English as a Second Language (ESL) students constitute the fastest growing student population in the U.S. K-12 education system (National Education Association, 2020). They represent an array of diversity related to their linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, ESL students embody their unique lived experiences, expectations, and imagined learning environments. The multitude of nuances related to their backgrounds, identities, and needs poses great challenges to teachers in K-12 settings, especially in mainstream classes which comprise the majority of English-speaking students with a few ESL students, however. While many mainstream content teachers hold a deficit- based mindset towards ESL students, and view them as a problematic student population, some teachers adopt a pedagogy of care, advocate for their ESL students, and strive to empower them by leveraging their linguistic and cultural repertoires. However, there is still a gap between teachers’ intentions behind caring pedagogical practices and student’s interpretations of those practices. With an aim to explore mainstream teachers’ and ESL students’ perspectives of caring pedagogical practices in a high school setting, I adopted the theoretical framework of an ethic of care, emotions, and advocacy. The focal participants in this U.S. high school-based case study were two mainstream teachers (Biology and English Language Arts) and two ESL students. I collected data from classroom observations, artifacts, field notes, and personal journals, but my primary sources of data were interviews with my focal participants over an entire academic year.My findings reveal the diverse ways in which the teachers intended, enacted, and communicated the pedagogy of care to their students. Advocating for their ESL students' mental health, creating, and cultivating care circles, and being trauma-informed were some of the manifestations of their pedagogy of care. However, they believed that they needed to be culturally responsive in their caring practices. Their caring practices resulted in emotion labor and emotion rewards. Similarly, the findings also showed a whole gamut of student emotions that were discursive in nature and that stemmed from their experiences of being ESL students in and outside classroom contexts. Whereas emotions of hurt and devastation emerged from microaggressive behaviors from some teachers and peers, the emotions of joy and satisfaction emerged from their agency of being multilinguals. In addition, the focal teachers intended to teach their ESL students to advocate for themselves when the students still needed some linguistic tools and strategies to advocate for themselves and their fellow ESL students. Based on my findings, I call for critical reflections on the intricacies of care, emotions, and advocacy in mainstream content settings from both teachers’ and students’ perspectives. The findings have implications for mainstream teacher preparation programs and school administrations to adopt culturally responsive care, to see caring practices as a space for emotion regulation, and to find restorative ways of handling explicit and implicit microaggressive behaviors towards ESL students.
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