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THIS
ISSUE +++
Heewon Chang, Ph. D.
Eastern
University
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Lisa
Bauer and Imelda
Castañeda-Emenaker
Jennifer E. Williams
Mari
Phillips
In the United States today, populations of K-12 students from marginalized cultures are increasing (Berube, 2000, Nieto, 2002). However, at the same time, the teachers who serve them are becoming even less diverse as a group, which is comprised mostly of white, middle class females (Nieto, 2002). These teachers, both practicing and pre-service, are not being prepared with the resources and skills they need to serve students different than themselves (Berube, 2000; Nieto, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Ball, 2000). In fact, Delpit (1996) reported that white teachers have trouble listening not only to the parents and communities of their students from marginalized cultures, but also to colleagues from marginalized cultures when they offer insights and values about the education children from their own cultures should receive. Consequently, unless something is done, there will be an increasing mismatch of cultures in 21st century US K-12 classrooms in which students will have limited cross-cultural experiences due to their youth and teachers will have limited cross-cultural experiences due to their position in the power culture. Further, without preparation or relevant professional development, most teachers can be expected to unconsciously assert both their own authority and their values as members of the power culture and to tune out the voices of diverse students. [paragraph 1]As part of its attempt to meet the needs of an exponentially increasing population of language minority students, a small urban district of a Midwestern city sought and received a Title VII grant. Over a three-year period, the district used federal funding to develop a program aimed at serving the needs of this new demographic beginning to populate its district. Through expansion of its English as Second Language (ESL) staff and use of resources such as bilingual aides, dual language after-school programs, universities within its state, and evaluators with expertise in cross-cultural communication, the district was able to make marked improvements in service to its language minority population. [paragraph 2] Two years prior to the implementation of the Title VII grant, the district in question was serving only 32 ESL students through two itinerant tutors who spent their days traveling to students enrolled in any of the nine elementary schools, the junior high school, or the high school. By the time that the Title VII grant was in place, the district was serving 142 students, representing a gain of 225%. While the district served students from diverse language groups including among others Arabic, French, Vietnamese, and Portuguese, Spanish was spoken by a large majority of the language minority families. [paragraph 3]In the first year of the grant, a full-time, Teaching English as a Second or Other Language (TESOL)-certified teacher was hired as the ESL teacher/advisor for the high school. A full-time rather than half-time ESL teacher was added at the junior high school. An additional elementary ESL teacher and an elementary ESL Resource Room were added to the district’s magnet school for ESL students. In addition, an ESL parent educator for the Parents as Teachers (PAT) Program was hired. Professional development opportunities were offered for district personnel in TESOL. Professors from two different TESOL programs of universities within the state conducted the sessions. In the district’s elementary magnet school for ESL students, 20 teachers and 10 educational aides enrolled in an after-school Spanish class offered by a volunteer, a professor proficient in Spanish who taught ESL/FL (Foreign Language) methodology at a local university. The class met for 45 minutes twice a week during the first two quarters of the year. For students, the district offered:
effectiveness of the ESL program. They noted that in the second year of the program, more language minority parents were attending teacher conferences, more school staff were making the effort to translate communications from school into the languages spoken by ESL parents, more bilingual staff were being hired, and more efforts were being made by staff to contact parents by phone. In addition to the programs in the first year, a Latino Club and evening English classes were implemented. In the non-magnet elementary school, Spanish was established as a class offered in addition to the core curriculum in the same way that art, music and gym classes were offered. [paragraph 5]In the third year, the programs were continued. ESL seniors participated in a small discussion group to determine how well the district had prepared them for high school. They indicated that they were prepared for both college and to find employment. They also noted that their ESL teacher/advisor had provided them with information on anything they had questions about. “She’s like a mom to us,” one student reported. The district also hired a bilingual school psychologist to provide testing, psychological and counseling services to students. The psychologist’s duties included assisting teachers and staff with understanding factors that impact identification of and services for second language learners with suspected language and learning disabilities. The school psychologist was housed at the elementary school where most of the district’s second language learners were enrolled. [paragraph 6] Insider and Outsider Perspectives As is the case with most federally funded grant projects, the district was required to hire outside evaluators to track its progress in serving language minority students over three years. For the first two years, evaluation activities focused on gathering information from teachers. They were asked about whether their needs for serving students were met, their perception of student progress, and implementation of methodology they learned in in-service training programs provided by the grant. Input from language minority communities about service was gained mostly in the form of participation counts for the various programs offered. In the third year, a small group discussion with ESL seniors about how well they were prepared for life after high school was conducted. The process of developing the evaluation illustrates a microcosm of issues around allowing language minority students to speak for themselves. The evaluation associate who designed the instrument was herself a member of the "white power" culture, a trained ESL teacher, and a researcher doing advanced academic work in preparing teachers to serve marginalized populations. When she designed an evaluation tool utilizing the small group discussion, her methodology still had the potential of tuning out the voices of the very group from which she was supposed to be gathering data. It was only after she received input from other members of the evaluation team, who were not members of the white power culture, that the situation was corrected. What follows are the perspectives1 from external evaluators as well as an administrator working within the school district. [paragraph 7] At the time I conducted this evaluation I had been trained as an ESL teacher and was experienced teaching marginalized populations both native and non-native to the United States. My education career had been spent in urban settings, and I was completing advanced work in multicultural education and TESOL at the university. This background enabled me to be sensitive to the fact that prior to my being part of the evaluation team, no data was being collected from ESL students who did not speak Spanish as a distinct group. This was important since, aside from hiring bilingual aides from some of the other language groups, all project efforts in a language other than English were in Spanish. [paragraph 8]In spite of all this, when it came time to ask the high school students about their experiences with the district, I found myself falling into imperialistic patterns. I made sure in my research design that the students had ample chance to compose their responses in English, but I totally discounted the importance of having translators available in case they found themselves overwhelmed. I was willing to do anything I could to help them express their thoughts as long as it was in my language. I relied on my ability to interact with and comprehend nonnative speakers of English at any level to solve all the problems. The completed design was fine for an English lesson that could include every participant regardless of his or her level of English, but it was not designed to allow participants the maximum chance to express their opinions about the program without regard to language barriers. [paragraph 9]
ESL Asian
Evaluator’s Perspective African-American Evaluator’s Perspective
I am an African American woman whose family
has lived in the United States for at least 10 generations.
Having been reared primarily in low socioeconomic, black
communities and educated in mostly white, middle class
environments, I have, of necessity, developed the art of
“harmonious duality,” a survival strategy in which one learns to
be flexible in communicating to adapt to the style (and comfort
levels) of either the dominant group or one's own group in a
given setting. I am proficient at “code-switching,” which is
the ability to flow easily in my case from a middle-class,
standard English speech pattern to a high energy, urban language
style, depending on the situation. This ability to adapt my
communication pattern is indeed an art that I have had to
cultivate and one that I don’t take for granted. I recognize
that not all members of under-represented groups have had the
opportunity to develop this talent, nor does everyone have the
motivation or desire to do so. However, an inability to
communicate effectively in a style most comfortable to
the majority culture does not justify having one’s voice
suppressed or one’s perspective distorted through a lens of
ethnocentrism. [paragraph 12]
African-American District Administrator’s Perspective As an African American district administrator, I feel it is important that educators understand factors that impact the learning of language minority learners. These factors include the home environment, school environment, school philosophy relative to supporting instructional programs for the language minority learner, and instructional strategies that support techniques to teach English, reading, phonics, and comprehension to language minority learners. It is my belief that we can all teach children to speak and read Standard English without denigrating their home language. By incorporating these factors into the school, language minority learners will be able to more quickly adapt to the school culture, learn the language at a faster pace and experience success. When these factors do not exit, the language minority learner soon is inappropriately identified, assessed, categorized, placed, and instructed. [paragraph 14] As a district administrator in a school district whose population is 52% minority and who is responsible for administering services to language minority learners, I make sure on a daily basis that efforts are being made and programs are being implemented in schools in my district that incorporate these factors. It is due to a grant opportunity and the commitment of the superintendent and members of the Board of Education that the district has developed and implemented a program that is successfully serving language minority students. [paragraph 15] As we examined our process, it occurred to us that our experience has significant implications for both teachers and educational researchers. Nobody in our process intended to shut out the voices of any of the students we interviewed. On the contrary, we attempted to design our evaluation so that these students would have a chance to provide input, which we considered vital to deciding whether or not the use of the grant money was successful. Even so, Fairclough’s (1989) warnings about the power of the majority culture to drown out voices of those unlike itself through societal inertia cropped up in our process. We wondered how often this happens in classroom settings, where teachers must serve the individual needs of so many students that they become overwhelmed. Certainly the white evaluator in our group could remember times in her own teaching practice when she had unintentionally ignored what her diverse students were telling her. In fact, her inadequacy in this area was a major prompt for her to undertake advanced study in multicultural education. As we looked at other aspects of our evaluation, we came up with more areas of concern, which we feel may be mirrored in school policy and practice for serving diverse students. [paragraph 16] First, we consider it important to note that most information for this grant came from teachers, and represented the teachers’, and hence the majority culture’s point of view. While this made sense both logistically and in terms of the program’s stated goals and objectives, we feel it should be an area of concern. If federal programs are being implemented to increase capacity to serve minority populations, we feel that it should be required that more attention be paid to the views of members of the marginalized groups receiving the services. [paragraph 17] Another concern we want to address is about the voices evaluators and educators open themselves to hear when serving diverse populations. In the case of this district, ESL students spoke many languages. However, Spanish was the language of the majority of students, and all district bilingual opportunities were offered in Spanish. Even though the district hired educational aides fluent in other languages spoken by ESL students in addition to Spanish, we wonder what message the concentration of activities around one language group sent to the rest of the ESL population. [paragraph 18] Of course, in order to address the needs of any group of diverse students, school districts need resources. Creativity using community resources such as a local university, local businesses, and advocate groups needs to be supplemented with funding. To that end, we’ve included an appendix with websites containing information on funding sources (see Appendix.) In addition, we’d like to propose that educators form an email network to share ideas and resources for serving ESL students. We would be glad to be a starting point for such a group. [paragraph 19]
Berube, B. (2000). Managing ESL programs in rural and small urban schools. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Ball, A. F. (2000). Preparing teachers for diversity: Lessons learned from the US and South Africa. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16 (4), 491-509. Delpit, Lisa (1996). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. In Beauboeuf-Lafontant, T. & Augustine, D. S. (Eds.) Facing Racism in Education (2nd Ed.) (pp. 127-148). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32 (3), 465-491. Nieto, S. (2002). Language, culture, and teaching: Critical perspectives for a new century. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Websites to Obtain Grants to Serve Diverse Students
___________________________________________________________________________________________ Lisa Bauer, is a doctoral student in Teaching English as a Second Language and an Evaluation Associate at the Evaluation Services Center, University of Cincinnati. Her area of research is preparing US teachers for diverse populations. (Contact the co-author at Lisa.Bauer@uc.edu)
Imelda
Castañeda-Emenaker, Ed. D.,
is a
research associate at the Evaluation Services Center, University
of Cincinnati. Her areas of research are in the use of
qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and
professional development. Jennifer E. Williams, Ed. D., is a Program Evaluator with the Cincinnati Public School District and a Counselor Educator at The Ohio State University. Her research agenda includes multicultural competence in professional practice, and abuse prevention and intervention (substance abuse, sex abuse, child abuse, domestic violence, school violence, etc.). (Contact the co-author at williaj@cpsboe.k12.OH.US) Mari Phillips, Ed. D., is the director of pupil personnel services and ESL program, at Princeton City Schools, Sharonville, OH. She develops and coordinates programs to ensure success for every Princeton student. (Contact the co-author at mphillips@princeton.k12.oh.us) Recommended Citation in the APA Style: Bauer, L., Castañeda-Emenaker, I., Phillips, M., & Williams, J. E. (2003). Developing the soil for diversity: Opening the US K-12 school districts to every student. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education [online], 5 (1), 19 paragraphs <Available: http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2003spring/bauer_et_al.html> [your access year, month date] |
