Inner City Boarding School

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

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

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 5: Understanding Academic Language - 1

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.

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door

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...

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."

Negotiating my own identity

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

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.