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A text that I aspire to as a teacher is Teaching Matters: Stories From Inside City Schools by Beverly Falk and Megan Blumenreich. In Chapter 7, the authors focus on an instructor named Kanene Holder, whose pedagogy was deeply shaped by her childhood racial and cultural experiences. Once she became a teacher, Ms. Holder was determined to not perpetuate the stereotypes and racism she experienced. Instead, she became a leader in her school and community. Using an anthropological approach, Ms. Holder began inserting herself into her community and school by interviewing her students’ families to learn more about them, which she coined as her “Funds of Knowledge”. Ms. Holder used the information gained from these familial interviews to develop a curriculum that educates students to become vehicles of change in their communities. Lessons included topics such as gentrification, rezoning, exploring diversity, and the socioeconomics of their community. In short, Ms. Holder gathered information about her locality to educate her pupils so that they may improve it one day.

As an educator myself, I aspire to be more like Ms. Holder. Her dedication to these interviews and developing numerous new lesson plans that are culturally and socioeconomically relevant to her students must have been exhausting. She is truly part of one percent of teachers that go above and beyond and deserve a whole chapter of a book in recognition of this effort.

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Of the resources provided in Module 4, I found the piece “Struggling Reader or Emerging Biliterate Student? Reevaluating Criteria for Labeling Emerging Bilingual Students as Low Achieving” by Susan Hopewell and Kathy Escamilla to be the most intriguing and important. This is not only due to how it perpetuates the reshaping optics of bilingualism from detrimental to beneficial, but also becauseI am focusing on how students are assessed for my final assignment.

Hopewell and Escamilla’s argument favors a more holistic approach to determining students’ reading proficiency. This means incorporating the primary language when assessing students. The data provided through their Literacy Squared program was revealing. Kids categorized as “at-risk” and placed on Individualized Learning Plans (ILPs) dropped significantly when the statistics showed that many of those students were reading at grade level in their first language. In other words, current standardized exams lead to a lot of “false positives” for students that are considered “at-risk” of falling behind their peers in reading proficiency in English and a more comprehensive and data-driven approach should be applied (Hopewell and Escamilla, 81).

As an instructor entering my seventh year of teaching, I have witnessed the detrimental effects of problematic/wrong labeling of students due to dubious composite scores in English-only exams. Therefore, based on this reading, I aspire to do several things differently at my school; this includes my curriculum, pedagogy, and rubrics. First, I aspire to be a stronger advocate for alternative assessments for our students. It will require more work for my colleagues and myself, but the amount of favorable data says the effort will pay dividends. Advocacy includes speaking against inequitable practices and laws. Families should have more choice in whether or not their children are labeled “ESL” and placed in dual-language programs. Federal and State laws that take agency away from families are not social justice.

Second, I intend to bring a more holistic approach to my pedagogy and when assessing students. This will lead to a better understanding of first language and cultural background strengths and weaknesses. In doing so, appropriate scaffolds in the first and second languages can be more meaningfully applied. Lastly, incorporating the primary language also means assessing more comprehensively. Developing rubrics that consider other languages and modalities besides writing in English will provide students with more opportunities to succeed. Teachers will also have a more complete portrait of the individuals they are educating.

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The video provided for module 2, titled Immersion and directed by Richard Levien, required several viewings to unpack the amount of information and experiences portrayed in a short period of time. Of the questions raised from this bit of cinema, I decided to focus on 3 (I combined two since they are connected). The first question being: “How were Moises (the focus student) and Ms. Peterson (the teacher) impacted by this assessment experience and state and local policies?” I believe this question to be one of, if not the most pertinent of the questions provided since it emphasizes the two groups of people most affected by current English-only immersion practices: students and teachers.

Due to misguided national programs such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Ms.Peterson and Moises were frequently placed in difficult and uncomfortable situations. That can be expected when dealing with any person that speaks a different language, but is exacerbated by English-only curriculums. Focusing on Moises first, there simply were not enough scaffolds for him to be successful in English or Spanish. This led to confusion and awkward situations in Moises’s classroom and playground. One example includes when he could only say the number “40” when answering the math problem for the class and could not explain how he reached that solution. Another concerned an issue of vocabulary and semantics when Moises asked his peer about “blocks”. There was no clarification for that term and how it can be used to describe shapes and measure distance in either language. Perhaps most disheartening was the fact that Moises, as a nascent newcomer to the United States, immediately recognized the significance of exams in this country and knew it would be an uphill battle for him to be successful. Similar to Paw from Danling Fu’s My Trouble is My English: Asian Students and the American Dream, Moises quickly connected “academic achievement with doing well on tests” (p. 50). Fortunately, Paw and Moises seemed like academically ambitious students that may overcome these obstacles. Still, it should not be surprising when so many other emergent bilingual students become disillusioned with current educational practices.

Students are not the only ones struggling with contemporary academic expectations. Instructors across the nation undoubtedly related to Ms. Peterson from the video, who clearly felt inundated, awkward, and disconnected. These emotions were personified in the scene with Ms. Peterson and her principal (especially when he uncomfortably closed the door in her face). She felt handcuffed by English-only exams and the principal’s desire to focus on intermediate English-proficient students due to funding and other potential punitive consequences from NCLB and ESSA. Since both pieces of legislation diverted funding away from bilingual programs to English immersion and standardized tests meant to assess adequate yearly progress (AYP), schools quickly adapted out of fear of losing money and other disciplinary measures. This is supported by Ofelia Garcia and Jo Anne Kleifgen in their text, Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Learners: “States were to hold schools receiving Title III funding accountable for meeting annual measurable achievement objectives for their emergent bilinguals, which placed unprecedented demands on the states for improvements in both the academic proficiency and the English proficiency of emergent bilinguals” (p. 41). Schools adjusted accordingly by diluting their standards to meet the unrealistic growth targets and both implicitly and explicitly encouraging teachers to place the majority of their attention toward students that will meet these national goals.

As a result of these policies, newcomers like Moises are often alienated and slip through the cracks into the lowest courses of their schools. Fledgling teachers like Ms. Peterson (perhaps that is too much of an assumption, but it seemed safe to say that she was a relatively new teacher when she made the rookie mistake of turning her back to the entire classroom) are also likely to become disheartened and disillusioned only to leave the occupation of teaching in pursuit of more rewarding careers.

Two more questions remain. The second being: What assessment practices shown in this video can be traced back to an immersion orientation toward language education? The third and final question is: What scenes in this film encourage viewers to re-evaluate an experience or a belief involving immersion and/or bilingual education? Moving linearly through these last two questions, several noticeable assessment practices in the video stemmed from monolingual practices. As discussed already, the most apparent was the emphasis on exams. Within the classroom, though, the day-to-day lessons also have to be questioned. Yes, the room was drowning in English terms and examples, but there were no sentence starters/frames, vocabulary with definitions, etc., to be found. The lesson was dominated by direct instruction with little to no apparent interpersonal interactions among the students to contextualize their learning, which is essential for emergent bilingual growth. Garcia, Kleifgen, and Fu support this idea, but let’s focus on a quote provided by Fu: “Language is acquired not in the role of spectator but through use. Being “exposed” to a flow of language is not nearly so important as using it in the midst of “doing”” (p. 42). In short, minimal meaningful dialogue between the students and teacher in any language is just one example of anglophone policies that hindered learning.

The immersion practices in the video encourage viewers to re-evaluate English-only pedagogy for several reasons. The number of awkward encounters among faculty, students, and administrators glaringly stood out. Depending on the context, there was little to no effective discourse in any language between any of the humans involved in the scene. As shown above, these interactions are largely due to top-down approaches from the federal government (granted, state and local governments are not insulated from making bad decisions with educational practices either). There were also disturbing scenes of injustice for emergent bilingual students, most notably the conversation between Ms. Peterson and the principal. Considering all of this, there are multiple ironies to be drawn out from this twelve minute video. One being that meritocracy within the United States (a founding principle of this nation) applies equally to all humans regardless of their socioeconomic and cultural background. Yes, humans can overcome these odds, but not everyone begins in the same place, nor are they all given equitable opportunities to climb the social ladder. The paradox of immersion programs was that they attempted to solve this problem in education only to make it worse. Therefore, many viewers probably concluded that alternative approaches to education are required.

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Anglophones and Multilingual Classrooms: Achievable? 

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Anglophones and Multilingual Classrooms: Achievable? 

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Of the sources provided to us for Module 1, I decided to focus on Ester de Jong’s “Preparing Mainstream Teacher for Multilingual Classrooms”. In this article, the author has several assumptions:

The first and most obvious being that incorporating students’ first language will provide a more equitable education and improve their academic performance. The present national policies and curriculums are superficial, unrealistic, and misguided. In short, contemporary approaches are moderately effective at best.

Therefore, change will occur from the bottom-up and not from the top-down.

Second, considering the potential academic returns for multilingual learners, the author assumes that monolingual teachers will embrace the suggested changes. This includes more cultural professional development to decrease ethnocentrism.

Ester de Jong also recommends appealing to the bilingual workforce to choose careers in education and that their presence will be invaluable to our pluralistic society.

Lastly, de Jong believes that Multilingual learners (MLL) will be more enthusiastic and invested in their education if a more comprehensive bilingual approach is implemented.

Considering these ideas, I agree with most of them and believe that if implemented, they would be effective. That being said, I do have questions about their application:

By encouraging a more grassroots strategy to education, is de Jong suggesting that NCLB and ESSA be repealed in favor of more state and local initiatives? This seems like an uphill battle in numerous ways (e.g., what happens to federal funding?).

Next, I thoroughly agree with the author about creating a more diversified workforce and environment in primary and secondary schools. That being said, how does de Jong intend to pull intelligent, skilled, and bilingual people away from more desirable occupations that are more respected (not to mention better paid)? In other words, how can teaching be expected to compete with STEM positions that are more coveted?

Continuing along this thread, what will the cultural professional development for obstinate anglophone educators entail? Many monolingual teachers are entrenched in their current pedagogies. Would there be incentives to encourage change? What would a typical bilingual lesson plan look like for an anglophone instructor?

Finally, yes, MLLs will probably be more enthusiastic about more comprehensive bilingual programs, but that is not guaranteed.  What if their prior education in their primary language is also limited and they are apprehensive about struggling with not one, but two languages? (Or outright refuse to learn in their primary language.) Would those students be given the choice to focus on just one or would learning both be mandatory?

Ester de Jong proposes many ideas that would be beneficial to our diverse student population. The amount of data (both numerical and anecdotal) consistently show that current methodologies are misguided and even a disservice to these kids. However, these concepts were produced by human beings and are therefore imperfect. Additionally problematic is that, yes, some of these recommended strategies were effective on micro scales, but the efficacy on a macro level remains to be seen.