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. In some ways it is hard to know where to even start as there are so many barriers that students face in and outside the classroom. What’s more, many of them are interrelated. In light of the assignment, though, I’ll focus on two barriers that I see in my own classroom as my perspective on those is obviously deeper. The first is internalized oppression.
For context, though my regular teaching responsibilities are at SDSU, I also occasionally adjunct at Palomar College. Emerging bilinguals (i.e., ESL students) at SDSU and at Palomar are made up of entirely different populations. My SDSU students are in the U.S. from various countries (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Colombia, and Germany to name a mere few). They are typically from middle-income families in their home countries and are studying in the U.S. as part of their undergraduate or graduate degrees as a means of improving their job prospects once they return home. In other words, they see English bilingualism as a commodity. By contrast, my students at Palomar are largely undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. These students face entirely different challenges and have life experiences far different from those of my SDSU students. They also, I have discovered, often see themselves in a different light. By way of example, a few years ago I had a conversation with some of my Palomar students in which I was encouraging them to continue in ESL and eventually aim for an associate’s degree. One of my students looked at me quite earnestly and shook his head: “Oh, Kelly, no. We can’t take classes with the American students. We aren’t as smart as them. Even when our English gets better, we won't be that smart.” He believed that. And so did the other students surrounding us. In fact, they argued that point with me for a solid twenty minutes. This is internalized oppression. If we hear long enough that we lack ability or are lazy or unintelligible or provide less to society… eventually, we’ll believe it and it will affect our sense of belonging and intrinsic motivation. This is what Freire believed we must change. This is why we must all seek liberation, the oppressed and the oppressor. Language barriers are the second issue I’ll address. Around the world, students are marginalized, miscategorized, and misjudged as a result of preconceived notions surrounding language acquisition. This is especially true when students are educationally isolated from their first language (their L1). One of the problems this creates is that students who are taught in a second language (L2) without appropriate linguistic access to their L1 often fall behind where content knowledge is concerned. Imagine if you are brilliant at math and your L1 is Spanish. Now imagine you arrive in the U.S. and are placed in an L2-only classroom absent adequate linguistic support. How are you going to manage word problems in math class? Even if you are phenomenal at math, how will you follow instruction in an L2-only classroom? Statistically speaking, you won’t. Instead, you’ll fall behind in your content areas as a result of your still emerging L2 fluency. There are alternatives, but we’ve been depressingly slow to adopt them on a global scale. My group's PPT for this week can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1i1XK_2xECtH-8oBI3rZzViPQAsC_rIhpg6pACliEyb8/edit#slide=id.p Why is an examination of inclusive education needed in both countries?
There are more reasons for an examination of inclusive teaching in the classroom than we realistically have time or space for on a platform of this type. There are of course the obvious reasons—like the way inclusivity demonstrates a commitment to diversity, how that diversity strengthens civil society, and how we have a responsibility to offer all children (all humans) equal opportunity where education is concerned. These are all true and paramount, even as they sometimes become platitudinous for their overuse in the absence of real action. In other words, it’s one thing to tout something verbally: it’s another to actually do it. But I’m digressing. There is another concept here that I’d like us to consider. It’s the fact that we shouldn’t only be examining the need for inclusive education globally for all the things it should do (those things sometimes can feel far off and even unrealistically utopian to our skeptical human nature), but also because we have a responsibility to NOT exclude as much as we have one to include. These might sound like one and the same thing, but they aren’t. We have a responsibility to NOT “other” our students. To NOT instill fear in them. It is an activist approach in the vein that many of us consider education itself a form of activism. I’m thinking here of chapter three of Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain. If we know, as Hammond (2015) points out, that culture and sociopolitical contexts are what trigger fear in the brain, then our responsibility is not simply to include the whole lot of our students in our lessons (this alone is not culturally responsive education), but to ensure that the environment we create for students with varying sociocultural backgrounds is not one likely to foment culturally bound concepts of threat. This is our responsibility. And this is why we must examine inclusive teaching in both the U.S. and in South Africa—because instilling threat or fear in students is contrary to our vocation as teachers. What is the “Wicked Problem” and how can we solve it? According to Elizabeth Walton’s “Inclusive Education: A Tame Solution to a Wicked Problem,” “wicked” problems are problems that are “complex, dynamic, multifaceted and intractable” (2017, p.85). Exclusion in education, she argues, is one of these wicked problems. It will not be solved using buzzwords or tame, ultimately non-performative measures (I’m using non-performative here in the spirit of Judith Butler’s work on gender whereby we can perform a representative act repeatedly without achieving the desired performative result). Instead, it requires real action. In her own words, solving the wicked problem of exclusion means treating it as a “social and political project that is bold enough to identify and challenge the impediments to meaningful inclusion and make radical changes necessary to ensure quality education for all” (2017, p. 85). I wholeheartedly agree. References Phasha, N., Mahlo, D., & Dei, G. J. S. (Eds.). (2017). Inclusive Education in African Contexts: A Critical Reader. Springer. Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin. 1. Provide a brief summary of your social location essay- why do you think it is important to establish yourself in this work as we begin a comparison of countries, cultures, and experiences?
Rather than summarize my social location essay, I’m including an excerpt of it below. I think this particular excerpt speaks to why I find it so critical that we examine our social location with frequency. For many of us—in fact, for most of us—that social location shifts with us throughout the day, the month, the year. I believe that cognizance of our various social locations in life helps us put in broader, more intersectional terms the social locations of those we encounter during our travels. An excerpt: This exploration of self and location makes me think of the concept of privilege, especially in the ways privilege helps dictate our social location in life. A number of years back, I read one of Roxane Gay’s books, Bad Feminist. She wrote something in that book that hasn’t left me since. I’m paraphrasing here, but it was essentially this: We don’t have to go to war over our various privileges and disadvantages in life. It doesn’t have to be a contest that one person wins. We can be privileged in some respects and disadvantaged in others. We can be privileged in our education, for example, but not in our skin color, privileged in the manner and comfort of our upbringing, but not in our gender or sexuality.We can understand privilege broadly without having experienced each form specifically. For clarity, Gay is not suggesting that some forms of privilege don’t carry with them heavier responsibilities; without question, some do. Instead, she is commenting on the fact that privilege is not an all or nothing game: we can and often do live in the in-between. Gay’s framing speaks to my own experience and location in society. I am, for example, strikingly privileged in many respects. I am able-bodied. I grew up in relative comfort and without ever facing real hunger. Though I am part Panamanian, my fair skin presents otherwise, a status that lends me an almost unending amount of ease in the societies that I navigate daily. I am a PhD student and teach in a university. I am literate and articulate and speak three almost achingly privileged languages fluently (French, German, and English). And while I am not wealthy in the classic (American) sense, I can afford simple vacations and new clothes when the inclination arises and a Starbucks whenever I like. I live in a house. In California, for god’s sake. But I am in some ways not amongst our most privileged, and this matters, too. I am, for example, a woman living inside the confines of a patriarchy—a crumbling one, perhaps—but one with a death grip so strong as suffocate some of us at mere view. I am queer, and more specifically, bisexual, a fact which means that I am neither straight nor gay, and rarely accepted by either group in full. I grew up in a household virtually absent books and to parents absent post-secondary education. And I was raised in part by men who were prone to objectifying and degrading the women around them, including me. Especially me. My social location, then, reflects the very malleability of my identity experiences and my subsequent need to flit about amongst them. I picture myself something like an abacus, one line moving higher in perceived numerical value, another lower—a calculation that, in the hands of the accountant, is unending and merciless. I am fair-skinned, up. I am female, down. I am highly educated, up. I sleep with women, down. I live in a house brimming with books, up. I grew up in a house without them, down. And on and on and on. Up, down. Back, forth. Step, fall. 2. What similarities and differences did you learn about inclusive education in SA and USA this week (in presentations and readings) I think what struck me most about the idea of inclusive education in South Africa versus inclusive education in the U.S. is that inclusive education in South Africa was historically defined as education that supports students with physical disabilities. In the U.S. inclusive education is largely understood to be broader. For example, inclusive education in the U.S. might be defined as understanding, accepting, and appropriately challenging students of various cognitive, emotional, social, linguistic, and physical backgrounds and proficiencies. Certainly, this chasm between South Africa’s definition of inclusive education and ours has some roots in our historical differences, but even that doesn’t fully explain it in my opinion. What I am thinking after this week’s readings is that regardless of the breadth and depth of understanding that we may have come to regarding the definition of inclusive education in the U.S., we have not made all of the strides in practice that our expanded rhetoric suggests. 3. What did you learn about in your group textbook chapters? Why is understanding the learner so important? What information is important to learn? I have worked with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students for many years. As an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor, this is my day to day. As a result, there wasn’t as much entirely new material in the book for me as there might have been for others. What I appreciated about it, however, was the connection between culturally responsive teaching and cognitive science—areas I don’t see intertwined as often as I’d like outside of research into second language acquisition and associated pedagogies. Understanding the learner is as critical to teaching as knowing ourselves as teachers. It allows us to connect with our students, to see where additional scaffolding is required in our pedagogical practice, and to consider where we might draw from our students’ knowledge and life experiences to positively impact learning outcomes. There is, simply put, almost nothing more important. 4. What do you hope to get out of the Changemaking experience? As with any assignment in this course, I hope to continue my own growth in the area of education and educational leadership. This includes, but is never limited to, expanding my knowledge of how to work with those who are different from me. I teach English as a Second Language (ESL) at the post-secondary level. All of my students are immigrants and a fair number of them are refugees. I am faced with the challenges of a socioeconomically, culturally, and linguistically diverse classroom every day; I suspect that these challenges are inherent to the South African educational system as well. I believe that I have a responsibility to seek out experiences that will help me better manage a diverse classroom and the conflict that occasionally arises within it. I hope this course will help me hone the skills necessary to continue my work with a diverse body of students while simultaneously helping me broaden my knowledge of the international contexts in which my students have lived and learned.
As my first assignment in this course, I read the novel Cry, the Beloved Country. It was, in retrospect, a good first choice for this course. Having read Mandela’s autobiography a number of years ago, Cry, the Beloved Country helped put some of South Africa’s history into perspective. But more than that, I found the novel superb in its humanizing quality, in the manner in which it highlighted the dignity that all humans seek and that all human beings have the opportunity to grant one another. In fact, I would go so far as to say this was my major takeaway from the novel—that the things that connect the South African experience to the American experience rest in the ways we seek and either are or are not offered dignity in return. After completing Cry, the Beloved Country, I watched the film In My Country. The film centered on the experiences of a white South African journalist and an African American journalist reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the mid-1990s. I learned a tremendous amount about South Africa in this process, both as a result of the film itself and as a result of extracurricular reading that I completed on the TRC after watching the film, but what really sticks out for me is the African concept of ubuntu and how it both governed and nourished the TRC. While perhaps flawed, my reading suggests to me that the TRC was largely viewed a success. I’m left wondering how American society might be different today had we enacted restorative justice of this type at any number of points in our history. |
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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