Advancing Linguistic Heterogeneity Through a Participatory Improvement Network

Carlos Sandoval

Multilingual learners continue to be underserved by educational systems. There exists substantial evidence that creating more linguistically heterogeneous and plural learning environments—often through linguistically sustaining practices, such as translanguaging—supports the provisioning of learning opportunities to both multilingual learners and their peers. Despite this evidence, linguistic heterogeneity and accompanying practices are far from widespread, with uptake often constrained to individual teachers within educational systems. The purpose of this project is to learn from efforts to spread and scale organizational and instructional practices, processes, and routines that design and sustain linguistic heterogeneity. Taking the form of a participatory networked improvement community, this research-practice partnership study brings together educators, educational leaders, family, and youth to understand existing and design new organizational and instructional arrangements that support broad-scale linguistic heterogeneity for supporting access to learning opportunities. I theorize about the network's enactment, learning within it, and its relations to educational systems. Three questions guide this work: What routines constitute the network? How do routines serve as contexts for learning to spread LSP? How do routines and educational systems shape one another? Employing a single embedded qualitative case study, I analyze process data to surface network routines, examine them as sites for collective learning towards linguistic heterogeneity, and understand relations between network routines and educational systems. This project addresses critical gaps in understanding how educational systems can be rearranged to support linguistically sustaining practices at scale and builds theory about collaborative improvement research and its potential for generating impact towards greater educational justice across sites.

About Carlos Sandoval

Dr. Carlos Sandoval (he/him) is an assistant professor in the Educational and Organizational Leadership Development department in the College of Education at Clemson University. Carlos's research and practice sits at the intersections of educational justice, organizing, and improvement. Despite the wealth of knowledge concerning the principles, practices, dynamics, and designs of humanizing and just learning environments, enactments of these learning environments are largely constrained to isolated cases (such as individual teachers and their classrooms) rather than made systematic and widespread. Carlos's work focuses on spreading of processes, practices, and routines that are intended to solve this problem. Using the tools of improvement science and design-based implementation research, Carlos engages in: a) investigations of educational systems and accompanying improvement efforts, with an eye towards focal educational outcomes and neoliberalism; b) work with leaders to center more expansive outcomes that foreground collective learning and thriving; and c) launching and enacting networks and partnerships that aim to design more humanizing and just learning environments across contexts and at scale. Examples of this work include his leadership and research on a teacher preparation improvement network focused on improving preservice teachers' uptake of linguistically sustaining practices, as well his work in initiating a network focused on spreading practices, processes, and routines for linguistic heterogeneity across classrooms and districts. Carlos received his Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to his graduate studies, he worked at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.