Meeting School Challenges
In Chapter 4 of Translanguaging for Emergent Bilinguals, Fu, Hadjioannou, and Zhou present the challenges of bilingual students and translanguaging for students within the American education system. Many of these challenges seem to be institutional failings or complete lack of understanding on the part of teachers who are in-charge of teaching these students. The chapter also goes into detail on some of the solutions to these issues.
The issues facing translanguaging students in the modern day classroom are lack of budget and experienced teachers. Many teachers and schools do not seem to understand/lack the required experience or knowledge to know how to properly handle a classroom where translanguaging and bilingualism is common place. Schools also lack the budget, or refuse to fit into the budget, programs to teach teachers how to properly handle these classrooms and students. In the chapter, we get the statistic, "Only 39% of the teachers and administrators surveyed strongly agreed with the statement 'I have received enough EL training/ professional development' (p. 21), and 82% of respondents reported spending personal time and effort to develop their skills to support English learners." (pg. 75).
It is particularly striking to me that school boards as well as teachers themselves feel so little involved with the lives of students. In my mind, it is important for teachers to be able to understand and provide for all students, especially for ELs and those translanguaging. We as teachers must be cognizant of these issues and must work to be able to support ELs. The idea, as the statistic above suggests, that 82% of teachers surveyed haven't put any personal thoughts into developing skills to help English learners is unacceptable to me.
Now, how can we help bilingual students and ELs. Students who may also be going through the same experience can be an excellent support for the students. We can include home-languages into the curriculum. This allows for both proficiency of learning as well as getting the student used to English. This way, we don't leave the student behind and encourage growth within their familiar language as well as growth into English. While teaching ELs and bilingual students, it is important that we acknowledge and even allow, for their own cultural and language identities to grow with their new information. Allowing these languages and cultures to cross-pollinate within the classroom can help to make the class a more enriching and culturally inclusive place.
We as teachers must be conscious of every student within the classroom and we must try our best to be inclusive while still teaching what we need to teach to the students.
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Christopher,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your blog about meeting school challenges and how important it is to keep those challenges in mind. I would have to agree that most of the issues for translanguaging students come from lack of budget and experienced teachers. As you claimed, it is important for the schools to have experienced teachers and a greater budget for the translanuaging students. As you said that the school board is less involved with the students, which is not a good outcome for the school district in the first place. I really enjoyed it when you talked about what we can do to help bilingual students. Bilingual students are very important to the school system as they can come to good use when learning about different cultures. Overall, I enjoyed reading your blog post about meeting the school challenges that teachers face every day.
Chris,
ReplyDeleteYour post is a great synopsis and synthesis of the fourth chapter in Translanguaging for Emergent Bilinguals. I agree that it is both surprising and unsettling that so many teachers report feeling unprepared to teach emergent bilinguals. Towards the end of the chapter, Fu, Hadjioannou, and Zhou explain this fear that many teachers face when deciding whether to adopt a translanguaging model of teaching or continue teaching as they always have. They then write, “the shift from ‘English-only’ to a multilingual perspective in their teaching practice requires a fundamental thinking shift in their teaching beliefs and in how they value and embrace all their students,” (Fu, Hadjioannou, & Zhou, 2019, p. 96). In this way, the authors recognize and validate the fear that many teachers have about the work it takes to practice a multilingual model, while expressing the necessary changes teachers must accept in order to create the best learning environment for all of their students. I think an important takeaway from this for teachers is that they are not alone in their journey towards creating a multilingual classroom. As you mentioned, through the translanguaging model, they will come to see that their students, the students’ families, and the entire school community will work with them to create the desired learning environment. (Word count 213).
Chris,
ReplyDeleteYour insights in this blog are absolutely marvelous. The way you talk about how EL’s struggle in ways that can also be outside of the classroom and at the district level and in the classroom. The portion that stood out to me is when you said “While teaching ELs and bilingual students, it is important that we acknowledge and even allow for their own cultural and language identities to grow with their new information”. To this point, we have talked about trying to have students maintain cultural identity, yet you go the extra mile and say that we should help them grow within their own cultural identity. I believe that we, as teachers, should grow in our diversity by not only accepting, but encouraging diversity and learning about other cultures through people of those cultures. We as Americans boast about being a cultural melting pot, but never actually talk to people about cultures. Maybe we as a class should sample what a cultural day looks like by talking about our cultures in class with Dr. Ohanian and see what we learn and try to apply it in our own teacher. I would love to learn about other students in our class and discuss what I know about being Irish. Thank you for the wonderful insights and Ideas Chris.
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