Early in her nearly 30-year career, Leslie M. Gauna was warned: bilingual education would not be a viable long-term career option.
However, today the need for Spanish-speaking teachers in the United States is stronger than ever, with districts Around the country struggling to hire them fast enough.
The bilingual teacher shortage is especially counterintuitive in Texas, where Gauna is a professor and where she conducted a qualitative research study on what she calls “The Teacher Drain in Spanish Bilingual Education.” In it paper, Gauna and her fellow researchers identified important life experiences that Latino bilingual teachers said made their path to becoming educators even more difficult. Gauna is an associate professor of bilingual/ESL and multicultural education in the College of Education at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
“A typical situation is that Spanish is spoken at home and then English is spoken at school, and that is something that is sometimes considered de facto,” says Gauna. “(It is) unfortunate because then the Spanish language at home is not cultivated or developed, and when the candidates want to recover that language – and demonstrate proficiency in that language when the state requires it – In reality, they have been robbed of their opportunity to continue developing that language.”
The United States has almost 41.8 million Spanish speakers, making it the fifth largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, according to data from the Spanish Institute of Spanish Speaking. Cervantes Institute. In TexasWhere approximately 40 percent of residents are Hispanic, nearly 1 million students in public schools are English learners who speak Spanish at home.
According to the research article, bilingual students in the Lone Star State could be considered their pool of future bilingual teachers. So why is there a shortage of these educators? Through interviews with three pre-service bilingual teachers, Gauna found a number of potential obstacles that begin much earlier in life than when students declare a major in college.
Two languages not equally valued
According to the document, a “leak” in the process of bilingual students potentially becoming bilingual teachers begins with the way they are treated during elementary school.
Interviewee “Esmeralda” began third grade in the United States after moving from Mexico with her family, but was not placed in a program for English learners. Remember the first American teacher who thought Esmeralda was pretending not to know English.
“When she called me and I answered in Spanish, she would get so angry that she would stop everything and just yell at me. . . Say it in English! “Esmeralda told the investigators. “I don't know how to say it in English (I thought). In the end she stopped calling me.”
The interviewee “Oscar” had the opposite problem. Despite growing up with Spanish-speaking parents, Oscar eventually lost his grasp of the language and decided to take Spanish classes during high school.
“In class he became the subject of derogatory comments made by his teacher, referencing Oscar's limited command of Spanish despite having a Spanish last name,” investigators wrote. “He recalled how, to cope with the repeated embarrassment he suffered, Oscar gave up learning Spanish and told himself, 'from now on, it will be nothing but English,' and as a result, he barely passed the class.”
While Esmeralda and Oscar eventually mastered English and Spanish, their experiences give examples of how both languages are not valued equally in schools.
This presents an obstacle to increasing the number of bilingual teachers, he says, because educators who teach children in Spanish obviously need to be fluent in the language.
But Spanish literacy (reading, writing, and speaking) is not encouraged during K-12 schooling like English is, even if children speak both languages when they start school. Rather, speaking Spanish is treated as a barrier to overcome, Gauna says, and schools try to have students attend English-only classes by third grade, when standardized testing begins.
That means bilingual teacher candidates have the added burden of mastering Spanish on top of the same work as their peers.
To combat this, researchers recommend teaching students to read, write, and speak fluently in both English and Spanish, rather than forcing them to transition to English-only classes as quickly as possible. This is because “achieving mastery of English at the cost of losing Spanish represents a significant drain” in the careers of bilingual teachers, the document states.
Gauna says the education system must also affirm bilingualism, as it is easy for students to feel like they are not good enough at either language. Students may say things like, “My Spanish is not good enough for my parents and if I speak English, I have an accent,” he explains.
He wants students to “feel like they have an asset, something to be proud of, not something to hide,” Gauna says.
Other cracks in the pipeline
All three interviewees reported hearing negative messages about college from their families. Esmeralda's business family did not understand why she would pursue what, in her opinion, was a poorly paid college career like education. Oscar's family, on the other hand, pushed him to pursue a trade instead of college. For the interviewee “Marlene,” her dedication to her school work made her the exception among her cousins born in the United States, who saw it as a waste of time.
Once in teacher preparation programs, the report's subjects said they did not feel they had adequate support in their pursuit of bilingual certification. Esmeralda said she felt pressured to teach in English to get a good evaluation from a supervisor, even though her students would not understand the lesson.
“Because (the supervisor) doesn't speak Spanish. . . “she (didn't) pay as much attention as she does when she watches someone in English,” she told researchers. “Later my teacher (collaborator) told me 'whenever an administrator comes to observe, she tries to understand the main things in English.' I had to choose (to speak in Spanish) to the students because they are the most affected.”
Bilingual teacher candidates in Texas must also take an intensive five-hour exam, Gauna says, to demonstrate their proficiency not only in the language but also in the pedagogy of teaching English learners.
“These are the only teacher candidates in Texas, and I would say in the entire United States, who have to create a lesson on the spot, right there, to demonstrate Spanish proficiency,” Gauna says, adding that a Texas law approved in 2023 will change the exam for the next two years to focus on language proficiency. “That is, I think, addressing the outcry from teacher educators like us, who we believe is an unfair burden on candidates and also contributes to the shortage of (bilingual) educators.”
A need that does not disappear
Even if universities don't always have enough support for bilingual teacher candidates, Gauna says interest in that certification will remain even if support doesn't.
She recalls how the number of bilingual tenured professors at her own alma mater, the main campus of the University of Houston, in the educational program dropped to zero between the time she graduated with her master's degree and her subsequent return to earn her Ph.D. .
The people who kept that program alive, Gauna says, were the students.
“It was because my UH Main students knocked on our door to get certified, even though they were no longer tenured (bilingual education) teachers,” Gauna says. “'I want to help people like me,' that's the most common phrase I heard, I would say 100 times or more.”
It is those students, as well as the data, who have proven that the detractors of Gauna's early career (those who said bilingual education was a risky path) were wrong.
“It really makes me want to clarify that there is no such thing as 'bilingual education is going to end,'” Gauna says. “Even 200 years ago we had bilingual education in this same state. We had German. We had Spanish. “Bilingual education is going to exist because it is a necessity and because it is part of the languages we have.”