Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 4

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!

Reflections: Chapter I: Identity and Empowerment

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.

Reflections: Preface

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?

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."