THE EDUCATION ALLIANCE @ BROWN UNIVERSITY
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THE EDUCATION ALLIANCE @ BROWN UNIVERSITY
Meeting the Needs of English Language Learners |
Ofelia García
Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus
ogarcia@liu.edu
My work in urban schools always reminds me of the language continuum of students who speak languages other than English, LOTE-speaking students, the impossibility of categorizing them, and the futility of isolating them. By introducing my title in the present progressive with "learning" and "transforming," I speak today about my thinking and re-thinking on the education of teachers of language minority students and on another category that I have begun to transform through different ways of working with teachers, that of university-based research in education. This thinking and rethinking has taken shape through involvement in the discipline of phenomenological descriptive inquiry used with the faculty of a School of Education and a New York City public school. That discipline has given me another lens for noticing LOTE-speaking teachers and children.
Reshaping a Teacher Education Program for Teachers in Urban Schools
In 1995, New York State started to require passing scores in teacher certification examinations that many bilingual and bidialectal teachers failed to pass. New York State also required that 80% of those teachers graduating from their certification programs pass the examinations. Bilingual students' high failure rate made them a liability for admissions into teacher education programs. Colleges started to close their doors to the very students who were deeply knowledgeable about minority communities and their ways of using languages, literacies and cultures, students who were deeply committed to those communities. City College of New York, a public college in Harlem where I had been on the faculty in the Bilingual Education program for 17 years, an institution with a previous policy of open admissions, closed its door to those students.
Four years ago, I left City College to become Dean of the School of Education of the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University (LIU). A private university with an 80% minority student body and a mission of access in downtown Brooklyn, LIU, like City College, did not have an 80% pass rate on the New York State Teacher Certification Exams. But unlike City College, LIU was looking for ways to strengthen teacher education to increase the likelihood that its urban minority students, most of them bilingual, bidialectal, and immigrant, would pass the tests.
As I changed institutions and roles, I reaffirmed my commitment to diversity. I did so not from the margin or the periphery in which my work had been located (within a bilingual education teacher education program), but from the core, the supposedly monolingual center, of a teacher education program. Yet, my work at LIU has been about stretching myself and others -- those of us who thought we were in the oppressed margins and those of us who thought we were in a privileged separate center-- to inhabit the plural space of the borderlands in which urban education must carry out its task.
A special issue of Time magazine had addressed the "new frontier," "where hearts and minds and money and culture merge." And Gloria Anzaldœa, in her 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera, reminded us: "In the Borderlands/ you are the battleground / where enemies are kin to each other;/.... To survive the Borderlands/ you must live sin fronteras/ be a crossroad." How could we create a School of Education in the borderlands? How could we become a crossroad? How could we create a generative third space that would join faculty, students and their students in the shifting urban landscape? A teacher education program has the possibility of transforming teachers, and in so doing, creating a new vision for the education of all children, including those who are LOTE-speaking.
We started a journal, Educators for Urban Minorities, and developed our KEEPS mission, an acronym for the kinds of teachers we wanted to educate: knowledgeable, enquiring, empathic, pluralistic and socially committed. We knew, however, that our traditional curriculum and pedagogy would not develop the KEEPS qualities we sought for teachers. We were bound by the academic setting, by teacher education faculty who were experts in their specialized disciplines, many of whom failed to see teacher education as an interdisciplinary, intellectually rigorous activity. We were also bound by academic discourse and scholarship that encouraged intellectual generalizations, answers, and solutions, and discouraged questions that problematize and bring out complexity. We were bound by educational scholarship that was either conforming or critical of the educational system, work that has paid little attention to noticing the child or teacher-to-be as active learners-in-the-making, scholarship that rarely looks at children's work or school environments as complex landscapes deserving intellectual attention. Furthermore, we were bound by traditional models of teacher education, both monolingual and bilingual education, and by traditional pedagogy, based on teacher education disciplined-based texts.
Pressured by the New York State Education Department, we knew, however, that much had to change. We were learning, as in images based on the Spanish poetry of Antonio Machado, and later that of an old cha-cha-chá:, that se hace camino al andar [you make the road upon walking] and that it is the constant vaivén, the back-and-forth of a good cha-cha-chá, the dialoguing and re-viewing of possibilities, that opens up the crossroad.
With the help of Cecelia Traugh, first as consultant and in the last year as Director of our new Center for Urban Educators, the School of Education faculty started using disciplined, descriptive, phenomenological inquiry processes derived from the work of the Prospect Center for Education and Research.
Driven by story, image and detail, our collaborative descriptive inquiry around texts, ideas, works of both students and faculty, has enabled us to cut through some generalities and abstractions, to start talking across differences in a generative sense, to enlarge our understandings. But because descriptive inquiry interrupts the familiar and previously unquestioned, and calls into question expert knowledge, our inquiry has also created much tension.
From the very beginning of our descriptive inquiry sessions in September 1998, questions about the language differences of our teacher candidates emerged, questions that parallel classroom teachers' queries about their own language minority students. In November 1998, during our third inquiry session, a junior faculty member did a review of her practice. The purpose of a review of practice is to help a teacher, in the company of colleagues, take an inquiry stance to her work by asking a framing question and showing the rough edges of work. Colleagues grapple with understanding the perspective of the person presenting and imaginatively responding to the question.
I quote here from the transcript of that session:
"When I began teaching at LIU/Brooklyn, I was overwhelmed by the academic, social and personal struggles of my students. As a result, I did not know how to facilitate their intellectual development. In acknowledging their weaknesses, I also had to acknowledge my own. I realized how little I knew about teaching linguistically and culturally diverse students how to teach. . . . My students need to be fluent in standard English in order to be successful in college and in careers as elementary school teachers. They also need to retain their pride and commitment to their native languages and cultures. . . I need to facilitate their entrance into standard English, while I allow them to give voice to their own literacy backgrounds" (November 19, 2001, p. 5).
As we explored the value of having an inclusive curriculum that would enable the education of LOTE-speaking children, as well as those with disabilities, important questions emerged. The descriptive notes reflect these questions: "How do faculty motivate themselves to acquire new knowledge? How do they overcome their fears of change, of losing 'turf,' of not being able to contribute to a different program?" (March 18, 1999, p.2).
Despite the tensions generated and the questions raised, our descriptive inquiry sessions have enabled us to completely revamp the undergraduate and graduate teacher education curricula. We decided to place at the center and the starting place of teacher education, not a body of theoretical content to be learned, but the people who are the objects of the education, that is, the students of teaching, and the children in all their complexity. And we have paid close attention to developing in our students habits of mind -- of noticing, of observing and describing, of remaining "wide awake," as Maxine Greene would say, to differences, of making visible what is often invisible in the classroom. By requiring fieldwork from the very beginning, we have grounded the entire curriculum in work in school. Because our new programs are based on the idea that knowledge is created through interaction, we are building a community where students move through blocks of courses with faculty either co-teaching or working in teams. Because we recognize that our bilingual and bidialectal students of teaching need intense language and literacy development, our courses are engaging students in doing close readings of complex texts and in writing intensively throughout the curriculum. We are collecting our students' work longitudinally and paying close attention to it. And because both our students and their students are bidialectal and bilingual, language differences figure prominently in our curriculum, in our discussions, in our studies, naturally emerging from noticing the people who are at the center of teaching and learning.
Our new programs pay close attention to language and cultural differences throughout the curricula, and not just as separate, specialized courses such as Multicultural Education. In an increasingly diverse country, all teachers, whether specializing in the education of English language learners or not, need to know about the role language plays in a child's identity and the interdependence of the first and second language in cognition and learning. In addition, teachers have to be ready to use the child's native language to further her or his thinking and imagination, and be able to adapt instruction when teaching in a child's second language. In an increasingly interdependent world, all teachers need to encourage English speaking and LOTE-speaking students to use other languages, other literacies, other sources, to seek plural and multiple sources of data and information to understand our complex, globalized world.
Our inclusive vision has also had an impact on the way we educate specialists to teach English language learners. Besides taking specialized courses, our teachers, whether ESL or bilingual teachers, are now engaged in a year-long collaborative inquiry, along with other students of teaching, as together we enlarge our understandings of the complexity of all school children.
We are also developing a transformative pedagogy "of the borderlands" by locating the students' experiences alongside readings. In this way, students can better understand the large ideas as they construct meaning from their own particularity, and faculty, mostly white and not bilingual, can better understand the students' particularity in order to gain deeper understandings of familiar, traditional theories of teaching and learning and generate new ones.
Cypress Hills: Working With the School Staff of a Dual Language Program
The collaborative inquiry work we have done as a faculty has not only created tensions among us, it has also created tensions within us, and has generated questions about our teaching and research. In Relationships of Knowledge and Practice: Teacher Learning in Communities, Marilyn Cochran Smith and Susan Lytle argue that the distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge in teacher education has maintained the hegemony of university-generated knowledge by giving practical knowledge low status and confining it to the everyday, the local and particular, the trivial. This serves "to reify divisions that keep teachers in their place -- the separation of practitioners from researchers, doers from thinkers, actors from analysts, and actions from ideas."
Collaborative descriptive inquiry has given me a way of starting to inhabit a space of questions and possibility with teachers, alongside teachers, of being a companion as we remain attentive to the changing landscape of their classrooms. Collaborative descriptive inquiry can be seen as a research-mode of the borderlands, a crossroad, a plural space of possibility and connections, as we learn to notice.
Last year, one of the public Dual Language schools supported by New Visions in New York City, Cypress Hills Community School, asked for support in staff development, after one of its teachers, Irene De Leon, received a Title VII grant. Cypress Hills was created in 1997 through the efforts of a group of parents in the local, community-based organization. Parents, both Latino and African American, wanted the school to develop the bilingualism of their children, regardless of whether they were English monolingual students, Spanish monolingual students, or bilingual. Cypress Hills was the first public school in New York City to have a parent co-director, Maria Vega, with a teacher educator, Sheryl Brown, a bilingual Anglo. In the Dual Language Program, there are approximately 100 students in Kindergarten through second grade; 25% are African American and 50% of the Latino children speak English only upon entering kindergarten. All teachers, whether Latino or Anglo, are bilingual. Although the children are linguistically mixed, languages are strictly separated by classroom and teacher in five-day language cycles. As in all schools, there are questions and tensions about remaining accountable to the value of bilingualism and biliteracy that underlies their innovative five day structure and bilingual practices.
In the past, staff development by university faculty would have consisted of content sessions. Instead, Cecelia Traugh and I started collaborating with the school faculty and staff in whole school descriptive inquiry.
Big ideas started to emerge almost immediately as we learned the discipline of descriptive inquiry. The issue of language in instruction was raised, not as a structural or administrative issue, but an issue emerging directly from the work of the child.
During the third whole school inquiry session, we did the first review of a child, a Latino English-speaking first grader who presented challenges. The English and Spanish teacher team worked with Traugh in preparing their review, realizing for the first time that neither of them knew the child's work in the other language. Using stories, details, and images, the teachers organized the review under the five headings elaborated by Pat Carini -- physical presence and gesture, disposition and temperament, connections with others both children and adults, strong interests and preferences, and modes of thinking and learning. The post-review discussion enabled the faculty and staff to share their different stories of Luis and the multiplicity of views and diverse images they held. They began to see Luis across languages, across disciplines, across grades, across home and school cultures, across themselves, as a being in the process of making. They began to see their work in the school across differences, as collaborative work in progress.
I share one of the images that emerged from the description of Luis' disposition and temperament: "I thought of the metaphor of twilight, that time between day and night, the mixture of the two. I thought of this point of twilight when you don't know whether it's day or night. . . .[when] you're not exactly sure what's ending and what's beginning. And I think that Luis is in that space a lot of times" (March 14, 2001, p.2).
Speaking about Luis' great imagination, another teacher said: "Teachers' agenda is about this whole literacy focus and doing all of that. But, this is just the agenda on top. And underneath the agenda is this whole subworld of what's really going on in the classroom. . . . And sometimes I wish we had more time to watch the subworld" (March 14, 2001, p. 14).
Our collaborative inquiry made me think that children are often situated in that twilight, that crossroad between reality and fantasy, between home and school, in this particular school, between English and Spanish. The work of all schools has to be about making connections, touching and tapping into those cultural, linguistic, real and imaginary worlds, constructing a plural borderlands.
The description of children's work we did during the next two sessions brought us closer to the issue of language, language as it emerged from the child's work. Two kindergarten teachers first selected a 5 year-old English-speaking African American kindergartner who was highly skilled in English and functioned well in Spanish. We conducted a close description of a picture drawn in the Spanish classroom, and then described and compared a second picture drawn in the English classroom. We noticed there was more detailed drawing and more writing in the picture done in the English class, the native language of the child.
Questions about the effect that the language of the class might have vis-a-vis the language dominance of the child and the work produced became an important question to explore. We chose an English Language Learner for our next Inquiry session.
The two teachers introduced Shanely, age five, who came to school "with no English at all." Shanely's use of language, and that of the children who surrounded her, soon emerged in the description. Barbara, the teacher of the English part of the kindergarten, recalled her notes: "Shanely is definitely a talker in Spanish. She follows stories really well and has a lot to say about them. She is very outgoing. . . .She is very interested in learning and seems very happy with things. Now she seems to be speaking a lot of English" (April 18, 2001, p. 1).
It is interesting to reflect on all this quote says about bilingualism in instruction and second language acquisition. Because of Barbara's bilingualism, she knew that Shanely was a talker, even when she taught in English only. It may be because Barbara was able to understand Shanely that Shanely also seemed to understand Barbara's stories when she told them in English. Barbara's bilingualism made Shanely interested in learning and happy in the classroom. And in seven months, despite the fact that more than half of the time was spent in Spanish, Shanely was speaking English.
Barbara continued to comment on the children's language use: "It seems, in general, that the kids who are just speaking English love to speak English in my class because it is a new thing. The ones who are just learning Spanish, they can show off with the Spanish they know. It is funny to have the English speakers speaking to me in Spanish, and the Spanish speakers speaking to me in English" (April 18, 2001, p. 1).
This description shows a level of novelty and excitement in using the second language, something traditional research literature has not commented upon. In the safe setting of this dual language school where teachers and directors, whether Latinas or Anglos, are bilingual, everyone wants to speak the other language. Because the teacher is bilingual, kindergarteners can "try" the other language regardless of the language of instruction.
Barbara returned to Shanely's process in learning to speak and write English: "Her English is broken. Sometimes she speaks in Spanish; sometimes she speaks in Spanish. Not in complete sentences. And, she copies. When Miss Brown came in and read, she copied what Miss Brown said. I think that is the way she is learning language. She is a mimic. It is the way she is learning" (April 18, 2001, p. 1).
Barbara described Shanely's use of Spanish to fill in the gaps she has in English, a common language use in the borderlands, as Ana Celia Zentella has pointed out. And in much the same way I have written this paper, as I copy others' words to make them meaningful for me, Shanely has made language meaningful for herself by copying.
After the presentation of Shanely, we took an initial look at her work from the English and Spanish class that the two teachers collected. Our first collective impressions again drew us into language. Barbara was interested in what Shanely was doing in Spanish, since she only saw the work done in the English class. She questioned: "I wonder if you could say that in English, she is copying more. Like in November she copied the whole alphabet, and the alphabet was on the table. Later on, there are whole words that she copies. I don't think I see much invented spelling in English. In Spanish, it is happening" (p. 2).
We then selected one drawing done in the Spanish class for close description. Irene projected it on the overhead. First, members of the inquiry group described it literally, noting the colors, the shapes, the numbers in the middle of the picture, the writing, how the figure was made, the pencil pressure in different places. After the literal description, the group joined in further thought:
Barbara then looked up her address and it was 239, so she reversed the first two numbers (p. 5).
Shelly, the Spanish kindergarten teacher, commented on the use of the English word "me" for the Spanish "mi": " I notice that they do that a lot. "Me" is a sight word. It has been a sight word all year. All the kids write "mi" as "me." Only now have we started doing "mi" and they see there is another way to write it. This is one of the things that really interests me with the dual language.... "(p.9).
Despite the strict language separation of this dual language school, for this English language learner, inhabiting a space that merges home and school, home language and school language, literacy emerged for the first time as a system with overlaps, connections, coincidences, blending.
This insightful discussion opened up the work for me, gave me the idea, that this kindergartner displayed in her drawing the coming together of her house and her school. She drew it and coded it, not only nearby, as her words expressed, but as a blend of both worlds, as the twilight, that third space which all children, coming to school for the first time, create for themselves to inhabit.
I thought of how educators rarely stretch their school conception to embrace and contain the home and the community, and wondered: How could we shape schools to blend those worlds which minority children, especially, must connect? How could we meet them half-way? How could all of us stretch? The Cypress Hills school seemed to be an effort in that direction.
The group turned to a drawing that Shanely made around the same time in her English class. I quote from the transcript of the pulling together of our description, where we noticed the layering and the depth of that layering. There is layering up and down. For example, the shape of the big figure was layered and inside there was the layering of patterns -- the zig-zag on the bottom, repeated triangles which merged into the circles, which merged into the crosses with the circles. Because of the erasure the layering was almost 3-D, a layering of what was kept and what was erased. . . (p. 7): "The words. All those female words - sister, her, she, daughter. Then, the "I" and something started and erased. Lines connect sister and her and her and she. The dot is really worked; it is not just placed. The parallels between the patterns in the writing and the drawing are very visible. . . . It feels like there is a story here. One is so plain and one is so decorated. One seems crying and the other is so happy. The words don't give us any hints about the story. Unlike the first piece where the words are connected to the drawing" (p. 8).
In discussing Shanely's drawing, we learned that, indeed, the words had been copied from a typical ESL lesson on "her" and "she" as female. But the group was surprised that Shanely herself added the word "I," which for her was female, suggesting that there was serious thinking in the copying and that original expression in writing in a second language was emerging in "a feminist poem," as Barbara suggested.
Another group member saw Shanely as a mathematics thinker and a language learner, and added: "There are math ideas in this work - patterns, shapes, pairings" (p.9).
Noticed in this way, Shanely was not just an English Language Learner. We saw her bilingualism and biliteracy in the making, as well as her individuality. One of the teachers said that doing a descriptive review of a child's work was "like reveling in a piece of candy." She said that the work made her pause and notice, and as a result, she was more interested in all children, in her teaching, and in her children's learning.
Conclusion
I close with words by Patricia Carini, good advice for those of us seeking to understand English Language Learners in schools: " 'Those children' [and you can read here those LEP or ELL children] is a phrase my ear picks up quite frequently in schools. . . The designation casts them into a negative space: they are not us or ours. They threaten our standards -- as teachers, as parents, as a school, as a nation. By lumping them together, we are sorting them out: they don't fit into our picture of school, teaching and learning. Our solidarity as a community is affirmed at the expense of their individuality . . . . Until we make the room and time and educational arrangements which allow us to recognize, value and draw forth this [the inner] dimension of the children we educate -- until our educational arrangements allow us to get to know and respond to them in their human complexity -- we will, I think, continue to be overwhelmed by their variety and diversity. We will continue to resort to categorizing them in order to reduce the complexity of the task; we will continue to seek technical, external solutions that will fix or alter the children so they will more easily fit into the school mold" (pp. 6, 7-8).
To understand English Language Learners, we must first notice their individuality as makers of works and meaning, as works in progress, unfinished and unfinishable, creating a shared space, a crossroad, where we can all educate ourselves to the possibilities of human differences and complexity.