document) as hindrances to getting their students the support they need. (Here are my presentation slides).
Caitlin Cornell 