| Notwithstanding ongoing concerns around professional responsibility in education, the issue of principled or moral conduct does not always include an explicit connection between a framework for ethics and education. This is no less the case in education for linguistically diverse students, that is, students who speak a range of languages in addition to or other than English. My study is a preliminary and exploratory effort to make such a connection. It is an ethnographic study of the classroom practices of teachers of linguistically diverse students which draws on an ethical framework informed by the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas. The data are drawn from in-depth interviews with eight teachers of linguistically diverse elementary students, four of whom are mainstream classroom teachers and four of whom are ESL teachers, in the region of Peel, Mississauga, Ontario. The data also include extended ethnographic observations of the teachers in their teaching contexts. I focus on the images of self and other these teachers instantiate through their pedagogical practice and the relation of responsibility between themselves and their students which is thereby implied. The findings suggest that while different teachers instantiate different images of self and other, and while these images are neither fixed nor consistently uniform, a more tenuous and flexible linguistic profile on the part of the teachers seems to be linked to pedagogical practice amenable to linguistic plurality, while a teacher's linguistic profile characterized by less equivocation seems to cohere more fully with a monolingual mandate. Two currents are thus identified as being at play in the teachers' pedagogical practice, one tending to expand plurality and the other tending to contract it. I conclude by outlining the conceptual limitations of the study and by pointing to the next conceptual and substantive steps for future study. |
