The purpose of this study is to illuminate how English Learner (EL) teachers in the Great Lakes region responded to the sudden shift to emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) at the onset of COVID-19 school closures in March 2020. Using an online survey, we examined how EL teachers from Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin continued legal provisions of instruction and service through the end of the 2019-2020 school year. We look closely at the state of Indiana, a state with a more recent immigrant population and where requirements for EL licensure and preparation are not yet required. Although findings show that schools and districts violated legal requirements for ELs, this is polarized by the lack of required training and licensure in Indiana among those serving in the role of EL teacher.

This study examines the experience of four student teachers in an intentional community of practice focused on culturally relevant pedagogy for ELs who learn of the implementation of a newly-adopted scripted literacy curriculum in their ethnically diverse elementary school. As students are more motivated to learn when curricula are relevant to their lived experiences (Howard, 2003), it is incumbent upon teachers and district leaders to consider ways in which to tailor pedagogy to their unique student populations. In the current sociopolitical educational climate of accountability and standardization, this goal is increasingly more difficult for educators to achieve. With ten percent of the United States’ student population made up of English learners (ELs), amounting to 4.6 million students (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2017), it is imperative that school systems shift to support culturally relevant practices.

During Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL) and the closure of schools due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, teachers of multilingual students were positioned to adopt varied outreach methods to sustain access to education among multilingual families. Prior to ERTL, instruction in schools was socially situated as having greater institutional value relative to service‐oriented tasks, yet service‐related needs, including health and human services and/or access to technology increased during the physical closure of schools. EL teachers took on more service‐related tasks for their MLL families and did so by assuming, negotiating and resisting particular roles; a reflexive and interactional process. Using theories of teacher positioning and language teacher identity, we examined the experiences of EL teachers in the Great Lakes Region of the US. Findings demonstrate that few EL teachers resisted roles within instruction and service during ERTL, a critical dimension of teacher identity transformation and advocacy for MLLs. As we move into recovery from the COVID‐19 pandemic and into a Remote Teaching and Learning (RTL) period, implications suggest that when EL teachers’ roles and identities are incongruous, resilience can be fostered informing a unique form of agency and teacher leadership; a necessary characteristic for an equity‐informed education.