Agency and pedagogy in literacy education

Abstract This longitudinal ethnographic case study examines, from a sociocultural perspective, how a White female English as a second language teacher of immigrant adolescents enacted agency toward culturally sustaining pedagogy in her classroom, school, and community. The teacher demonstrated her agency in her personal and professional spaces by (a) re-contextualizing curriculum and instruction with students, (b) engaging in daily conversations with students, (c) recruiting community members to participate in class, (d) constructing an ELL teacher community, (e) visiting students’ homes and involving herself in refugee communities, and (f) performing community services with students. This study provides significant implications about how teachers, who will be working in classrooms and schools and encountering deficit discourses about immigrant students and standardization forces, can create agentive pedagogical spaces where the linguistic, cultural, and community resources of immigrant students are identified, understood, centered, and can connect those resources with classroom and community practices.