The Dilemma of Cultural Responsiveness and Professionalization: Listening Closer to Immigrant Teachers Who Teach Children of Recent Immigrants

by Jennifer Keys Adair, Joseph Tobin & Angela E. Arzubiaga
Our comparative, multivocal ethnographic study of teachers in five U.S. cities in a number of early childhood settings suggests that immigrant teachers often experience difficulty applying their cultural knowledge to the education and care of young children of immigrants because they face a dilemma between their pedagogical training and their cultural knowledge; between the expectations of their fellow teachers and of parents; and between the goals of being culturally responsive to children, families, and their community and being perceived as professional by their fellow teachers and their superiors. This article details this dilemma and then focuses on how immigrant teachers’ funds of knowledge and power need further attention.
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Classroom Culture, Mathematics Culture, and the Failures of Reform: The Need for a Collective View of Culture

by Michele Gregoire Gill & David Boote
In mathematics education and beyond, various “cultural” arguments have been used to explain teachers’ resistance to change, yet these meanings of culture are often conflated. This article uses three distinct conceptions of culture—individual, interactional, and collective—to analyze the practice of one experienced mathematics teacher.
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The Myth of Teacher Tenure

by Diana D'Amico
In the stories of exorbitant costs and incompetence, teacher tenure laws have achieved mythic proportions. Judge Rolf Treu’s tentative decision in Vergara v. California may be the death knell for teacher tenure. But what will change as a result? A look to the past reveals that teacher tenure never really protected teachers and nor was it supposed to. Using history as a lens, this commentary explores the origination of tenure policies and the debates that surrounded them. This commentary argues that embedded in the tenure debates is a much larger problem that should concern us all.