Building trust is, to my mind, more about listening and follow-through than anything else. By listening and following-through on our commitments, we demonstrate that, as teachers, we value the lived experiences of our students. If we don’t demonstrate that we value our students (even if we think we do value them), we risk that they will feel alienated from the learning process. This, in turn, often leaves students disengaged.
By showing students that we value their voices and experiences in our feedback, we say to them, “I see you; I hear you.” Verbal and written feedback that suggests genuine interest in students’ work creates an atmosphere primed for comfort and risk-taking so that students are willing to show who they are. Because culture directly affects the way students see and experience the world, it’s also important that we adjust our curriculum to speak to the diversity of our students. This is as important here in the U.S. as it is in South Africa. One of the ways I do this in my own classroom is to design curriculum that is open-ended enough that my students are not pigeonholed into one narrative. It means “exploring” topics from our varying views rather than being “taught” those same topics from mine. I completed the CRSTP with my daughter, age 7. Though I used the elementary template, I still found a number of slides required adjustment or omission. She had difficulty with some aspects of metacognition (not surprising considering her age), but showed remarkable insight in other respects. For instance, I learned from this process how attuned she was to the perceptions of others regarding her bilingualism and her speech impediment. Having found the CRSTP incredibly useful as a parent, I have no doubt that teachers might use it to better understand the needs, desires, and insights of their students.
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Esikhisini is an R-7 school in the Pretoria area outside of Johannesburg. Its language of instruction is Zulu. I cannot say enough wonderful things about our two days at Esikhisini, especially about the R teachers I observed and the students I met and worked with. Nothing will ever erase the memory of two dozen children joyously mobbing me to touch my tattoos to “make sure they were real.” Truth be told, the entire administration, the teachers, and the student body enveloped us in warmth. They were my favorite school.
While I won’t have time to address all the experiences I had at Esikhisini here today, I’d like speak to one specific experience as a means of highlighting my own learning there. It’s an experience that I continue to mull over; and it’s one I suspect I will continue mulling over for some time to come. On day two of our visit, we worked on abbreviated versions of the CRSTP with sixth and seventh grade students. During that process, I noticed that three of my eighth grade students were having difficulty following English conversation. It turns out that these students had immigrated from French-speaking African countries. They were having difficulty following conversation in English because they were French-speaking students being asked to learn English through a second language (Zulu) that they had not yet mastered. From the principal, I learned that they had no French language support; from the students themselves (with whom I henceforth spoke in French), I learned that while they had support in Zulu, they were not proficient enough to use it as a base for English acquisition. I was profoundly affected by the relief I saw on these students' faces when they realized they could communicate with me in French as a means of completing their project in English. Several things strike me here, but the one I’m most interested in is how French language support (inclusive of the type of translanguaging that Dr. Makalela spoke to in his article and presentation) might provide linguistic scaffolding and acquisition advantages as well as potential identity-related benefits. But to do that the school would need French-speaking teachers and resources (neither of which, according to the principal, it has). Also of note here is that it was the CRSTP that clued me in to this linguistic challenge as it was through answering the culture and language questions that I learned the students were immigrants from French-speaking African nations. If that isn’t indicative of the CRSTP’s usefulness, I don’t know what else is. We arrived in South Africa on Wednesday morning; and, after a quick break for showers and settling in at the hotel, we drove to the Apartheid Museum of Johannesburg. I felt then, and still feel now, days later, nearly overwhelmed by the experience. This isn’t a criticism, but instead reflects the near impossibility of capturing Apartheid in all its breadth and scope and abject viciousness. There was, quite frankly, not enough time (nor even mental space) to take it all in; in fact, I found myself periodically skimming in the interest of time and sanity. I want to be clear here: I think it is important that the museum felt as overwhelming as it did, that we were unable to “grasp” it all. It speaks to the destructive power of systemic ubiquity—one of the very things that allowed Apartheid to lengthen its roots and flourish.
For my own part, this experience also brought to the fore the importance of our assigned readings/films and of my own extracurricular reading/viewing on South Africa and Apartheid. It was a direct result of much of it--Cry, the Beloved Country, Born a Crime, My Traitor’s Heart, Long Walk to Freedom, and others—that I was able to make some “sense” of what I was seeing. I had read about the racial reclassifications in My Traitor’s Heart, for example, so a certain foundation had already been built for me; and I had some background on the ANC from Long Walk to Freedom, so reading about it in the museum felt familiar rather than entirely foreign. In this way, the readings/viewings acted as frameworks for the detailed narrative that the museum set forth—making the overwhelming digestible. Truth be told, I cannot imagine having grasped much of what the museum held without having already consumed some of the books and films that I did. In the shadow of my experience at the museum, I am reminded of the parallels (and differences) between our two countries and their histories of racism and broad injustice—of the ways in which we have learned (and might continue to learn) from one another’s successes and failures. There is so very much that binds us in this regard even if our struggles have manifested in unique ways and along varying continuums. Is this why South Africa feels so comfortable for me? Is it because I recognize these forms of oppressions as juxtaposed to these forms of progress? Is it because I, too, live in a society full to bursting with contradiction and strife, but one that I cannot help but call home because its imperfections speak to its ongoing fight? I’m not sure. But maybe, just maybe. So I’ve barely slept for 48 hours… please don’t hold any ineloquence against me on this blog post. On the bright side: We’re all in South Africa!
The School to Prison Pipeline (STPP) is one of the very types of oppressive structures that Freire pushes back against. In the same way that the STPP further marginalizes students in a system in which they already have little power, not allowing students access to their home language (or to translanguage in ways that enhance learning) oppresses students who, again, have less access to begin with. Both of these things perpetuate systemic injustice. As I see it, some of the most serious problems that culturally and linguistically diverse students face are the constant misconceptions lobbed at them from afar. This happens to students who end up in the STPP, but it also happens to students who translanguage. Where the latter is concerned, for example, I cannot tell you how many times I have seen fully proficient bilinguals code-switch only to witness monolinguals assume that their English proficiency was subsequently not adequate. Misconceptions like these make it easier for us to paint others with broad strokes—to confine them inside narratives we’ve already encountered, whether or not we see any real evidence for doing so. What I liked about doing the CRSTP last week was that it allowed students their own voice. In this way, it allowed them to shape the narrative—a very Freireian concept indeed. When we allow students to take part in the process, we see that all students have the propensity for an academic mindset; we simply acknowledge that an academic mindset looks different for each one of them and that our receptivity to their prior knowledge and strategies makes a world of difference. We’ve only been here for a few hours now and while I’m exhausted, I’m genuinely excited for the days to come. I am of course committed to remain as safe as possible during the trip. As I do whenever I travel, I will be observant of my surroundings and will avoid being alone anywhere that I am not acquainted with. I have traveled abroad to comparatively “safe” and “dangerous” countries all my life, much of that travel has been alone; while each country is unique, those general rules have served me well. Finally, of all the current events shared with us last week, I am most interested in learning more about the “Tablet Teachers.” Most notably, I’d like to know what research suggests that this is a method of teaching that results in stronger educational outcomes. Further, I can’t help but ask in light of the course we’re currently in: In what ways is this culturally responsive teaching? No surprise, I wasn’t a fan. But even so, I’d like to know more. |
AuthorI'm Kelly. I teach English as a Second Language, business English, and writing. I eat poems for dinner. Archives
January 2019
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