“You need to find the guts”: a critical discourse analysis and autoethnographic study of structural teacher vulnerability in a U.S. charter dual language immersion school study

I examine how institutional discourse in a U.S. charter dual language immersion (DLI) school constructs teacher responsibility while dismantling teacher protection. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and autoethnography, I analyze institutional, interpersonal, union, and online professional texts: a family handbook, a grievance policy, parent and student complaint emails, a union response, and a corroborating Reddit thread from r/Teachers. Feminist CDA functions as a structural tool for tracing gendered affective labor, while AsianCrit operates as a sensitizing lens for interpreting a DLI context in which Chinese language and culture are institutionally valued while the Chinese immigrant teacher’s authority remains precarious. The analysis reveals a pattern in which teachers are made accountable for classroom outcomes while structural conditions remain invisible within charter school choice, where parental investment in language becomes entangled with market accountability. I contribute to scholarship by showing how unenforced protective policies relocate institutional failure onto individual teachers.