Teachers’ Conceptualizations of Sociocultural Competence: A Case Study of a Spanish-English Two-way Immersion Dual Language Professional Learning Community

Dual language programs have the potential to promote social justice and have documented positive outcomes for students, particularly students classified as English Language Learners. These programs have been increasingly growing in popularity across the nation. While they can provide prime spaces to promote equity in schools, scholars have growingly voiced concerns about rising inequities, elitism, and bias in these programs, particularly impacting minoritized students. This call has led to increased attention to the programmatic goal of sociocultural competence, which helps students practice continuous self-reflection, develop a sense of themselves and their relation to others as cultural participants, and seeks to respond to the cultural needs of minoritized students. This case study with collaborative tenets focuses on a 6-8th grade interdisciplinary dual language teacher professional learning community (PLC) exploring sociocultural competence. It uses the Framework for Approaching Professional Learning Communities Interculturally as a lens to explore six qualitative data sources collected during PLC meetings with seven teachers and two coaches. Specifically, the research sought to address three main areas. The first is to understand how middle school teachers at La Unidad Middle School, a long-running dual language program in the northeastern U.S., conceptualize and foster students’ development of sociocultural competence. The second is to explore dual language teachers' perceptions of their professional competence related to sociocultural competence after participating in a PLC. Finally, to investigate the professional learning community processes that teachers and coaches perceived to be the most impactful for promoting their professional competence. The contributions of this study are conceptual and practical since it provides insights into how educators conceptualize, implement, and support this multifaceted construct; additionally, it explores PLCs as vehicles for teacher learning and continued development of practice in a dual language context. The findings suggest that it is imperative to recognize that sociocultural competence is not developed in a vacuum for each student but rather is closely connected to class and school environments. Furthermore, for teachers to promote sociocultural equity-driven humanizing environments, their schools and districts must create the same environments for teachers.