Negotiated Identity

OLDER THAN AMERICA Trailer

2010-03-21T09:02:00.001-07:00

This movie is an appropriate addition to the content of this blog. See the main film site at http://www.olderthanamerica.com/

to kill the Indian in the child . . .

2010-03-21T09:00:00.001-07:00

I just found this video, which is very appropriate to the topic of this blog.

Negotiating comprehension

2009-10-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

I just had to include this entire blogpost from Academomia (written by my cousin,) because it's a fantastic example of negotiating for meaning--for sense-making. I'm afraid that a language learner might not be as persistent as 3-year-old Charlie:

On our way to church this morning Ryan and I were talking about our university's quarterback situation in which we lost a bunch of games, our starting QB was injured and taken out of a game that was not supposed to be that big of a deal but that we were barely hanging onto, our second string QB was put in, and we scored like a thousand points inside one quarter.
Ryan made the giant mistake of saying "Poor starting quarterback, that's a tough deal."
Charlie piped up from the back seat. "Wha happened to him?"
"Uh, our quarterback got hurt playing football."
"Wha happened to him?"
"He fell down during a football game and got a booboo. Now he is all better but the coach has to decide which quarterback is going to play the rest of the season."
"Wha happened to him?"
"Our quarterback fell down and hurt his leg, Buddy. He's fine, but now there are two good quarterbacks and the coach has to decide who gets to play."
"Wha happened to him?"
"Charlie, why don't you tell me what I've told you so far?"
"I don't know."
...
...
Ahhh.
"Wha happened to him?"
Sigh. "Our quarterback fell during the football game and hurt his leg. His mommy wrapped him up in a quilt, gave him some milk, and let him watch TV. Now he feels better."
"Oh."
Later after we picked him up from Sunday School Charlie skipped down the hall saying "The football player fell down and got a booboo and now there are two quarterbacks and his mommy wrapped him up in a quilt and let him watch George and that was SO NICE of her and now he feels ALL BETTER!"

Now that is real sense-making related to the experience of a three-year-old--comprehensible input, as it were! How do we recognize when our students haven't been able to make sense of what we're saying? A high school student is much less likely to persist, so we may not discover the problem before a test, unless we do careful and constant formative assessments.

Oakland campus caters to refugees, immigrants

2009-09-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

The LATimes also had an article related to the topic of this blog today, Oakland campus caters to refugees, immigrants. The international high school provides an alternative to newcomers, some of whom have never been in a classroom. Many of the students at the Oakland International High School have had little or no education in their homelands, and most have endured the tragedy of refugee camps, absent parents and even being orphans before coming to this country. The school has an ambitious mission

... to provide quality alternative education for recently arrived immigrant students in English language acquisition and in preparation for college. Our diverse students become active participants in our community while learning in small groups through hands-on, interdisciplinary projects and collaboration.
(School website)

and a willingness to make it work, which isn't an easy job for either the students or their teachers. The article tells the story of some of its students:

Samuel Kanwea showed up for what should have been his freshman year in high school illiterate, malnourished and exhausted from years of living in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast. His family had never been able to afford the luxury of education, so he spent his early teenage years collecting firewood and selling fish. When the Liberian refugee started school in Oakland at the age of 17, it was the first time he had set foot in a classroom.
(Gorman, p 1)

Another student from Guatemala has a slightly easier time because she speaks Spanish, which is not her native language, and she had attended some school.

In one sense, Florinda -- who attended only two years of school in Guatemala before arriving in the United States in spring -- has an impressive gift. She speaks both Spanish and Mam, a Mayan dialect. But, like many new immigrants, she doesn't speak any English. Everything else in school -- geography, algebra, U.S. history -- will be out of reach until she learns the language. Classmates become both friends and translators.
(Gorman, p 1)

The principal Carmelita Reyes is very much aware of the difficulties students have when they are not literate in evey their native language. But Florinda at least has the advantage of already being bilingual, which we have read is always an advantage to learning a new language. She also can seek help in Spanish, while some students do not have fellow speakers of their language that they can turn to for a translation.

Hser Kaw, 15, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his family fled Myanmar. He spent just a few years attending school in a bamboo building before coming to the United States as a refugee in 2007. Hser said he often skipped class at the camp.

When he first started at the Oakland school, Hser said, he felt intimidated because he couldn't read, write or speak English. He spoke some Thai and a little-known language called Karen. ...

In his first year, he received mostly Ds and Fs. He said he considered quitting, but knew that he would be able to find a better job if he graduated. So he sought out extra help and completed his missing work, and he's now in 11th grade. Reyes said Hser is often the first student to arrive on campus in the morning.
(Gorman, p 2)

I was shocked to read that these students even received grades at this level. Getting D's and F's in subjects you have no background to be able to understand can only knock away a student's motivation. Luckily many refugees are made of very strong stuff to get them this far.

Even though learning to read has been a tremendous struggle, Kanwea said getting discouraged hasn't been an option. His mother, Jessie Kanwea, said she is relying on him and his sisters.
(Gorman, p 2)

The article ends with a quote from President Obama's speech to schools, which the class was reading.

Even when you're struggling, even when you're discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you, don't ever give up on yourself. . . . The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

Inner City Boarding School

2009-09-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

In my reflections on Chapter 1, where the concept of negotiating identity was introduced, I wrote about the boarding schools that have often been used to erase the identity of (usually) indigenous children so they could become "productive members of society." Thus I was struck by an article today in the New York Times Magazine "School Issue," The Inner-City Prep School Experience, about the SEED School in the Southeast section of Washington, DC. It sounds almost like the same sort of experience that these other children experienced. And yet it isn't entirely. The children go to their homes and neighborhoods every Friday afternoon and return Sunday evening to what become the sanctuary of the school, where they are dressed like the child in the picture, which would certainly not be accepted in the 'hood, and have to negotiate their identity all over again. According to their website:

SEED’s model is unique not only in that it is a boarding school for public school students, but also in that it is located within the students’ local community. Proximity to the local community nurtures positive contact with family and community leaders. It also provides students the opportunity to serve as role models and improve their own communities through service. SEED offers resources for local families, thereby strengthening both students’ support structure and the surrounding community.
(SEED School website/Experience)

But how do the kids manage their two identities, the school identity and the home one? For one thing, the Student-Parent Handbook says it "is is not the intention of the school to regulate every aspect of a student’s individuality.” (Jones, p. 1) so the students are permitted a certain amount of the hair styles, jewelry, etc. that is important to their home identity. One girl told the writer that

SEED was her refuge from the drama of the neighborhood, the bridge between home and the bigger world, the place that would help her be the first in her family to go to college. “I know what I gotta do when I’m at SEED,” she told me. She could move between worlds. But, she said, “I don’t mix my worlds.”
(Jones, p 2)

The students' need to negotiate their identities is very clear from this quote:

To survive that back and forth, many SEED students learn to code switch. A SEED student knows he can’t swagger through the hallways in baggy jeans, the rapper Ludacris blaring out of his iPod, while he avoids eye contact and a handshake with Mr. Adams [the head of the school.] But if he takes too much of SEED back to the neighborhood basketball court — the big words and pressed shirts — he could have troubles of a different sort. Rather than try to erase students’ street culture, Adams, who is 39 and biracial and was raised by a single African-American mother, talks to students about the particular value of it. “Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a skill set that others lack,” he told me. “Why would I want to rid him of that?”
(Jones, p. 3)

Certainly Adams' attitude is the exact opposite of the leaders of the old boarding schools! These students are protected from needing to negotiate their identity constantly by being at the school 5 days every week, but their position at home is the same situation we described in blog reflections on another book for a CGU class this summer, The Adolescent Dilemma (which we tried to direct at high school students, but instead got reactions from other teachers.)

Language as a bridge and an identity

2009-09-22T11:26:00.000-07:00

Hector Tobar's column in the LA Times today, Language as a bridge and an identity, provides a lot of wisdom on this topic. Tobar is of Latino origin, and spoke Spanish until he started school.

I know, from experience, that a second language is like a mental muscle that will turn flabby if you don't use it on a regular basis.

The first words I spoke were in Spanish. At 5, I was still fluent. But at 17, after a dozen years of only English in local public schools, I spoke Spanish like a 4-year-old.

When I went to college and mastered Spanish at age 20, worlds opened up to me. I had my first real conversations with my Guatemalan grandparents. Today, Spanish is essential to my profession -- I've interviewed peasants and presidents in the language.
(All quotes from Tobar)

In the article he interviews parents and students at a weekend Spanish class which helps the children hold on to their Spanish.

I was invited to speak on Sunday to a group of 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds, and to their odd, tiny "classmate" -- a stuffed bear. Like me, the children were all English speakers, born in the U.S. But the stuffed bear spoke only Spanish ... So the kids and I chatted in español -- just so el oso wouldn't feel left out.

One of the parents told him the reason he found it necessary to enroll his child in the school:

"As soon as my son went to preschool, all of his buddies were speaking to him in English ... English was powerful. And Spanish was for the people cleaning up the school."

It seems odd that the language of Cervantes and Neruda would be considered a second-rate tongue. But that's the reality of L.A.

Here, English is the language of success, while Spanish is the language of hard labor. Some people run away from it as fast as they can.

A small minority would like to erase Spanish from the city's life. That would be a grave mistake.

Spanish adds to our collective cultural sophistication, along with Korean, Mandarin and many more languages. Those tongues and the people who speak them make us a more cosmopolitan and economically competitive city.

It was certainly a lot easier for my children to stay bilingual in Denmark. English was a high status language that everyone needs to be able to speak, so they start it in school in 5th grade. But even though speaking English has high status, being American sometimes gave problems, particularly from the time of the Vietnam war, all the way to Clinton's presidency.

But cultural sophistication is not the only reason to keep your first language, which is Spanish for many of the residents of our area. All of your languages are part of your identity.

And being connected to the language of your ancestors is good for the soul. [One of the parents] says she sees the impact of not knowing Spanish on some of her relatives. "They don't know where they come from, or where they're going," she said. ... "I have all these cousins who are basically monolingual in Spanish," she told me. "But all their kids are monolingual in English. They can barely communicate with each other."

Being a hybrid

2009-09-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

I asked a Taiwanese/American friend to look at this blog, and to comment on it. I asked her to tell me about her Chinese/American identity, remarking that in Denmark I used to feel like I was 75% Danish and 75% American (since there was certainly some overlap in the two cultures.) Linda said she understood the concept but considers herself 65% American and 35% Chinese hybrid (as a mathematician, she wants it to add up!)

Linda has very kindly shared a couple of sections from her Ethnographic analysis of her own background, which was a major assignment for our summer classes.

Family Background
I was born and raised in a middle class family with traditional Chinese values. My father was an entrepreneur who was the primary financial provider for our family. My mother was the traditional loving wife and mom. She focused most of her attention on instilling good values in her children, doing everything she can in her power to ensure that everything was done to the utmost of her ability. The house was spotless in her presence, the children were never left unattended and the household ran smoothly.

Growing up as a young child, I was exposed to several languages. My first language was Taiwanese. It was the primary language that was spoken within our household, and among friends and relatives. As I entered into my school years, I learned Mandarin, which was the formally accepted written language in Taiwan at the time. My father spoke Japanese as part of his professional dealings, and as a result, I was exposed to the Japanese language as well. It was not until my college years [in the U.S] that I actually spent some time formally studying the Japanese language. Throughout my secondary school years, I spent five years studying the Spanish language as part of my foreign language requirements.

My first introduction to the English language and the western culture was at the age of eight when my family immigrated to the United States. For the most part, my western influences came from the world outside of home. As a child, my teachers and friends at school played essential roles for shaping my acceptance of the Western culture into my life. It did not take long for me to embrace the openness of the Western culture, as it closely connected to my personality. Confused about my true identity, I was living a Western life by day and an Eastern life by night throughout most of my school years. The two sides of me did not mesh until I began to look within myself as a young adult. It was not until my late twenties that I actually accept myself as sort of a hybrid, someone who embraces the freedom of the western culture while still upholding some traditional Chinese values from within.

Today, I feel extremely lucky to have been exposed to both the Eastern and Western style of education. As a teacher, I will pick and chose from both styles of education. Depending on the needs of each student in my class, I can shift between the Eastern and Western style of teaching.
Language Acquisition
My first encounter with the English language occurred on my first day of class in America as a third-grade student, at Yorbita Elementary School in La Puente, California. No one in my immediate family spoke English, and thus, my first day of school in the United States was complete immersion in the most unexpected way.

As I recall, the teacher pointed to me during my first day of class and said, “Linda”. She pointed to herself and said, “Ms. Dubra”. Not being aware of the English name that I was just given at that time, I remember thinking the English language was so complicated. In Chinese, the simple words of “you” and “me” were just “ni” and “wo”. I thought to myself, “Why are there so many syllables for such simple words of communication?” After a few days of having this misconception, I finally made the connection that “Linda” was actually my name, and therefore, “Ms. Dubra” was the name of my teacher.

My experience as an ELL student in 1978 was one that was nurturing and encouraging. My teacher and the class aide were both more than supportive of my inability to understand the English language. They were also pleasantly surprised at my mathematical capabilities, as I had no problems comprehending formulas and equations that were based on the Greek system of numeration.

Differentiated instruction was used to teach me the English language. Initially, a student aide who I met with for approximately one hour per day taught me some basic English vocabulary using body language and picture cards. As I began to understand some verbal English instructions, I joined first grade students during the English portion of their class. My day consisted of two separate instructional parts. It was through this method of differentiated instruction that I learned to read in English.

It took only a few months before I was able to communicate verbally using some basic day-to-day English vocabulary. However, it took many years of practice before I felt confident writing in the English language. It was not until I fully immersed myself into the American culture as an adult that I was able to comfortably write in English. That meant I had to stop translating from Chinese to English and actually, think and write directly in English. It took almost twenty years of work in progress for me to achieve a fluid level of written communication in the English language.
On schools in Taiwan and the U.S.
(from the email, not the ethnography) Generally, school in the US was a lot easier in terms of academic expectations, and much more at ease (more freedom) with respect to the daily school life. The teachers were all super nice and caring, and they never really punished anyone. In Taiwan in the late 70's, the teachers [could] physically hit students for talking, doing something incorrectly,... as a form of punishment. Middle school students actually [had] to have their hair cut a certain way, a very specific length - I remember always laughing at my sister's silly cut when we were young. Can you believe that?

[Linda added in a later email that] the education system today in Taiwan has changed quite a bit as well. Students are allowed to have their own preferred hairstyles now, unlike before where they even had someone at school reshaping your haircut if it did not meet the stated requirements. Coloring hair is still not accepted in most schools. Teachers are also not allowed to hit students anymore today. I would estimate the change to be in the 90s, maybe a gradual change began in the late 80s as Taiwan opened its market to the outside world, receiving more western influences as a result.
(Emails from Linda - My emphasis)

I think Linda describes very clearly the conflicts of two cultures, how she negotiated her identity between home and school, as well as her own awareness of her lack of Academic English, as discussed in the book and earlier in this blog.

Since there were most likely very few Chinese students in her school, she learned entirely through immersion in English, with caring teachers. Since she had learned not only her family language Taiwanese, but the Academic Chinese of Mandarin in school and was adept at mathematics, she was able to pick up the language quite quickly and was encouraged in her studies. She was given maximum exposure to English by being placed in a regular classroom (albeit a couple of grades back) so that she could learn to read along with the first graders. Since her language was not European, she had to learn an entirely different code and had very little other than underlying language universals to help her learn English.

Chapter 8: Collaborative Empowerment

2009-09-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

At the Preschool, Elementary and Secondary Levels

Our assignment permits skipping "Chapter 7: The Deep Structure of Educational Reform," which probably goes beyond "that which we can change;" "Chapter 9: From Doublethink to Disinformation: The Academic Critics of Bilingual Education," an attempt to give the other side the word and "Chapter 10: Babel Babble: Reframing the Discourse of Diversity," also a chapter on policy, which would be very useful to some, but not first-year math teachers. So I have not read these chapters now, but may come back to them some time.

In Chapter 7, Cummins gives practical examples of several schools at various levels where the concepts he has developed here are carried out in practice as inspiration to the rest of us. I quote first from his conclusion, and then return to the various schools to pick out certain practical elements I find particularly interesting.

They show also that empowerment is generated only through interactions that affirm students' identities and extend their conceptual horizons. The creation of power in these interactions is at the core of genuine educational reform.
One reason why much educational reform has remained at a safe surface level ... is that genuine reform ...is not safe.; it threatens structures of privilege and status within the society. Faced with the escalating rhetoric of diversity as the enemy within, it takes courage for educatios to assert the rights of children to develop their home languages and the importance for the nation of fostering these multilingual resources....
(Cummins, p. 253)

Cummins tells about a preschool run on Montessori principles developed by the Foundation Center for Phenomenological Research, which is apparently now the National Council of La Raza which now has a number of different programs, including the one linked here on Early Care & Education Programs. The major difference in the preschool in Winters, CA, described by Cummins is that the school recruited members of the community with no educational training, and taught them Montessori methods, creating a school that is part of the community, provides jobs for community members, trains whole families in health and literacy, and in general perpares the small students well for the school career. The students and their parents become empowered by the program and strenghten their identities as Latino/as and Americans. From the website I cannot determine if this school still exists nor any studies on its results.

For the Elemenary level, Cummins highlights the work of several different schools:

The Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Washington. D.C.is primarily Spanish/English, but also enrolls both Asian and African American students, as well as Spanish speaking students from many countries, making it very mulit-cultural, while retaining the students' identities.
[The] School offers a ... bilingual program for grades pre-k to eighth. All instruction and school activities are conducted in a dual-language immersion environment, with equal weight given to learning in English and in Spanish. Both ... faculty and ... student body are balanced 50%-50% between native English and native Spanish speakers. In addition, by enrolling children from many neighborhoods, nationalities, cultures, and economic circumstances, Oyster provides a heterogeneous social environment that is essential to its multicultural mission. Oyster enjoys an unusual dual status as a DCPS neighborhood public school and as a school entirely devoted to a specialized program. Accordingly, all "in-boundary" children have a right to attend grades K-8, while "out-of-boundary" and pre-k applicants are admitted according to the school's selection criteria.
(From school website)
The Dual Language Program of Manhattan's District 3 has at least three types of bilingual education. Cummins was particularly interested in their pioneering Dual Language program.
Bilingual
Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) programs provide language arts and subject matter instruction in the student’s native language and English as well as intensive instruction in English as a Second Language (ESL). As the student develops English proficiency, instruction in English increases and native language instruction decreases.
Dual Language
Dual Language programs educate ELL students in need of English language instruction alongside English-speaking students who are interested in learning a second language. Programs continue to develop ELLs’ native language and English language skills throughout their schooling while enabling English-speaking students to become bilingual as well. Both groups provide good linguistic role models for each other, and through their interactions, support language development in both languages. Students receive half of their instruction in English and half in the target language.
ESL
Freestanding English as a Second Language (ESL) programs provide all classroom instruction in language arts and subject matters in English through the use of specific instructional strategies. Native language support is available to help students accelerate their understanding in subject areas. Native language assistance is supported by such activities as encouraging students to discuss subject matter with peers in the native language, allowing students to use the native language to write explanations of what they understand, and making native language textbooks, libraries, dictionaries, reference materials and technology resources available for students to use in the classroom.
(PDF from District Website)
The Bilingual Bicultural School, which occupies part of a larger school in East Harlem, uses multi-subject projects to teach both English and Spanish dominant students in both languages. They have been particularly known for the use of technology for these projects.
The Bilingual Bicultural Mini School's Mission is to provide a performance standards-based curriculum that is of exceptionally high quality, challenging and intellectually enriching for all our students. OUR MISSION WILL BE ACHIEVED THROUGH THESE GOALS: 1) Students, parents, teacher, and administrators are treated with respect; 2) Trust, faith and belief in our children are ever present; 3) We recognize that all our students have gifts and talents; 4) Provide higher level of knowledge in all subject areas; 5) The integration of technology across the curriculum; 6) An arts program that gives all students access to art, music and dance instruction; and 7) Parents participate in schoolwide activities that emphasize scholastic growth for their children.
(From school website)

At the Secondary School level, Cummins finds that the situation for bilingual students is acute for several reasons:

Students risk running out of time before they have caught up sufficiently in academic English...
traditional departmentalized high schools are organized in rigid way that often track ELL students into lower-level programs, and construct their bilingualism as an academic deficiency.
a large majority of secondary school teachers have had minimal training to eneable themto teach ELL students effectively.
The three programs profiled [in this chapter] have one major element in common: they all acknowledge that bilingual adolescents have "so much to say" ... and they provide organization of structures and interpersonal spaces within which students' voices can find expression.
(Cummins, p. 245)

A Navajo-English Applied Literacy Program encourages students to create "specific products for specific audiences," such as their community. They produced articles about the community in both Navajo and English for the community weekly paper, and videos in both languages for the local TV station among other activities. By reporting on their community they learned more of their own culture, strengthened their Navajo language, and most importantly developed empowerment based on their Navajo/American identity.
At a high school in Oxnard, CA, a single teacher, Bill Terrazas, encouraged students to have long dialogues around round tables to help them find their identities and position in the community. His students formed an organization called Students for Cultural and Linguistic Democracy, which I, unfortunately can find no current references for.
The International High School at Laguardia Community College in NYC is truly international, with an ethnic break-down of 35% Asian, 48% Hispanic, 3% Black and 14% White of different nationalities. 63% have ELL status. As part of their Mission Statement, they list

We are committed to the following educational principles:
Limited English proficient students require the ability to understand, speak, read and write English with near-native fluency to realize their full potential within an English-speaking society.
In an increasingly interdependent world, fluency in a language other than English must be viewed as a resource for the student, the school and the society.
Language skills are most effectively learned in context and emerge most naturally in purposeful, language-rich interdisciplinary study.
The most successful educational programs are those that emphasize high expectations coupled with effective support systems.
Individuals learn best from each other in heterogeneous, collaborative groupings.
(From school website)

To this I would like to add the Internationals Network for Public Schools that I discussed in a post about Chapter 5, September 11, and Oakland International High School, which I discuss on Sept 27: Oakland campus caters to refugees.

This is the completion of my interactive journal about the required chapters from the book Negotiating Identities. However, if I should find something else related to this topic in the future, I will return with a new post. I consider this, like all journals, as a work in progress.
I would very much appreciate your comments, suggestions or additions to my posts. Perhaps, for example, you are working with a program that should be included here.

Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

2009-09-15T12:51:00.000-07:00

The Role of First and Second Language Interdependence in Explaining the Outcomes of Bilingual Programs

When you learn to speak as a child, you are using some sort of innate cognitive abilities to understand language, which Noam Chomsky called the General Theory of Language in his revolutionary book from 1957, Syntactic Structures. He proposed that individual grammars of individual languages were based on a cognitive structure used by all languages. For example, all languages (except sign language, of course) use a variety of phonemes, which can be described by universal features, all express various concepts in some sort of semantic structure, words, prefixes, etc., and all have a certain syntactic structure (subjects, objects, verbs, etc.) This is why it is possible for us to learn a strange language by picking up objects to ask for their names and put the names into some sort of comprehensible structure. We still have to learn the specific rules for each language, but the main framework is already in place.

[Linguists] must be concerned with the problem of determining the fundamental underlying properties of successful grammars [of specific languages.] The ultimate outcome of these investigations should be a theory of linguistic structure in which the descriptive devices utilized in particular grammars are presented and studied abstractly, with no specific reference to particular languages.
(Chomsky, p. 11)

Chomsky's book arrived the same year that a symposium on Universals in Linguistic Theory was held at the University of Texas. These books were the "bibles" when I studied linguistics back in the 1960's. I was pleased to see that Chomsky's book has been republished, and that the topic is still of interest. Nowadays, of course, there are bio-neurological theories of language that weren't possible when I studied linguistics, such as the works of Steven Pinker, which I will have to study some day.

So learning a language is learning those specifics about the particular language; learning math is learning math concepts, which are language independent.) We can appreciate a picture drawn by someone no matter what language she was thinking in when she painted the picture; people who speak different languages can plan sports, even on the same team.

Just as a football player has no difficulty learning the rules of basketball or soccer, because they have some general "sports rules" and a pianist can learn to play a violin or flute because he already understands the musical concepts behind playing instruments, then every language that a student learns builds on her cognitive understanding about what the general language rules are that govern all languages. In each case, the person compares and contrasts the sport, or instrument or language with what s/he already knows, to figure out which new parts still have to be learned.

For example, a Spanish speaker discovers very quickly that English has a lot of recognizable vocabulary, and figures out rules so that he can automatically "invent" correct words in English using those rules. He learns by trial and error when these invented words work and when they are incomprehensible, buiilding his cognitive understanding of both languages.

According to Cummins, there are still people who believe in a "Separate underlying proficiency (SUP) model of bilingual proficiency", which apparently believe that you start from scratch when you learn a new language. Cummins is supported by the early theorists in the theory of Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) model, which assumes that a good part of learning is common, no matter what language you speak, as he shows in this figure:

Figure 6.4 The "Dual Iceberg" Representation of Bilingual Proficiency
(Cummins, p 174)

Cummins reports on numerous studies representing many language combinations that prove this point, that by learning one new language, a student builds a cognitive representation of language learning that aids him in learning new languages. This is why some people can speak enormous numbers of languages - since a large part of each language is common cognitive representation.

The Ramirez Report (1991), the Thomas/Collier Study (1997) and various International Evaluations

Cummins goes into more detail on a four convincing studies, where large numbers of students taught in different types of bilingual programs were studied, both in the U.S. and internationally. All of the studies he describes provide good support to the thesis that the longer students have good training in their L1 as well as the L2, they will become proficient in both, and in some cases more proficient than their monolingual peers, supporting the additive enrichment principle.

Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

2009-09-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Theory Proposed by Bilingual Education Advocates

Additive Bilingualism Enrichment Principle

Figure 6.1: Effects of Bilingualism
(Cummins, p. 171)

Bilingualism and Metalinguistic Abilities. Researchers have found that bilingual students gain cognitive skills from their bilingualism, including learning a third language faster. Because they are constantly comparing and contrasting their two (or more) languages, they become cognitively aware of the structure of the languages, and how they are similar or how much they differ. They consistently score higher on "measures reflecting creative thinking (the Torrance Fluency and Imagination measures), metalinguistic awareness (Word Order Correction), and verbal and non-verbal awareness."(Cummins, p. 165)

Cummins tells about conclusive studies in Italy and in India, where

studies show a clear positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive performance, instuding measures of metalinguistic ability. [The researcher] suggests that bilinguals' awareness of language and their cognitive stragegies are enhanced as a result of the challenging communicative environment in which their bilingual abilities have developed.
(Cumins, p. 166)

My bilingual children are decidedly more creative than I am. Although my artist grandmother was sure I would be an artist, my creations were very down-to-earth and concrete, while my children produced much more fanciful drawings and writings. My son is now a very creative developer. I expect that my own social creativity has also advanced because of my late bilingualism. After inital protestations about how strange things were done in Denmark, I learned to accept cultural and food differences them, which I have carried over to my new life in the "new" culture of California, 30 years later.

A variety of explanations have been suggested to account for the observed superiority of bilingual children on certain types of cognitive and linguistic measures: for example, the fact that bilinguals have two words for the same idea or object and two ways of expressing the same through may lead them to "objectivfy" or become more aware of their linguistic operations...
(Cummins, p. 167)

This would indicate that we not only should encourage those of our students who are fortunate to become bilingual to keep their two languages equally strong (as in the illustration), but encourage monolingual students of the advantages of becoming bilingual. Possibly the some of the members of the organization U.S. English realize the advantages of bilingualism, and fear that bilinguals will become to strong in our culture. Interesting enough, since this is a country of immigrants, maybe the creativity of those immigrants can be attributed to their bilingual backgrounds. Are monolinguals too complacent without the challenge and contrast of bilingualism? Interesting enough, the origins of U.S. English are among the foreign born who has "made it" here in this country. According to the website

Mauro E. Mujica ... Chairman of the Board and CEO of U.S.ENGLISH since January of 1993 ... [who] immigrated to the United States from his native Chile, has a firsthand understanding of the obstacles facing non-English speakers upon their arrival in this country. His insight into the linguistic isolation of non-English speakers and his determination to help tear down these barriers made him a perfect successor to the late Senator S.I. Hayakawa, who founded the organization in 1983.
(U.S. English, About)

The organization is apparently working to pass legislation in states (and being somewhat successful) to make English the Official Language of this country, but they claim that this does not mean "English Only."

As evidenced in our legislation, official English would not affect the diversity of languages spoken in the home, foreign languages learned in classrooms, mottoes, Native American languages and the like. Making English the official language of the United States refers solely to the language of the government, not of the people, private business, classrooms, etc. Passage of official English legislation would not make the United States “English-Only,” just as Nigeria is not “English-Only” and Mexico is not “Spanish-Only."
(U.S.English, Official English)

This message doesn't sound as terrible as Cummins suggests. As with all organizations, the initial concepts of the founders may have been lead astray by xenophobic followers, who are trying to limit the amount of bilingual education in schools, so that the students do not get the support they need to become truly fluent in both languages, also in Academic language.

Enhancement of Third Language Learning. Studies comparing how well bilingual students learn a third language compared with monolingual students (for example, Basque students in Spain who are bilingual in Spanish, who are learning English in classes with monolingual Spanish speakers) have consistently shown the advantage of bilingual students, who can draw on their enhanced metalinguistic abilities. However, Cummins reports that just bilingualism isn't enough. The students apparently must reach a certain threshold (in Academic Language) for this to be effective.

Specifically, there may be threshold levels of proficiency in both languages that students must attain in order to participate effectively in instruction and avoid falling behind academincally and in a second, higher, threshold necessary to reap the lingistic and intellectual benefits of bilingualism and biliteracy.
...
[The] research strongly suggests that, rather than "shutting doors" as Schlenger (1991) claimed, literacy in two languages enhances the intellectual and academic resources of bilingual students. At an instructional level, we should be ... [building] on this potential advantage...by focusing students' attention on language and helping them become more adept at manipulating language in abstract academic situations.
(Cummins, p. 170)

I have known examples of students who evidently did not manage to cross the threshold in both languages giving them decided linguistic problems in school. The one student was the youngest child of (divorced) Canadian immigrants to Denmark. The parents both spoke inadequate Danish, as far as I could see, also with their children. I think that the older children had no difficulties, so they possibly had an English-speaking environment at home before the divorce. The youngest, however, had no good role models of either English or Danish at home. Luckily he was very musical and sang in various groups, so he was learning correct language through songs. However, he had not advantage from these two languages when I was trying to teach him German.

In the next post, I will take up the final topic in this chapter, the role of the first and second language interdependence.

Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

2009-09-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

What does the Research Say?

Politicians are not usually in agreement about what to do with English Learners in their school systems; and according to Cummins, they figure they have enough experiential evidence to make their decisions. Where there have been many studies about education bilinguals, from all over the world, and a few theories about what is best for the students, politicians have rarely used the results of research that has tested the theoretical hypotheses against all the different studies. Chapter 6 relates the theories with types of bilingual education programs and the studies made about these programs, to find the methods that most researchers (and fewer policy makers) have discovered work best.

Types of Bilingual Education Programs

In Bilingual Education, two (or more) languages of instruction during parts of the student's school career. This is not the same as teaching three years of high school Spanish to English speakers, where Spanish is the subject being taught, not (necessarily) the language of instruction.According to Cummins, this can be interpreted in two ways:

The method is used as a means by which other educational goals are achieved. Students are often taught in bilingual classes only up to the point where they are deemed able to participate in regular classes with their peers. The bilinguaal education is used to provide a transition from L1 to L2. Real proficiency in L2 is expected to develop while the student uses it in regular classes along with L2-speaking peers.
In some bilingual programs, however, bilingual proficiency is the goal, rather than the means. Students are expected to become academically proficient in both (or all three) languages. These programs are often found in two types:
1. Second language immersion, such as French programs taught in Canada, where students may be taught entirely in French for the first few classes, gradually moving toward 50% English and 50% French as the language of instruction of all subjects.
2. Dual language (two-way) bilingual programs, where students with two different L1s are taught in each other's languages, sometimes starting with about 90% in one language and sometimes 50/50, with perhaps the one language in the morning and the other in the afternoon.
Thus the students gain academic language proficiency in both languages.

Typologies of bilingual education programs

Different researchers have classified programs according to "goals, status of the student group... , proportions of instructional time through each language, sociolinguistic and sociopolitical situation in the immediate community and wider society." (Cummins, pp 160-161) Cummins divides these into five types, based on the status of the L1 and L2:

Type I use indigenous or Native languages as the medium of instruction, often aiming at reviving and revitalizing languages that have been endangered through earlier abusive educational programs . Besides in the US and Canada, these can be found with Maoris in New Zealand and other similar countries.
Type II use a national minority language, like Welsh in Wales (which might also be motivated as a Type I program; French, German or Italian in Switzerland; Swedish in Finland, and Basque in Spain.
Type III use international minority languages used by relatively recent immigrants to a country. These are common in places like the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as the U.S., and are mostly used to transition students into the dominant language. In some case, Type II and III merge, as with Spanish/English schools in the U.S.
Type IV are bilingual/bicultural programs for the deaf or hard-of-hearing.
Type V are for majority/dominant group students, who can see an advantage becoming bilingual. These include the French immersion programs for English speakers (the already bilingual English/Swedish daughter of friends in Montreal enjoyed participating in such a program) as well as some duo-language programs in the U.S.

Theories of bilingual education

There seem to be four major theories about bilingual education. The first two are favored by policy makers who oppose comprehensive bilingual education, while the last two are based on cognitive theory, and are favored by Cummins:

Linguistic Mismatch: where there is considered to be a mismatch between a student's L1 (and culture) and the language and culture of the school, the student is instructed in the L2 to minimize or erase the mismatch, assuming that students would encounter academic difficulties because of a mismatch. (Cummins, p. 158.) Cummins dismisses this assumption with short shrift later:
While the claim that children cannot learn through a language they do not understand has been persuasive to many policy-makers and educatiors (and, in fact, underlies the quick-exit transitional focus of most U.S. bilingual education), it ...fails to account either for the success of English background children in ... dual language programs...
(Cummins, p. 164.)
Maximum Exposure: students learn the L2 best by being completely immersed in it as soon as possible, providing maximum "time on task" for learning English, and leaving the L1 for home use alone. This is the method that has been taught in schools for Native Americans here, as well as similar schools in many other countries where a native population was dominated by another (as discussed in my blog post about Chapter I,) where children were kept in boarding schools in an attempt to "save them from their heathen culture." Cummins quotes several claims that purport to prove that time on task learning the predominant language (and this means, in particular, the spoken language) is the greatest predictor of learning this language, claiming that bilingual education spends too little time teaching English. (Cummins, p 163)
Additive Bilingualism Enrichment Principle: bilingual students gain cognitive skills from their bilingualism, including learning a third language faster.
Linguistic Interdependence (or Common Underlying Proficiency) Principle: cognitive skills are independent of the language being spoken (i.e. it doesn't matter what language you speak to learn to drive a car) so the cognitive skills of language learning are interdependent on each other. (Cummins, p. 159.)

These last two theories are discussed and supported in the rest of the chapter, so I will cover them in the next blog post.

Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 4

2009-09-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

Focus on Use

If the students learn their math and Academic Language enough to get good test scores, but never use the logical skills of math or the persuasive skills of Academic Language outside the classroom, then their education remains in the classroom, and has no connection with the rest of their identity. Therefore students must use these skills for authentic purposes. As Cummins says:

Language must be used to amplify students' intellectual aesthetic, and social identities if it is to contribute to student empowerment, understood as the collaborative creation of power.
(Cummins, p. 144)

So we have to make sure that students are actually using this language. For math, this would have been an alien concept not too long ago. Students worked problems, including word problems, which require a certain mastery of English, but they never wrote more than a geometry proof. Nowadays students may be expected to keep a Math Journal, where they keep track of the steps to do various problems, for example, and maybe even are asked to reflect on how a math concept can be used in real life. By using written Academic Language, according to Cummins:

Students must ... figure out sophisticated aspects of [English] ...to express what they want to communicate;
[Students and teachers become aware of] ... what aspects of language they need assistence with;
[Teachers get] the opportunity to provide corrective feedback...
(Cummins, p. 144)

Although Cummins recommends such great literacy tools as drama/role play, creative writing and critical autobiographies, these will always play a smaller role in a mathematics classroom. However, using language in structured groups to provide and strengthen background knowledge and in various forms of journals can be used in math. Asking students to explain the steps they have taken to solve a problem in writing, much like writing geometry proofs, can help activate Academic Written language, which is useful for all students, not just ELLs. Using more authentic projects for learning math is certainly a challenge to a first-year teacher like I will be, but is by far the best way for students to see how both math and Academic Language can be used outside the classroom.

ELLs might be permitted to discuss a topic first in their L1, if there is more than one speaker of that language in the classroom, and then produce a written report in English. They may even be permitted to write their outline in their E1 first, while they are gathering their thought. In my experience, however, they should be discouraged from trying to write first in the L1 and then translating to English, because they will translate idioms directly.

Scott J. Cech in another Education Week article, Weigh Proficiency, Assess Content, discusses NCLB requirements that ELL students test scores be included for adequate-yearly-progress purposes after only one year, although most research would indicate that students need up to seven years to master English at a level with their peers, even in math.

Students whose state NCLB test grades are consistently lower than their peers are automatically in for feelings of inferiority. Their schools have difficulty reaching expected results when their total scores are pulled down because of their lower scores.

The obvious thing, of course, is to set in everything to figure out how to bring these scores up, but the article can only report on a few practical studies, where different approaches have been used to improve ELL students' Academic English. For everyone agrees that that is the path to be taken.

Education Week has been running a blog by Mary Ann Zehr called Learning the Language, which "will tackle difficult policy questions, explore learning innovations, and share stories about different cultural groups on her beat." The most interesting post I read from recent times is High School for Newly Arrived ELLs Opens in San Francisco. The school is part of the Internationals Network for Public Schools which has 11 schools in New York and more recently one in Oakland and now San Francisco. Their students have all lived fewer than four years in this country. This is what their website says about their Approach:

At International high schools, a badge of prestige replaces the “stigma” of immigrant status for students, families, and faculty. It is understood that near native fluency in English and proficiency in a second language are valuable resources when it comes to achieving professional and social success in the United States and the global economy and participating fully in democratic society. Within our network, every teacher is a language teacher as well as a teacher of academic content and skills. The educational process takes place in a heterogeneous, learner-centered, collaborative, and activity-based environment. Students are organized in diverse clusters that work with the same team of teachers over 1-2 years. Classes are mixed according to age, grade, academic ability, prior schooling, native language, and linguistic proficiency. They are interdisciplinary and rigorous, and the curriculum includes literature, social studies, math, science, the arts, technology, and physical education
The Internationals’ pedagogical approach to educating English language learners is based upon five major tenets:

Heterogeneity and collaboration: schools and classrooms are heterogeneous and collaborative structures that build on the strengths of each member of the school community to optimize learning
Experiential learning: expansion of the 21st century schools beyond the four walls of the building motivates adolescents and enhances their capacity to successfully participate in modern society
Language and content integration: strong language skills develop most effectively in context and emerge most naturally in a purposeful, language-rich, interdisciplinary, and experiential program
Localized autonomy and responsibility: linking autonomy and responsibility at every level within a learning community allows all members to contribute to their fullest potential
One learning model for all: every member of our school community experiences the same learning model, maximizing an environment of mutual academic support. Thus all members of our school community work in diverse, collaborative groups on hands-on projects; put another way, the model for adult learning and student learning mirror each other.
(Internationals, Our Philosophy - my emphasis)

These students are learning English while they are learning content. They are not being held back until their English is good enough. The schools emphasize their bilingualism as a "badge of prestige" and empowers them to become active citizens.

What an exciting place to work and learn, and what an inspiration! I will continue to explore their website. It has a wealth of inspiration!

Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 3

2009-09-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

Focus on Language

One of the main reasons bilingual students end up having trouble keeping up with their fellow students is perhaps that they have learned conversational English so well that teachers and counselors figure they are generally fluent. However, students do not learn Academic English from their friends. They learn it in the classroom. Their friends have had a number of years to build a advantage that the ELL students have to catch up with. Of course there are some Standard English speakers in their classes who didn't quite catch on either when Academic Language was being presented, so any activity to strengthen Academic English is good for the whole class.

In an article from Education Week Research Hones Focus on ELLs Debra Viadero reports on how even the best ELL students tend to fall behind their peers with English as L1, and that researchers agreed that it has something to do with learning Academic English. Following are some short quotes from the article:

What they have yet to nail down is how to help this vulnerable and challenging population of students over the learning hump that comes later in elementary school; how to teach higher-order reading skills, such as comprehension; how to teach adolescents who are new to English; and how to boost achievement in academic subjects other than English.
...
Making matters worse, the existing research on the topic has been dominated by a single, politically explosive question: Should English-language learners be taught, either initially or for an extended period of time, in their native languages?

...five independent research reviews addressing that question over the last 25 years conclude that teaching students in bilingual settings is more effective—at least modestly so—than teaching them only in English.

“I think the evidence is there,” says Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, a private research center in Washington. “There’s a lot of transfer that occurs from the first language to the second language.”

...Scholarly views diverge even more over how long it should take for students to master English, with estimates ranging from three to eight years.

...To prod students to talk more, especially in the academic arena, many experts recommend setting up structured cooperative-learning groups so that students can practice speaking under less-threatening circumstances. In fact, a research-based practice guide published last year by the Institute of Education Sciences calls for English-learners to spend at least 90 minutes a week working one-on-one on carefully designed activities with students of different ability and English-proficiency levels.

...the bottom line is that the research suggests that English-learners need some sort of classroom support if they are ever going to succeed in American classrooms. ...Yet he estimates that 10 percent to 50 percent of ELLs are in classrooms where few, if any, modifications are made to help them overcome their language difficulties. And their numbers are growing, ... even as pressure builds in some states to enact policies that block teachers from using students’ primary language in classes or limit instructional modifications for English-learners.
(Viadero)

Cummins says that ELL students need to develop "critical language awareness, which encompasses exploration of the relationships between language and power." (Cummins, p. 137) In other words, students have to become aware of the differences between colloquial, usually oral, language, and the language of power, which is generally Academic Language. (Even powerful speakers of Ebonics or Latino/American use a different language to convince people, than they in daily conversations.) He suggest turning the students into "language detectives" who discover the differences between colloquial language and the language of power - and academic English, to see how different forms of language are used in different contexts. In this way, there is no denigrating colloquial language, the language of the student's home identity, but the students learn how to use language flexibly.

He talks of enabling students to "harvest the language" (Cummins, p. 139) by being aware of grammatical structures and vocabulary. While most of his suggestions would be more applicable in a more text-based subject than mathematics, there is undeniably a math vocabulary that students must learn to be successful. We must be careful not to dumb down the mathematical vocabulary for these students, but teach it to them instead. (This summer I discovered this while teaching division of polynomial fractions. We were saying that they should "flip" the divisor, until it occurred to us that the students actually knew the term "invert.")

Cummins suggests working with the Graeco-Latin vocabulary, which of course, is prevalent in mathematics, and points out that students with Romance language backgrounds like Spanish are accustomed to using these words. We should have them discover the small differences between the English and Spanish cognate terms. The computer program HELP Math that I discussed in the previous post has an excellent glossary that compares the English and Spanish terms. For students with other languages, we will have to help them build this understanding of the vocabulary and word-building functions of prefixes and suffixes.

Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 2

2009-09-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Focus on Meaning

Of course, when you are teaching a subject, the most important thing you want the student to understand is your content, in other words, the meaning of what you are teaching.

If the student does not have (or realize that she has) sufficient embedded context to understand the meaning, it is the teacher's job to make sure that the she has the background information necessary to take on the challenge of learning new content.

Since I will be teaching Math (I haven't found a job yet, so I have no classes where i can try out these things) whatever I write here will be theoretical when it comes to Math.

As I quoted in the previous post, if you're a great teacher of, say, math, to the "standard" student, but leaving the Standard English language learners behind, you're not a great teacher. If most of your kids get it somehow, there's still that group who didn't, and maybe could have, if they'd had the necessary background to understand it.

With math the problem could be poor preparation in elementary or middle school. It could be a parent who told the child that she always hated math. It could be that the child missed out on some important part of math because he moved from one district to another and they were doing things in a different order. (That happened to me. I moved from Ohio to Pennsylvania in April of my Junior year. I had no problems in most of my subjects, but in math, they had already had coordinate geometry and we were just about to get to it in my Ohio school, so I had to learn it on my own. Even now, many years and many math classes later, I still feel some strange insecurity there.)

So what's a math teacher supposed to do?

The good thing is that math is very symbolic, and pretty much the same despite the language. Of course, there are differences.

Where we write 2,456.25 most of the rest of the world writes 2.456,25, which is certainly confusing. In some countries, division is not indicated by / but by :
In Denmark, subtraction is indicated by ÷.
In Denmark, Ø is a letter (and also the word for "island," not a number.
Many Europeans write one with a little flag to the left (like our 7) and cross their 7's so they don't look like ones.
Since I had math in school and college prior to the advent of calculators and computers, we never talked about negative numbers as "negative two" but as "minus two." I think the new nomenclature came partly because of the advent of number lines (which we also didn't use) and the different keys for "negative" and "minus" on a calculator keyboard (which have been a hassle for me!)

Those are just simple things that might floor a good math student from another country.

For students L1 is a European language, they probably know a lot of the math vocabulary already, or at least they will recognize most of it. But a student from an Asian country most likely has to learn the entire math vocabulary even though she can do the symbolic math.

In most cases the students have some prior knowledge of math that the teacher can help them activate in various ways that have already been discussed. If a student has not been exposed to the necessary mathematical background, then it is necessary to find help to bring the child up to speed. Since the rest of the class will be moving on, this puts an enormous pressure on the child who is trying to catch up.

Cummins suggests a sequence for introducing new content, which can also have some application in math:

Experiential phase - to activate background knowledge
Literal phase - finding out what the text in the book says literally (as in explaining what a word problem is looking for.)
Personal phase - relating to the student's own experience (which might be difficult in some areas of math.)
Critical phase - drawing inferences and exploring generalizations.
Creative phase - translating the previous phases into creative action, like solving the problem or extending a math concept to something else.
(Cummins, p 134)

Other ideas he suggests which could be used in math are

Use visuals to stimulate discussion
Use manipulatives and multimedia presentation
Share prior experiences with people of diverse backgrounds (like those number and operator difficulties I mentioned above.)
Writing activities that focus students' prior knowledge - a bell-work assignment?
Linking prior knowledge to knew concepts, which is something so basic for teaching that I wonder why it's even mentioned.
(Cummins, p 135-6)

HELP Math for Spanish/English bilingual students

I happened on an interesting website the other day, called HELP, aimed at Spanish/ English bilingual children learning math in grades 3-8. I signed on for the 21-day free trial so I could see how it works. There is a little story with animal-like children doing things in real life, and then transfering that to a math lesson. For this page, Maria walks every day and keeps track of how far she goes in a table of values and a bar graph. When the student clicks the the button "En esta pagina" at the top right, a speaker tells about the page or the sequence in Spanish, giving an oral background to what the student is learning. The middle button on the bottom is a glossary of key terms with explanation in English and Spanish and always an example.So the student gets background knowledge in Spanish, hears the story in English, and can check key terms in both languages, which is right after the book! Evidently it is possible to aquire the program for your school with Title I, II, etc. grants. It looks like a useful program.

But what do we do for the children who speak a language that isn't Spanish?

I plan to look for textbooks in the languages of my bilingual students, so they have a reference work to check with. Conceivably there will also be math materials in those languages on line. My students could help search for materials in their languages.

Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 1

2009-09-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

Making It Happen in the Classroom

This is the nuts and bolts chapter, with more concrete ideas about how to teach Academic Language in the classroom.

A high school teacher may take pride in her ability to teach science but unless she knows how to teach science to students who are at varying stages of acquiring academic English, her science teaching skills may amount to very little.
Her role definition must change from being an effective science teacher of the "generic"...student to being an effective teacher of science and English academic skills to the new culturally and linguistically diverse mainstream student.

Cummins has developed a framework incorporating both identity negotiation and cognitive challenge intersecting with "patterns of societal power" which were the topics of the previous chapters. This then focuses on three areas: the meaning/comprehension of the content matter, demystifying / "harvesting" language so students can use it, and opportunities for students to express themselves. I will be presenting these topics over several blog posts to keep them shorter, relating them to my own experience, and to becoming "an effective teacher of math and English academic skills."

A Framework for Academic Language Learning

The Development of Academic Expertise

Focus on Meaning

Making input comprehensible
Developing critical Literacy

Focus on Language

Awareness of language forms & uses
Critical analysis of language forms & uses

Focus on Use

Use language to:
Generate new knowledge
Create literature & art
Act on social realities

(Figure, Cummins, p 125)

With this framework, Cummins centers on what he calls the Interpersonal Space of Cognitive Engagement and Identity Investment, which is what all the previous chapters have been about. It is in this zone of proximal development (Cummins, Chapter 1, note 14) that learning occurs. However

these [teacher student] are never neutral; they either challenge the operation of coercive relations of power in the wider society or they reinforce [them.]
(Cummins, p 125)

Cummins asserts that students' engagement in the cognitive work of the class must be maximized, and this can only happen with the affirmation and respect of the teacher.

The best way to do this is by activating prior knowledge, perhaps through brainstorming in small groups, so that students are aware that the knowledge they gained in their L1 in their life outside school or in their home country is valid knowledge. In this way their identity is strengthened, because it is affirmed by the teacher. Sometimes they get the idea that they have had their slate wiped clean when they moved here. It is important that they realize that their background is still of value to them.

The teacher can use the results of the brainstorming to find out how much the different students know about the subject, so she can provide background knowledge or supplement where there are holes.

If a student has little or no prior knowledge on a subject, then the teacher can work with her to build background knowledge, possibly using her L1, so that she can be on a level with her fellow students. This could be done by giving the student a text with background knowledge in her L1 prior to the class where the knowledge is needed. In that way, although the student hasn't discussed the topic in English before, the content is already embedded and thus more comprehensible, so she just has to work with the language of the topic. She is able to make intelligent guesses about the meaning, since she knows it is related to the prior or freshly built knowledge of the subject.

She also knows that the teacher acknowledges her knowledge, or lack thereof, and respects her enough to help her use or build that knowledge. The rest of the class can also respect her prior knowledge of the subject as just as valid as their own.

The teacher has to present material to the students in a way that targets Quadrant B: context-embedded and cognitively demanding (See Blog on Chapter 3.) If the material isn't demanding (Quadrant C), for example rote worksheets, or is not context-embedded (Quadrant D) where the student has too many unknowns that are not sufficient comprensible material and thus learns nothing. We have to remember that just because a student is not fluent in English, or even just because the student has an inadequate school background, does not mean that he cannot learn cognitavely challenging subjects. They just have to be presented to him at a level he can work with. This is also showing respect from the teacher, meeting the student where he is, but expecting that he will go far. As Cummins reminds us,

second language learners ... may be trying to find their way in the borderland between cultures. They frequently don't have either the means or the desire to go back to their original culture, but don't have the language skills or cultural understanding to participate fully in their new culture.
(Cummins, p. 132)

This concept was well-described in my blog entry A culture shift isn't always what you expected either. Our students need to feel our respect and affirmation to keep going.

[This] implies that teachers must see their role as creating instructional context in which second language learners can become active partners in the learning process; seocond, ...that teachers must view themselves as learners - in order to teach effectively they must learn from their students about students' culture, background and experience.
(Cummins, p. 133)

Part of the requirements for my teaching credential from Claremont Graduate University is the Ethnography thesis, where we first study ourselves ethnographically, then 5 or more of our students, their community and the school. This will be a challenging but certainly rewarding part of my first year of teaching.

I will discuss the three foci of meaning, language and use in the next entries.

Long-Term English Language Learners

2009-09-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

I was intrigued by the title of an up-coming chat on EdWeek: Educating Long-Term English Language Learners, with this little blurb:

Many school districts are at a loss on how to best educate long-term English-language learners-students who have been enrolled in special programs to learn English for years but who have never tested as fluent in the language. Kate Menken, an assistant professor of linguistics at the City University of New York who wrote the book English Learners Left Behind: Standardized Testing as Language Policy, will answer questions about what she's learned during three years of researching long-term ELLs in New York City. The study also included an intervention in two high schools with long-term ELLs that is showing promising results.

This problem hasn't been covered in any of the books we've read so far, so I decided to investigate further, particularly since this is a seconday school problem, and (I assume) I'll be teaching secondary math. Evidently we can assume three levels of ELLs in high school:

Newly Arrived with Adequate Schooling
Newly Arrived with Limited/Interrupted Formal Schooling (also known as Students with Interrupted Formal Education or SIFE)
Long-Term English Language Learners...the focus of this study.
[LTELLs] are distinct from the two other groups because they are not new arrivals, but rather have been in the U.S. for seven or more years, and some are in fact U.S.-born ... As a result, they are usually orally proficient in English and often sound like native speakers ... [Which Cummins warns about.] In spite of their oral proficiency in English, these students are characterized by low levels of academic literacy in both English and their home language. As such, their reading and writing is usually below grade level in either language, and they often experience poor overall academic performance and high course failure rates ... These students are frequently misperceived as ‘failures’ of ESL and bilingual programs.
There is a fair amount of overlap between long-term ELLs and students termed “generation 1.5,” a population of mainly U.S.-educated English learners that has received attention within TESOL scholarship, particularly in studies of higher education.
(Mencken, et al, p. 2, her references removed. My comment in italics)

The typical high school assumes that ELLs have sufficient academic background from their previous school. They are not well prepared to have students in academic classes who do not have this background. I think that I, too, have been assuming that a student in Algebra I has had enough math previously to have the cognitive background to learn the difficult content. Since these students are often quite fluent in BICS speech, teachers, administrators and councilors have been assuming that they must have congenital cognitive limitations, rather than experiential limitations from inadequate schooling.

The LTELLs in NYC high schools that the authors interview for her study have a variety of backgrounds: "The vast majority of our student participants (90%) speak Spanish... [most] from the Dominican Republic, while others come from Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela. The sample also included speakers of Twi, Chinese, and Garífuna." (Mencken, et al p. 7-8)

The educational experiences of the majority of LTELLs are characterized by inconsistency and transience across countries, schools, and programs. ...[W]e have identified three categories of LTELLs ...: 1) vaivén students, who have moved back and forth between the U.S. and their family’s country of origin, 2) students with inconsistent U.S. schooling, who have shifted between bilingual education, ESL programs, and mainstream classrooms with no language support programming, and 3) transitioning students, who simply require additional time to acquire another language while they are developing academic content knowledge.

As the first two categories ... make up the overwhelming majority of the students in this study, it becomes apparent that LTELLs lack stability in their schooling experiences, compounding the already difficult task of learning a language for academic use.
(Mencken, et al, p. 8-9)

The researchers quote several of the students in the paper. This one is a good example:

The changes that I been going back and forth like being in DR, then coming over here, I’m getting used to class being all in English then I go back over there and it all in Spanish… It’s that like since I been going back and forth and studying here and studying over there. Like the History Regents it’s difficult ‘cuz my mind with the history over there I know it more than here. And then I come here I’m studying the history but I don’t get everything, you know? Like there’s my head, crazy sometimes. I was telling my teacher I wish the Regents was about DR, that way I would pass it [laughs].
(Tatiana, 10th Grade LTELL, School 1, interview transcript)
(Menken, et al, p. 11)

The authors list several different causes for these students besides vaivén wbo have moved back and forth between countries:
Inconsistent U.S. Schooling

‘School Hoppers’
Programming Differences from School to School
Inconsistent School-Based Language Policies
Absence of ELL Programming

A much smaller group were categorized as Transitioning. Generally they had just not been here long enough to get their English up to par, but because of excellent school back home, were doing quite well in most content course. The authors expect these students to move on easily.

It looks like we have to be very careful not to be taken in by a student's fluent conversational skills. When a student is having content difficulty, we should be very careful to check his background to see if he just hasn't had enough schooling. For our class, we will be writing an "Ethnography," which will include interviews with several challenged students and their families. I will try to find an LTELL for the project.

Chapter 4: Reading and the Bilingual Student:

2009-09-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Fact and Friction

This chapter is one of the longest in the book, but with the least usefulness to me. From the subhead you can gather that it's about controversy - the controversy of "phonics" over "whole language." Cummins' general conclusion, through many pages of text, is that both are important - phonics initially to help the student "decode" the written word, and then as soon as possible reading, which doesn't have to be all "decodable text." This applies for both the L1 and the L2. However, if students have already learned to read in one language, they have a cognitive context for learning to read much more quickly in the second language.

Once students get the gist of reading, they can also guess the words in between. I observed this with my bilingual daughter, who was exposed to books - both Danish and English - all her early childhood, but who really broke the reading barrier after starting first grade - in Danish. The following summer, when we visited my parents, who had collected a lot of children's books for the grandchildren, my daughter picked up a Dr. Seuss book with a reading emphasis on the difficult ough words. Even though she had never been taught to distinguish the different sounds of this letter combination, she read the book fluently with correct pronunciation.

Cummins constantly repeats that the job of the teacher is to "support ELL students [I would say, all students!] in developing strong reading skills, because reading is the primary way in which students get access to academic language." (Cummins, p. 85) Reading, of course, is not enough if the students don't actually comprehend what they are reading, so we have to work with them on comprehension skills as well, although just doing a lot of reading is the major issue.

Simply put, books are the only place where students get access to the low frequency Graeco-Latin lexicon of English. It follows that a diet of engaging books works much better than a diet of worksheets and drills in developing reading, comprehension and academic language.
(Cummins, p. 87)

Cummins goes on with a quick review of how people acquire a second language. The most important issue is that a learner must be presented with sufficiently comprehensible input, a term that was introduced by Stephen Krashen in his 1981 book, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, now available online. Reviewing Krashen's discussion, Cummins writes:

Exposure by itself is not enough - it must be exposure that learners can understand [i.e. be comprehensible input.] Furthermore, the input should contain structures that are a little beyond what the learner already knows [for otherwise the learner isn't learning anything new - about language at any rate.] Despite the presence of "unknown" words and/or structures, learners can utilize context, extra-linguistic information, and their knowledge of the world to understand the meaning.
(Cummins, p. 88, with my comments in brackets)

This is confirmed with the observations of my daughter mentioned above, and my own learning experience of German described in the previous blog post.

Cummins goes further to ask how we can get bilingual students to invest in their learning process, to activate their language through speaking and writing, "so that they come to see themselves as powerful users of language with additional insights about language and its potential in comparison to monolingual students." (Cummins, p. 89, my emphasis) This, I think, is a crucial reason to emphasize bilingualism, that the students gain a knowledge about culture that is more fully developed because they are cognizant of the similarities and differences between the two languages and cultures. If they are taught that their own language and culture are inferior, they lose the cognitive background to contrast and compare. Later he writes that "the fuel that drives the development of reading competence is the extent to which students are enabled to invest their identities fully in the process of becoming powerfully literate." (Cummins, p. 91, my emphasis.) If they lose part of their identity, they can no longer use it to interpret the world (or their reading.)

In a long section called Decoding, Cummins reaches the conclusion that phonetic awareness is necessary to start decoding written language (in other words, reading), but it is not necessary to get into all the details that pure phonetics advocates impart to unsuspecting students. As my daughter clearly demonstrated with the ough words, she was ready to take on such challenges with her Danish reading skill and her knowledge of English. Obviously some students may gain an advantage with more formal training in decoding, but most students will learn much faster with challenging original texts. On the other hand, students who have been immersed in a literate background in the home (no matter what language) have an advantage that we teachers must offer all the students in class.

In a section on Reading Comprehension, Cummins (p. 110) lists two emphases that improve comprehension:

focus on extensive reading and writing for self-expression
development of explicit awareness of how language works [discrete language skills]

Academic language includes structures (like the passive voice) and vocabulary that are rarely found in conversational language. High frequency words used in conversation are primarily of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the more high-frequency academic vocabulary tends to be Graeco-Latin.

This is of course an advantage to students with languages of European, particularly Romance, roots, like Spanish, because they have a very similar academic vocabulary. I assume that non-European languages, like the languages of Asia, do not use the Graeco-Latin vocabulary, which presents a greater challenge to these students.

Of course each academic field has its own specialized jargon, which must be learned in connection with the concepts of that field. Besides these three types of vocabulary, English has an enormous trove of extremely low-frequency words, which speakers learn through their reading in particular. One study (by Laufer in 1992) determined that "[w}hen the proportion of words in a text known by the reader falls below [a] 95% threshold, the possibility of inferring the unknown words decreases significantly." (Cummins, p. 114)

As a teacher of secondary mathematics, I can expect that my ELL students may have already been exposed to the mathematical vocabulary that their English-speaking peers have learned if they have had good school experiences in their home country. I plan to provide textbooks in some of the students' home languages if they are available, so that they can continue their bilingualism in academic language.

Learning L2 in the L1 context

2009-09-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

Most of us had to learn a second language in school, while still in our L1 setting. I had 2 years of Latin and 2 of French in high school, then more French, a year and a half of Russian and started German in college. German became my major when I felt like I couldn't excel in math and physics, so I attended German summer school 3 times, did my graduate study in Germanic linguistics, took a Danish MA in it, and taught it in Danish high schools for about 12 years.

And this doesn't account for all the other languages I "learned" in an academic setting: Gothic and Old High German, Frisian, English, & Norse; Greek, Sanskrit, & Lithuanian; Finnish & Greenlandic Eskimo. All of these languages were taught primarily in the "learn grammar, read and translate" method.

I have met numerous foreigners who learned English that way in their home country. They have no problem reading and writing, and thought that they were fluent, but they discover that spoken English is very different from classroom English.

I had a friend in Denmark, who was studying English at the university and later became a HS English teacher like me. She was so afraid that I would discover that she made errors in English that she would never speak English with me. I sometimes thought she preferred that I made a fool of myself in Danish rather than she in English. Her husband, on the other hand, was studying economics, and had no need to have perfect English. We often talked English together. Later, he lead tours to Berlin, so I assume he also spoke a fluent, but imperfect German, which got him wherever he wanted to go.

My son's wife studied English for many years in Panama, but was completely tongue-tied when she moved here, because the teachers had punished the students with ridicule and bad grades if they made mistakes. She has had to work hard to shake off her feelings of inferior English.

My high school French teacher did try to get us conversing in French, and my German summer schools (including a college-run summer school in Vienna) were attempts at immersion, so we did do a lot of "conversing" of sorts in German there and at German House in college.

But I always say that I really learned German when I arrived in Germany after 2 years of German and had to go to a drug-store to buy a tooth-brush, as well as our first experiences ordering meals in restaurants, which produced some interesting results. (Later I had a similar experience trying to buy disposable diapers for my son. I ended up putting him on the counter and pointing - entirely "context embedded!")

But I learned particularly German (and later, Danish) another way. I read. I read many German novels above and beyond what we were assigned in our courses. In this way I absorbed an enormous amount of passive vocabulary and grammatical structures. That summer in Vienna and another 2 weeks in Eastern Germany many years later were my only extended visits in German-speaking countries. Everything else I learned from books and movies. Several of my college assignments also had to be written in German, my only writing experience except for an occasional letter. In all those first books I read, the first 20 pages are well annotated with glosses. After that I quit using the dictionary, because I had acquired enough of the context to figure out the rest of the words. I could at least figure out that a word was a poitive adjective, the name of a yellow flower, some sort of activity. If I encountered a word several times without guessing its meaning, I might look it up, because I knew that it would help my understanding to know it.

As a teacher of German in Denmark, I finally got the "discrete language skills" of German down, because I had to correct numerous translations and essays, where the students were expected to write correctly. My students had had German since 7th grade, so I got them 3-4 years later. We had to work a lot on their "discrete language skills" of grammar. since their primary school classes had emphasized conversation. Since Germany was our closest neighbor, most students had traveled in Germany, and some even watched German TV. Besides grammar and essay-writing, classes were based on large amounts of reading, and classroom discussions of what they'd read. My students had a much better chance of learning a usable German (and English, which they started in 5th grade) than we ever did with 2 years of HS French. Their exams were also very different from here: Final exams consisted of an individual oral exam, where a student discussed a half a page of one of the texts we had read, as well as a written exam, where students answered short questions, translated some text and wrote an essay based on a given 2-page text. Multiple-choice is unknown in Denmark.

My experience of learning Danish (my L3) in Denmark was mostly the natural method, with a couple of classes in Danish for foreigners and then an evening HS class in Danish intended for Danes. My experience was thus somewhat like that of our students - except that I was an adult, knew a similar language (German) fluently, understood the concept of grammar, and had a great need to learn Danish quickly, so that I could get a job. I was also married to a Dane, so I spoke Danish at home and with his family, and I had children who were becoming fluent in day care and in school.

Negotiating Identity

2009-09-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

I was curious to see if anyone else has written about our book, Negotiating Identity, so I Googled the term. As you will see by scanning the following examples. the term is used in many different contexts, where language and culture are just a small part. Our students are working with many different identities, not just, for example, Latina/American. Our native born, WASP students are struggling with identities as well, like the kid whose parents expect him to be a doctor and he'd rather become a chef, or movie actor, or school teacher, which reminds me of Harry Wong's dedication to The First Days of School:

Dedicated to my father and mother,
who wanted me to be a brain surgeon.
I exceeded their expectations.
I became a scholar and a teacher.

From Faceted Id/entity: Managing representation in a digital world, Danah Boyd's Master's Thesis at the MIT Media Lab:

Chapter 2: Negotiating Identity in Social Interactions
During social interaction, people regularly present themselves while simultaneously reading the presentations of others. Depending on one's personality, an individual will adjust aspects of their presentation according to the reactions and presentations of those around them. Fundamentally, social interaction is a negotiation between individuals performing within a particular social context to convey aspects of their identity. This negotiation often occurs with little conscious thought; people comfortably interact with one another, revealing what is appropriate while assessing what information is being given.

From Negotiating Identity and Community After September 11 by Kay Deaux, Professor of Psychology, Graduate Center at the City University of New York

I became a United States citizen four years ago because of my long love affair with New York....I am a Bangladeshi woman and my last name is Rahman, a Muslim name...Before last week, I had thought of myself as a lawyer, a feminist, a wife, a sister, a friend, a woman on the street. Now I begin to see myself as a brown woman who bears a vague resemblance to the images of terrorists we see on television....As I become identified as someone outside the New York community, I feel myself losing the power to define myself...
--Anika Rahman
In this poignant statement by a U.S citizen, ethnically Bangladeshi with Muslim linkage, the complex web of issues involved in immigrant identity is dramatically clear ... Identification is typically a complex rather than simple construction, involving multiple aspects of oneself that may overlap or compete. Identification is a dynamic process, in which the meaning, the function, and even the basic labels can change from one point in time to another. Further, and most relevant now, identification is a socially constructed process in which the context and views of others have a significant role, shaping options and consequences for individual experience.

From Coming to an Asexual Identity: Negotiating Identity, Negotiating Desire, by Kristin S. Scherrer, University of Michigan (article abstract)

Sexuality is generally considered an important aspect of selfhood. Therefore, individuals who do not experience sexual attraction, and who embrace an asexual identity, are in a unique position to inform the social construction of sexuality. ... In this article I describe several distinct aspects of asexual identities: the meanings of sexual, and therefore, asexual behaviors, essentialist characterizations of asexuality, and lastly, interest in romance as a distinct dimension of sexuality. These findings have implications not only for asexual identities, but also for the connections of asexuality with other marginalized sexualities.
Sexualities, Vol. 11, No. 5, 621-641 (2008) DOI: 10.1177/1363460708094269

Female Repeat Offenders Negotiating Identity Abstract of article by Brenda Geiger and Michael Fischer:

This study examines the process of identity negotiation of Israeli female ex-convicts who have been separated for extensive periods of time from their children and lost custody over them. Content analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with the offenders reveal that these women were able to reconstruct their biography and retrospectively account for their crimes and drug addiction in terms of the sexual, physical, and economic abuse they had endured, and by appeal to higher loyalties, their children, whom they had to provide for. However, when having to account for their failings as mothers, all biographical reconstruction, external blame, and accusation collapsed. Looking at themselves through their children's eyes, female offenders were simply unable to renegotiate the imputed identity of incompetent mother. Neither could they confront their children's actual or expected anger and resentment nor explain why they had abandoned them. Filled with self-blame, guilt, and remorse, the offenders' only hope was to obtain their children's pardon. Permanently alienated from the center of motherhood, the female offenders interviewed in this study were doomed to existential chaos with no feeling, value, or role commitment.
Geiger, B. and Fischer, M. , 2006-11-01 "Female Repeat Offenders Negotiating Identity" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA Online . 2009-05-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p118631_index.html

Chapter 3: The Three Faces of Language Proficiency

2009-08-31T09:08:00.001-07:00

How long does it take to learn a new language? Or maybe we should ask: what does it mean to "know" a language?

When I've looked back at my experience learning Danish as a 25-year old, I was thinking 3-4 months. But then I remember the embarrassment of misunderstandings, my husband's writing job applications, my relief that I could submit my American dissertation draft (in English) as my Danish MA thesis, and that most exams were orals. Even many years later when I was trying to earn a living between real jobs, when I was told by a temp agency that I couldn't do a receptionist's job because of my (minimal) accent.

Most texts about learning a second language divide language competency into two categories: BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency.) Most kids pick up BICS pretty quickly. I remember meeting a little 4-year-old American boy in our apartment complex in Denmark, very miserable because he couldn't communicate with the other kids. It seems like it didn't take him more than a month before he was playing happily with them. My daughter at age 2 1/2 was having trouble separating the English of her mother and children's books, and the Danish of her father and day care until we spent a couple of weeks in England with no Danish around. After that there was not problem keeping them separated.

So our bilingual children started school with the monolingual Danes and appeared to do as well as them, since they were learning CALP along with their Danish classmates in school...as well as, it appears, at home. Because we read to them in both languages, and discussed things with them, they were getting kid-sized CALP from us. It apparently doesn't matter which language you start doing cognitively stimulating things, as long as you do it. But even so, studies have shown that kids often need 4-7 years to catch up with their classmates when it come to CALP, the stuff that's measured for grades and standardized tests. Small children probably a little less, if they get good support at home, kids 8-14 best, it seems, and over 14 never has a chance to catch up. (Cummins, p. 73) .

Somehow it seems to me that there are parameters not being considered here:

How much cognitive stimulation is the child getting from home (no matter in what language?)
How old is the child - or person?
What is his L1 (a language that is similar in vocabulary to English (i.e. with all the Greek and Latin academic words) or one that is very different?
How challenging was the child's schooling in L1 before coming here?

Cummins adds a third dimension to BICS (which he calls "conversational fluency") and CALP "academic language proficiency"):

Discrete language skills reflect specific phonological, literacy and grammatical knowledge that students acquire as a result of direct instruction and both formal and informal practive (e.g. reading). Some of these ... skills are acquired early ... [including] knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, the sounds represented by the ... letters,,,, and the ability to decode written words into appropriate sounds. [Later] they will also acquire conventions about spelling, capitalization, and punctuation as well as ...grammatical rules...
(Cummins, p. 65)

Evidently some students are able to acquire convincing conversational and discrete language skills without being able to use them in academic situations. Thus both the teachers and counselors don't consider the possibility that the student is still a language learner when it comes to cognitive learning skills. Cummins argues for longer protected bilingual training, so that students can develop more of the CALP skills before being transferred to regular classes.

Language presents demands across both contextual and cognitive continua to receive and produce language. If there is sufficient external context, just as gestures and appropriate objects, language learners can understand quite well with minimal language skills. As the student learns vocabulary and cultural background, she internalizes more and more context, so that more can be understood without the external context. Similarly, the language may be cognitively undemanding, as in a conversation or an easy book, while it can become progressively more demanding, as in high school and college classes. Cummins presents a framework to show these two continua.

(Cummins, p. 67)

Cognitively Undemanding
Context A C Context
Embedded B D Reduced

Cognitively Demanding

The area A defines normal conversation (BICS), while D is the most academically challenging (CALP). According to Cummins,

the progression of academic tasks should ideally go from quadrant A ... to quadrant B ... and then to quadrant D... Cognitive challenge is essential for academic growth but the internal and external contextual support necessary for bilingual students to meet that challenge must also be built into the activities. ...Quadrant C activities ... can be useful for reinforcement or practice of particular points and for teaching discrete language skills. However, if instruction stays at the level of quadrant C ..., it risks focusing only on out-of-context drills and worksheets, ...[failing] to supply ...elements to facilitate learning: for example, cognitive challenge, affirmation of identity,and extensive comprehensible input in the target language.
(Cummins, p. 71)

Of course all students, not just English Learners, can benefit from this progression. It is very interesting to see where Cummins places worksheets as context-reduced, cognitively undemanding.

Getting back to the question of how long it takes to acquire proficiency, Cummins reports on research on students in several different countries. He concludes that students can gain "peer-appropriate" (BICS) language skills quite quickly, since the cognitive level is relatively undemanding. However, it takes students a longer time to catch up with their classmates on the more demanding classroom skills, because their classmates are "a moving target;" they are also moving on. So a language learner has to learn at a faster pace in order to catch up with her classmates, which puts enormous pressure on the students. Even though they are apparently fluent, they still need a lot of support in the classroom. It is no wonder that many of these students give up when they have to work harder than their classmates. We teachers must be aware that even seemingly well-adjusted language learners may be struggling, and provide them with the support that they need.

Message of the Statue of Liberty

2009-08-31T08:38:00.000-07:00

I was debating whether to just put this in as a comment, or as a separate post, but the message of the Statue of Liberty is something we seem to have forgotten. I read a number of web articles about it, and chose this one: MESSAGE OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, The Promise of the Golden Door, by Julie Redstone.
In case you've forgotten, there is a plaque with this poem the "The New Colossus," written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus, appear on the Statue's pedestal:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Julie Redstone continues to explain what this Liberty is:

What is the Golden Door?
It is the entrance into liberty and freedom from oppression that is the promise of America - a land, a people, a way of life.
It is also the freedom of spirit and of choice that was declared an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence - a document whose date of execution, July 4th, 1776, is inscribed on the tablet she carries. The Statue welcomes all to this door - the lost, the needy, the rejected, the exiled. She invites them to step through it into freedom.
Liberty's comforting presence is increasingly needed when the sea of world events becomes more stormy, the waves higher. In times of turbulence, her light is reassuring, her presence, a guarantor of safety.
(Redstone)

I must admit that I had always thought that the part of the poem with "Give me your tired and poor" was engraved around the statue, not just on a plaque, so I learned something here.

The women of the earlier post from Iraq finally were welcomed at the Golden Door, but it evidently "freedom from opression" might welcome a select few, but we have not been very good hosts since they got here, to help them achieve the freedom they sought. They are again "huddled masses." And the immigrants, who have given up trying to come here legally because the system is broken, may be "huddled masses" but they're not welcomed at the Golden Door.

Of course these days there are a lot of people born in this country who feel that they are part of the "huddled masses," or maybe, "yearning to be free." It is our responsibility as teachers to help our students attain what they have come to school for: their highest potential, which will give them Liberty. This means ensuring that we give them ample opportunities to learn the cognitive skills, including academic English (the topic of the next chapter) to achieve this potential.

A culture shift isn't always what you expected either

2009-08-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

The book, Negotiating Identities, is about how to teach English learners in school, so its understanding of identity is as a foreign person arriving in a new country. However, there are similar identity conflicts when your native language is a dialect of the standard language, and when your culture and identity is very different from the dominate, educated, culture. This of course is true of many African-Americans, who speak some sort of Ebonics among themselves, or even Latinos/Latinas who have grown up in predominantly Latino culture, such as in East LA, where everyone speaks fluent, natural American, but with their own particular accent.

My first husband, A., a Dane, came from a proud and competent farm family. His mother was born is a small town, not on a farm, and conveyed her delight in reading to her children. When his eldest brother, N., finished the primary school in their farm community, he was encouraged to go to middle school in the neighboring town. There he was constantly taunted for his country-yokel dialect and his farmer ways. Nevertheless, he persisted, and got a job in a bank, which supported him to get his high school diploma and then a law degree in evening school.

My husband, A, would have none of this taunting, so he first went to a follow-up school for farm children, where he evidently developed an interest in more socialist politics, in contrast to the libertarian politics of most Danish farmers at that time. He was strong in his personal identity as he went on to a variety of jobs in industry, which he often lost because of conflicts with bosses. At some point, he decided to follow in his brother's footsteps, took evening classes to pass both middle school and high school, and was completing his second year of university studies in political science when I met him.

But A. had an identity problem. Somewhere in his schooling a teacher had convinced him that he would have to speak standard Danish (with the accepted local city accent) to succeed. He completely dropped his dialect, which I never heard him speak, even with his parents, whose dialect was so old-fashioned, that it took me several years to understand most of it. Even though he "lost" his native language, we went to the farm every weekend, where he loved working with the harvest or feeding the pigs. He appreciated his mother's influence on his book-learning as well, but in conversation always answered their dialect with standard Danish.

A. aimed at a career as a university professor, but felt that everyone who was competing with him for tenure track positions had connections through their academic family background. I don't really believe this was entirely true, although he was part of the first generation of non-middle class students who got an education beyond 7th grade. Before his generation, only about 12% became university students.

He is often quite bitter about his life - a stroke in his 40's didn't make life easier. While his parents were adamant that their children should decide their own careers (the youngest 2 remained farmers,) A. was insistent that his children should get a university education, which our son initially didn't do. This caused constant intergenerational conflict as well.

Some others I knew could easily switch between dialect with family and standard local Danish with their colleagues. (I remember feeling very honored when one of these invited me to a birthday party, where most of the others were local and family, with whom she spoke in dialect. She spoke in dialect at the party, also to me, so I felt like she had accepted me into her inner circle, almost as a native.)

Would the once very self-confident and strong A. have kept his confidence if he had accepted the language of his background? Was his denied language the most important part of his identity? He apparently dropped it voluntarily, but their were certainly outside influences that forced him to change that part of his identity instead of negotiating a space for it.

Life not what they expected

2009-08-30T21:19:00.000-07:00

As I was beginning to think about this blog, I read an article in the LA Times about Iraqi refugees to this country, Iraqi refugees find U.S. life not what they expected. For Iraqi refuges, coming to the U.S. presents multiple conflicts. They are often part of the previously dominant Sunni culture of Iraq, often highly educated, accustomed to a high position in society, which included staff to cook and clean. But furthermore, they are coming to the country that conquered them and removed the possibility to continue the privileged life they had known. Often they will need retraining to be able to hold a position even vaguely resembling what they had known.

The article describes the travails of a woman lawyer, whose husband disappeared, and her adult daughter, who has a master's in computer science. I assume particularly the daughter speaks English somewhat fluently, and will soon be able to find work somewhat related to her education; her lawyer mother had hoped that she would at least be able to do clerical work in a law office. But this has not yet happened because of the current economic situation.

The Iraqis are some of the most educated and skilled refugees to come here, aid workers say. Used to a middle-class life, many hope to work as doctors, lawyers or accountants. But recertification is costly and time-consuming. So they are advised to at first pursue more typical refugee work as shop attendants and cleaners.
(Zavis, p 2)

They all discuss whether it would be better to return to Iraq, but then they remember why they had to flee. The new identity forced upon them here is distressing, but the life available to them - their former identity no longer exists.

"Everything in my life was destroyed, even my dreams," Ann said after mother and daughter labored over a meal that back home would have been cooked for them. [the daughter continued:] "I blame her. I'm sorry for that. . . . She always protect me. Why she can't protect me this time?"
(Zavis, p 3)

They will have to renegotiate their identity time and again in this country until they can feel comfortable with what it has become.

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door

2009-08-28T21:28:00.000-07:00

The text below is about half way through the graphic story "I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door," by Maira Kalman in the August 27, 2009, NYT. (You can see the story if you click the link or the text - have patience, it takes a long time to open!) As she writes, when she was sworn in as a citizen (from Israel) she was told that they would "shed our old identity and put on a NEW IDENTITY..." but the woman she met at the district office of Homeland Security for immigration told her "This nation's IDENTITY is BASED on its rich diversity... Americans can be many different things."

Of course Maira Kalman is a voluntary immigrant...

Chapter 2: The Evolution of Xenophobia

2009-08-28T20:22:00.000-07:00

Cultural Diversity as the Enemy Within

This chapter is trying to trace the history of why some "non-dominant" groups do well in this country and some apparently do not. Cummins refers in particular to Ogbu, J. (1978) Minority education and caste, where he develops a theory of voluntary and involuntary immigrants.

Those who come here voluntarily, he theorizes, may have initial difficulties, but because they chose to come here, they use the strength of their convictions to get them past the hard part and are succesful. Particularly all the immigrants around 1900 have mostly gone on to succes - well particularly the ones from northern Europe, if you ignore the Irish; the ones from southern Europe didn't do as well. And there is the little problem with the Mexicans and many other Latinos, who apparently came here voluntarily... More recent successful voluntary immigrants are the Chinese and Punjabi Indians, he says. (Although the first Chinese who came here weren't treated very well - witness the Chino camp that has left only its name, or the destruction of Chinatown in LA.)

Of course the largest group who came here involuntarily is the former slaves, the African-Americans. But they have had a similar destiny to the Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, who were already here - and then those Mexicans (some of whom were already here, too, of course!)

..involuntary minorities are people who were brought into the united States (or any other society) against their will; for example, through slavery, conquest, colonization, or forced labor. According to Ogby, "thereafter, these minorities were often relegated to menial positions and denied true assimilations into the mainstream society."
(Cummins, p. 32)

I think instead of "brought here" it would have been better to say "brought into contact and submission." Is our problem with Mexicans (and all other Latinos/as by default) that they were here first, and we're afraid they want to take this country back again? Cummins brings a fantastic quote from an essay by Isidro Lucas (1981) Bilingual Education and the Melting Pot: Getting Burned:

There is in America a profound underground culture, that of the unmeltable populations. Blacks have proven unmeltable over the years. The only place allowed them near the melting pot was underneath it. Getting burned. Hispanics were also left out of the melting pot. Spanish has been historically preserved more among them than other languages in non-English-speaking populations. It was a shelter, a defense. (p 21-2)
(Cummins, p 36)

The Welsh Note
Originally uploaded by Canis Major

But to continue the story, these involuntary immigrants, the unmeltable ones, were subjected to enormous indignities from speaking their own language (L1) instead of English (L2) in school, for example. Mind you, the U.S. isn't the only place such things happened. Cummins quotes in a note Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley about the mistreatment of Welsh children caught talking Welsh in school.

The "Welsh note" (or Note) came into existence after the 1870 Education Act in Britain as a means of eradicatingthe Welsh language. Any child hear speaking Welsh in school had a heavy wooden placard...placed over his or her shoulders. ...If that child hear another child speaking Welsh, he or she could transfer the "Welsh not" to the other child. The child carrying this placard at the end of the day was caned.
(Cummins, p 52)

But by 1967, in what Cummins calls Phase I of Bilingual Education, some enlightened educators decided that it would be a good idea to teach students in the L1 to get started, and then gradually move them over to English.

Unfortunately this didn't last very long, because of a lawsuit in 1974, Lau (a Chinese) vs. Nichols, insisted that children weren't getting assimilated fast enough with bilingual education. They need to get into English atthe deep-end, with what became know as Basic English. If the kids don't know Basic English, how are they going to get on in school? was the thought. The court mandated that "schools take effective measures to overcome the educational disadvantages resulting from a home-school language mismatch." (Cummins, p. 41, my emphasis.)

People also started worrying that bilingual education could cause divisiveness. You only had to look to Quebec to see what happens then. (Now, the streets signs there are all in French, not even bilingual!) Cummins summarizes the conflicts of this time as: ...during this second phase the battle lines were drawn between two opposing but apparently equally plausible arguments: on the one hand, the linguistic mismatch hypothesis, which argues that children can't learn in a language they don't understand; on the other, the maximum exposure hypothesis that if children are deficient in English, then surely they require maximum exposure to English in school. The political aspects of divisiveness, "the broader set of concerns ... [about] the more general infiltration of cultural diversity into American institutions," (Cummins, p. 43) leads into the third phase, starting in 1987.

In the 1980's the organization U.S. English started its xenophobic opposition to bilingual education, getting a referendum passed in 19 states to make English the official language. (The website is scary!) They use claims like "bilingualism shuts doors" and "monolingual education opens doors to the wider world," (Cummins, p. 45) which is a contradiction in terms (and see the next posting!)

This all came to a head in 1998 (the beginning of Phase IV) when California passed Prop 227, which aims to eliminated the use of L1 as a classroom language. Luckily it includes a provision for parents to request that this be done, although not all districts care to tell parents that. There has been a lot of discussion back and forth between proponents of bilingual education (where English is started along with the L1, and content teaching gradually moves into English alone when the student is ready) to moving kids quickly through a transition class that takes about a year and then directly into mainstream classrooms. Reseach has been done on the results of the different methods, with each side infering that the other has fudged the results by not using appropriate data.

Cummins conclusion is that there is "overwhelming evidence against the maximum exposure assumption," which he believes is more based on sociopolitical reasons:

...a patently inferior form of education has been rationalized as being for children's own good and necessary to provide them with access to what U.S. English calls "the language of equal opportunity."
(Cummins, p. 51)

In a later blog post I will relate the experience of my own children learning Danish and English in Denmark with a Danish father and American mother.

The Magdalene Sisters

2009-08-28T12:49:00.001-07:00

The Magdalene Sisters demonstrates in a movie how the 3 protagonists insisted on negotiating their identities to survive.

Tattycoram and the Magdalen Sisters

2009-08-28T11:37:00.001-07:00

A literary example of coercive power and negotiated identity is seen in Harriet Beadle (called Tattycoram) from Dickens' Little Dorritt, as described in this exerpt from the decidedly un-academic Yahoo answers:

Tattycoram was a foundling - the family took her in. They patronised her somewhat- they had good intentions but there seems to have been a bit of self-indulgence there too. (Her former name is Harriet Beadle, the family give her the silly made up name in true slave fashion).
Tattycoram had developed a serious anger-management problem... The strong-willed Miss Wade encourages Tattycoram and eventually entices her away. (While with Miss Wade, pointedly, she reclaims her original name) ... Tattycoram eventually repents and goes back to the family ... And when she returns - you guessed it - she takes the silly name again, and submits to a sermon from her former master on the importance of submission and duty.
(Sam R.)

Certainly her "serious anger-management problem" is not unexpected, considering the position she has been forced into by her circumstances, while "the strong-willed Miss Wade" is likewise pushing her own concept of Harriet's identity. I recently saw a BBC series on Little Dorritt, where Tattycoram was portrayed as a young black woman, based on her description in the novel as "a handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes, and very neatly dressed." (McLean) She was portrayed as being more a foster child of the family, who nevertheless is treated demeaningly. On the one hand, the family implies that she is a member of the family, on the other hand, she is given a childish name, taught to control her anger by counting - like a child - and dressed in much simpler fashion than the women of the family. The family think they are doing her well by rescuing her from the home, but they are coercing her into a position over which she has no control, just as the First Nation children described by Cummins were sent to schools to "improve their lot."

Schools like the one Harriet Beadle attended in Dickens' time were still going strong in Ireland until the 1990's. According to an article in the Guardian, "More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s." (McDonald) These schools may have been called "Reformatories" but mostly demeaned the children with poor living and working conditions, as well as the sexual abuse reported in the article.

A similar story is told by the movie The Magdalen Sisters. (See Wikipedia - MS,) which demonstrates how the 3 protagonists negotiated their identities to survive.

Reflections: Chapter I: Identity and Empowerment

2009-08-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

Chapter I analyzes how identity is related to empowerment, exemplifying the topic with 2 case studies. The first shows how a Latino community, Pajaro Valley was given empowerment over the local school and brought great changes through a literacy project. The following quote from the project report, is particularly illustrative about how empowerment and identity are linked:

Another mother said: 'Ever since I know I have no need to feel ashamed of speaking Spanish I have become strong. Now I feel I can speak with the teachers about my children's education and I can tell them I want my children to know Spanish. I have gained courage'...
(Cummins, p 7)

The second tells about one of innumerable instances where children of "inferior" backgrounds were sent to boarding schools or assigned as foster children to well-standing citizens, ostensibly to train out their inferior qualities, but actually to remove any sense of empowerment their culture might have retained in their identities. The example is of a First Nations residential school in Canada, where, according to Cummins' research, "Eradication of of Native identity was seen as a prerequisite to making students into low-level productive citizens." (Cummins, p. 9)

The process of identity negotiation in schools is a reciprocal one between educators and students. For example, in the case of First Nations students in the residential schools, educators defined their role as dispenser of salvation, civilzation and education to students who necessarily had to be defined as lacking of these qualities. In other words, the self-definition of educators required that students and their communities be defined as heathen, savage and without valid form of cultural transmission... This devaluation of identity was communicated to students in all of their interactions...
(Cummins, p. 10)

Schools of this sort were run, mostly by various church organizations, into the 1970's. Cummins goes on to report a newspaper account of a conference focused on the treatment of First Nation children,

after the community started to conquer widespread alcoholism and social problems in recent years and realized that the self-destructive behavior had been masking the pain of the residential school experience.
(Cummins, p. 11)

The pain these people had felt was described recently in a "Health" article The sting of social rejection, in the LATimes.

The hurt of social rejection or exclusion is emotional. But there must be a reason why we so often experience it -- and talk about it -- as if it were a physical pain. One feels "burned" by a partner's infidelity, "wounded" by a friend's harsh words, "heartache" when spurned by a lover.
(Healy)

The article goes on to explain that a particular class of brain cells, called my opiod receptors, which not only dampen pain when an opiate drug or the body's own painkillers are present, but also "play a key role in physical and social pain. Thus it is no wonder that this pain, which most of us recognize as causing depression, would cause people whose identity has been removed to dampen their pain with alcohol and to feel depression. The " low-level productive citizens" that were expected have become non-productive in the extreme.

Of course this has happened all over the world: Native American, Australian aborigines, Greenlandic Eskimos under the Danish colonial power (where children were sent to Denmark for middle school, and many ended up alcoholics,) to name just a few. See the next entry for some literary and real-life examples from England and Ireland.

Cummins points out that these coercive relations of power such as these assume that there is a fixed quantity of power, using zero-sum logic. However, the example from the Pajaro Valley Literacy Project demonstrates that cooperative relations of power are additive.

Power...can be generated in interpersonal and intergroup relations. ...
participants are empowered through their collaboration such that each is
affirmed in her or his identity and has a greater sense of efficacy to create
change... The power relationship is additive rather than subtractive. Power is
created with others rather than being imposed on or exercised over others.
(Cummins, p. 16)

It is obvious from the Canadian example here, and the Irish examples in the next blog entries, that coercive power is subtractive. Instead of productive citiizens, society is faced with more crime, child support, hospital bills, etc. that could have been avoided with cooperative power. If the children's own identities had been supported, rather than attempted to be annihilated.

Educators and identity negotiation

As educators, we must be very careful to help the students retain their identity, while encouraging them to add to their identity in ways that will help them achieve their potential in the society they intend to live in. If education is student centered, it is much easier for us to help students achieve this potential. In large classrooms, teacher-centered instruction becomes more dominant, as the teacher has very little opportunity to get to know each student personally. As Cummins points out:

Our interactions with students are constantly sketching a triangular set of
images.
an image of our own identities as educators;
an image of the identity options we highlight for our students...;
an image of the society we hope our students will help form.
(Cummins, p. 17)

Our teaching then includes our own image of our students' future. We must be very careful to let the students form their own future, but we can provide them a view of our version, as well as the opportunities they need. But if we force our image on the students, we are being coercive, which will only subtract from the students' own identity. The micro-interactions between teacher and student, Cummins says, "form an interpersonal ...space within which the acquisition of knowledge and formation of identity is negotiated. ...[They} consitute the most imediate determinant of student academic success or failure." (Cummins, p. 19) Cummins concludes by discussion the two lenses through which these micro-interactions can be viewed:

...the lens of the teaching-learning relationship... required to promote reading development, content knowledge and cognitive growth; ... [and] the lens of identity negotiations ... communicated by the students regarding their identies - who they are in the teacheer's eyes and who they are capable of becoming.
(Cummins, p. 21)

We educators must always be aware that our wishes and concerns for our students must include their own understanding of their identity. A student's identity is not carved in stone. It is flexible and pliable. But we do not want to break our students by removing coercively a vital part of the student's identity. It is up to us to help the students negotiate their identity between their understanding and our understanding of the world they need to be prepared for.

We ARE Americans

2009-08-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

Professor William Perez of Claremont Graduate University has been concerned about the fate of undocumented students, many of whom do well in school and then find the door to a college education shut in their face. These students have learned to respect their identity in the classroom, but are considered as non-persons when they leave school.

In 'We ARE Americans' Profiles Undocumented Students NPR's All things Considered of August 22, 2009, host Guy Raz interviewed Professor Perez and a former undocumented student, Nora Preciado, who did prevail to become an immigration lawyer.

I think my experience is typical of a lot of undocumented students, especially as a teenager. I can only describe it as feeling invisible in this country when I was growing up.
(Raz)

When she arrived in this country she knew no English, so she was placed in remedial courses for many years, even though she had been an honors student in Mexico.
(I too experienced being "stupid" after I moved to Denmark until I learned the language and culture. I even had colleagues at the high school where I taught as a fully qualified teacher who would try to find errors in my Danish or cultural understanding, which always felt demeaning.)
But she wanted to be like the others, and ended up succeeding in high school, only to realize with shock that she couldn't attend university or even travel. But with the help of an understanding guidance counselor she managed to fulfil her dreams.

Professor Perez found that many of these young people end up in the alternative economy instead of becoming productive citizens. But the 180 students he interviewed for the book are different.

They don't really have a lot of options. I mean, the students that I profiled in the book are students that have decided to pursue that goal despite the challenges that they face. And so, you know, they work multiple jobs in addition to maintaining high grades in their classes, and also responsibilities that they have at home, a lot of them are still helping their parents.

But one of the most surprising findings was the high levels of community service that these students were involved in. Ninety percent of the students that I surveyed had participated in some form of volunteer work. Everything from food drives to voter registration, which I found, you know, particularly interesting, because even though they themselves can't vote, they wanted to make sure that other people didn't take for granted that privilege that they didn't have.
(Raz)

As the title says, these students' have "American" as part of their identity now - they ARE Americans. We must help them live that part as well. I look forward to helping all of my students achieve their potential, supported by colleagues, teachers, classmates - and of course, my students.

Reflections: Preface

2009-08-26T13:19:00.000-07:00

I nearly called this blog Creating Power Collaboratively, since that is the emphasis right from the start. If we change the power structure of a classroom from coercive, teacher centered, to collaborative, which draws on all the individuals in the classroom, with their various identities, then there is a power structre where all can grow, including the class as a community. Jim Cummins defines empowerment in this quote:

The term empowerment entails both sociological and psychological dimensions: to create contexts of empowerment in classroom interactions involves not only establishing the respect, trust, and affirmation required for students (and educators) to reflect critically on their own experience and identities; it also challenges explicitly the devaluation of identity that many culturally diverse students and communities still experience in the society as a whole.
(Cummins, p viii)

If a student does well in class, but then is not met with respect outside the classroom, she may find that her classroom excellence is not worth the effort. The classroom must help her build confidence in her identity, so that she can meet these challenges.

As a new teacher I need concrete suggestions for how to empower my students. There may be 35 students in my class, each with a different identity (or several different identities.) How will I be able to learn all these identities so that I can support them and empower them? I hope that the chapters of this book, and my classes, classmates and teachers at CGU will provide me with some answers and techniques.

This requires that schools respect students' language and culture, encourage community participation, promote critical literacy,and institute forms of assessment that contribute to the school as a learning community rather than pathologize culturally diverse students as scapegoats for the failure of schools and society.
(Cummins, p ix)

All of our students have their own identities. Some have more difficulty defending their identity than others. African-Americans have always born the stigma of slavery, of been a 4/5 citizen. While many have learned to develop and identity that largely ignores the stigma, as we have seen recently, even college professors discover that it is lying right under the surface under certain situations. Similarly, women in this country have had more difficult access to jobs they are qualified for, and when they get those jobs, their payscale and chances for advancement are often less than men. In some countries, women are nearly invisitble in their society. Some of our students bring their own culture's view of women with them when they come to this country. We must help the girls to find their identity, and encourage both the girls and the boys to accept each other as equally valuable individuals.

Reflections: Forward: What did you bring with you to school?

2009-08-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

This is the first of the many posts in this blog that refer specifically to chapters in the book. They will all be labeled "Reflections." Intersperced will be other postings about my own experiences, other related readings. In the right margin is a bibliography of books and articles I refer to. Some I list as I find, even though they have not yet been discussed.

Vasilia Kourtis Kazoulllis tells about her introduction to schooling in America, and about her metamorphosis from Greek child at home to American school girl, which she handled seamlessly.

I could enter an environment, immediately calculate the demands of that particular environment and act accordingly. . .I knew that each teacher had a prototype of excellence. I didn't challenge it--or try to be better than the prototype of excellence for even that was disastrous. I learned to become just that.
(Cummins, p iii)

She begins the section with an anecdote from this first experience of kindergarten. She had brought her teacher a very special koulourakia Greek cookie (see picture,) which was a sign that the family accepted her authority (and it probably was delicious.) She discovered the bag in waste basket, unopened. The teacher had kept to her own identity, but not accepted the identity of her student. As Kazoullis comments:

If I had been accepted as an individual and if individuality and not conformity had been the key to success...things would have been much easier.
(Cummins, p iii)

As she analyzes the situation, this is not a question of multicultural or intercultural education, which stress similarities and differences, but a question of individuality. It is a question of accepting each student's identity in the classroom, and making the classroom richer because of the many different flavors of identity it provides.

This is a 2-way process, of course. While the teacher should be able to recognize what makes each student individual, the student must also recognize how each classroom and each social context is individual.

Kazoullis concludes that society should derive power from collaboration, not coersion. With coercive power, someone always loses if someone wins. With collaborative power, each individual with her own identity contributes to the power of a community. This is what the favorite business term synergy is all about, or the motto United we stand, divided we fall, which doesn't mean "unified we stand" or "conforming we stand."

Negotiating my own identity

2009-08-24T21:00:00.001-07:00

gathering in the kitchen
Originally uploaded by bonbayel

This picture shows a part of my identity that only my family knows. I am sitting in a cottage kitchen by a lake in Maine together with my husband, my mother, my daughter and my sister-in-law.

Mom and Dad lived by this lake for almost my entire adult life, while I was living in Denmark. Their home was our home in America, and it looked sort of like this.

I sometimes wonder how I could end up in California. (Hint: that guy on the left moved here and then asked me to join him.) But I think that being by a lake in Maine is hidden deep inside me.

My life has been a constant renegotiation of my identity. I went to 4 schools in 3 states (NJ, OH, PA) before college in OH, and Mom and Dad added 2 more states (TN and ME) while I was in graduate school in a 6th state, NC. And then I lived in 5 different towns in different parts of Denmark for 29 years. Moving requires a change of identity every time, even within the same state.

I went from saying "tomahto" to "tomayto" when we moved to Ohio, to avoid being laughed at.
Moving from HS to Oberlin College meant moving from a school where I was one of the top students to a school where everyone had been that. I no longer got straight A's, which was required a lot of renegotiating of who I was.
I went from a future physicist to a nobody in the science department, because my competition had increased dramatically.
So I majored in German, and became a linguist during graduate school at UNC.
I moved to Denmark, where it took a while (at age 25) to learn the language and the culture, and where I never entirely fit in.
I became the wife of a man who had grown up a farmer, quitting school after 7th grade, but through night classes ended up a Ph.D. from U.N.C. He had to constantly renegotiate who he was throughout his life because of class culture differences, and then later because stroke left him not able to teach or be as active as he'd been. I will write about his struggles with his identity elsewhere in this blog.
Strangely, in Denmark, I became the scape-goat American, who was expected to defend the Viet Nam war, which I had petitioned against in 1965, to pollution, even though I have always been an avid environmentalist, to whatever else people held against Americans:
"Just because you're an American doesn't mean you can teach English well."
"'English' means the language of England, not the U.S.," was a battle I ran as a teacher (and my daughter, later, as a student.)
This was aided by my becoming the mother of 2 children, who taught me the culture as they learned it in school.
In Denmark, I was a HS teacher of German and English - grammar, which is sort of like math, but also literature, a subject I'd avoided all my life, so I constantly felt that I wasn't preparing my students properly in that area.
I dropped that for the world of business - for which I started dressing more appropriately and had my ears pierced, so I could wear a bit of "no-fuss" jewelry. But business in Denmark was not ready for a mature, foreign woman with a university degree in the humanities, so I had to hop from one temp job to the next doing things like translations.
I became a small business owner, developing and running a diaper service for about 5 years, never making a profit.
This lead to studies (and a few jobs) in environmental management.
And finally a move to California as a new wife, with a whole new barrage of identity negotiations.

Negotiating your identity

2009-08-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

Our identity is the sum of our background and our interests. It is what we think of ourselves, but tempered by what others think of us. Our identity is based on our gender, culture, socio-economic status, religion, interests and passions, community, the larger society - and our education.

When we are in society, there will always be parts of our identity that don't quite fit in with the rest of whatever community we are in - at a job, in church, as a volunteer, and in school. We all have to learn to negotiate our identity with our surroundings, trying to keep as much as we can of the person we think we are, while adapting whatever is needed from the prevailing culture to fit in (or at least survive!)

For children school can be particularly perplexing when they find that things they take for granted are somehow unacceptable at school. This may be a handicap, the way the clothes they wear, their language, the food in their lunch box, how loud they speak, or many other things. If the school culture doesn't accept parts of the child's identity that are important to her, she may never really catch on in school.

If our role as teachers is to prepare students for the very best they will be capable of, then we teachers have to negotiate our own identities. Maybe some part of our identity is that we belong to the prevailing, "superior" culture. If we are to prepare all of our students, we must learn to accept their culture and quirks as of equal value to our own. Students must be able to accept their own culture as valued, while learning about the prevailing culture, which may be necessary for future success. Being bi-cultural and bilingual can only be a strength, because such a person is adept in several cultures and learns to be flexible.

This blog is to be an "interactive journal" of my reactions to the book shown here: Negotiating Identities, by Jim Cummins, as an assignment for my Teaching Internship Program at Claremont (CA) Graduate University. I will reflect on about one chapter a week, starting with a short summary of the chapter, then digging deaper into particular quotes or concepts, providing interaction with other readings, experience, pictures and probably YouTube videos.

Since my own personal experience includes moving several times as a child as well as living, studying, teaching and bringing up my bilingual children in Denmark for 29 years, I have very personal feelings about negotiating my own identity, and the conflicts my children experienced as well.

	Cognitively Undemanding
Context	A	C	Context
Embedded	B	D	Reduced
	Cognitively Demanding