Date of Award
1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School
College for Education and Engaged Learning
Department/Program
Teacher Education and Teacher Development
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Emily Hodge
Committee Member
Kathryn Herr
Committee Member
Reva Jaffe-Walter
Abstract
The history of multilingual education in the United States over the last fifty years has gradually transitioned from a subtractive bilingual approach to additive approaches, where students increase their cognition of both their native language and the target language. The dissertation study explored the scale and sustainability of one dual language early childhood program that has been implemented over the past 19 years, expanding across grade levels. The research question of this dissertation study was, “What can we learn from a long-lasting and steadily expanding public early childhood dual language program?” The data for this dissertation was collected through a series of one-on-one and focus group interviews with key rightsholders from the program including the school administrator, teachers, and paraprofessionals. The findings from this study provide evidence that quantitative measures of scale and sustainability are not enough to help a program flourish– it is strategic hiring practices, staff commitment, and responsibility as culture carriers that help the program grow. These findings indicate that purposeful and intentional decision making from school leaders about staffing plays a large role in a program’s survival beyond implementation stages. This study contributes to the larger body of literature on scale and sustainability as it offers a unique perspective on scaling up a program by hiring from within the community, developing a democratic system of decision making within a school, and putting student’s cultures and heritage at the center of the program’s goal, which is pedagogical equity between both heritage and target languages.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Loconte, Michelle Belfiore, "The Scale and Sustainability of an Early Childhood Dual Language Program" (2025). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1492.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1492
Included in
Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, First and Second Language Acquisition Commons
