Reading A: Summary of “Deeper Learning” (Gándara, 2017)

 

Patricia Gándara, in a chapter of an edited book called Rethinking Readiness, comments on the growing emphasis on “deeper learning” in U.S. education:

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While there is no single, fixed definition of “deeper learning,” the term tends to be used to describe a mix of academic, personal, and relational capacities, including elements such as collaborative learning, critical thinking, conceptual understanding, and learning how to learn. Typically, deeper learning is said to have an affective dimension as well, touching on characteristics such as persistence and self-motivation, and advocates often argue that students should be taught to take responsibility for their own learning through active engagement in their education. (p. 123)

 

Gándara argues that not only can immigrant students, including those classified as English Learners, benefit from the “focused, critical, and engaging classroom instruction” designed to foster deeper learning, but that “one could argue that these children tend to be better equipped for such teaching and learning than monolingual, nonimmigrant students” (p. 123). Immigrant English Learners’ “affinity for deeper learning,” however, is often unrecognized, because these students are often framed primarily as “deficient and in need of remediation” (p. 123). However, Gándara argues that, “[i]n spite of the many challenges they face (and perhaps because of them),” students classified as English Learners “can also be viewed as advantaged in certain ways—possessing some important skills and dispositions that monolingual and monocultural students may lack” (p. 133). Reviewing relevant research and theory, Gándara articulates a number of specific advantages that immigrant students and English Learners have relevant to engaging in deeper learning:

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Multilingualism: Researchers have demonstrated that youngsters from immigrant backgrounds who serve, often informally, as bilingual interpreters for their families in their schools and communities exhibit many of the cognitive, linguistic, and interactional attributes of giftedness found in national guidelines. In addition to the cognitive and linguistic skills necessary to translate from one language into another, they navigate across cultures, picking up on and negotiating subtle situational and relational cues, shades of meaning, and power dynamics. Other research has found that students who develop and maintain high levels of bilingualism have cognitive advantages compared with monolinguals, such as an enhanced ability to invoke multiple perspectives in problem-solving and more focused attention on a specific task. There is also some evidence that those who maintain high levels of their home languages are more likely to go to four-year colleges than those who have lost those primary languages, most likely due to the social networks that their bilingualism has afforded.  

 

Multiculturalism: Young people who are navigating life in more than one culture may help students to be more “cognitively flexible,” allowing them to view problems from different perspectives and come up with novel solutions; exhibit creativity; and represent ideas and experiences in a wide variety of ways (pp. 134–135). These advantages not only benefit individuals; research has shown that diverse groups are more effective at problem-solving than homogenous groups. Furthermore, immigrant students’ experiences transitioning to new cultural environments often lead them to be “welcoming of differences, skilled at intercultural communication, and comfortable working on diverse teams—characteristics that employers often describe as highly valuable” (p. 135).   

 

Optimism and motivation: As a group, children of immigrants often have greater academic achievement than subsequent generations. While structural barriers such as longer time in poor-quality American schools may account for a downward trajectory across generations, some researchers have argued that that “immigrant optimism” may also play a role in the success of children of immigrants: that is, young immigrant students’ appreciation of the sacrifices their parents have made to migrate to the United States, the wider educational opportunities that may be available compared to the home country, and the desire to achieve the “American Dream” despite “daunting obstacles” (p. 136). Researchers have also studied affective variables related to differential academic success (such as stress management, adaptability, interpersonal skills, and persistence), which are all also associated with adapting to new and often hostile environments.

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Resilience: “In spite of often traumatic uprootings from their homes, harrowing immigration passages, and hostile receptions in the new land, immigrant children often arrive in the United States full of hope for the future, with a drive to succeed in school” (p. 137). In fact, some studies have shown that immigrants actually demonstrate better mental and physical health than the native-U.S. born population. One researcher has argued that at least four specific aspects of resilience are common in immigrant children: social competence, problem solving, autonomy, and sense of purpose. 

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Familial and cultural practices that value cooperation and collaboration: Psychologists have extensively studied how the backgrounds of many Latina/o/x students lead to peer interactions that are more cooperative than competitive. These are best seen not as inherent traits, but rather as enactments of cultural and historical practices (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003), including families’ privileging cooperative and respectful family interactions over individualism and independence. “While an emphasis on individual behavior serves students well in settings where they are expected to study alone and compete with their peers for the right answer, preference for cooperative behavior would seem to lend itself to the kinds of shared inquiry and teamwork that are cornerstones of deeper learning” (p. 137). 

 

SOURCE: Gándara, P. (2017). Deeper learning for English Learners. In R. Heller, R. E. Wolfe, & A. Steinberg (Eds). Rethinking readiness: Deeper learning for college, work, and life. Harvard Education Press.

 

[See also The Implications of Deeper Learning for Adolescent Immigrants and English Language Learners, Students at the Center Website.]

 

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Reading B: Summary of “What’s the Problem?” (Orellana & Gutiérrez, 2006)

 

In a commentary, Professors Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and Kris Gutiérrez argue that the language educators and researchers use to talk about English Learners may unintentionally reinforce deficit perspectives on this population, limiting our ability to understand and confront the ways that structural and institutional forces negatively impact their educational opportunities. As captured in the following excerpts, they also address what it would take to re-orient how this student population is talked about and viewed:

 

Reconsidering the questions that drive [us] is essential if we are to resist the language ideologies that are at work in constructing English Learners as problems. These ideologies are evident in the very categories and labels that are used. After all ... why do we categorize some students as English Learners and not others if we are all learning English every day? More perniciously, why did the field for so many years use the term “LEP” (“Limited English Proficient”)? Who, from a linguistic and social perspective, is more limited: those who are monolingual English Learners or speakers of other languages who are also English Learners? Rethinking such conceptual labels may lead us to ask fundamentally different questions about who or what is limited, or at risk, and why. Might we not see monolingual English speakers as unprepared for futures in a rapidly changing, globalized world? What can we learn from English Learners that can help all youth to negotiate a multilingual and transcultural future?

 

...we argue that we should decouple people from the problems to which we orient. By avoiding frameworks that identify people as problems, we may be better able to shine the spotlight on institutional practices, social processes, material resources, and situational contexts, and see other problems that are currently obscured. The point here is that people, in this case students, must be understood in relation to the practices of which they are a part, the available resources, and the specific demands of the context. This is a different approach than focusing on the student as the unit of analysis, which inevitably makes the student the problem. …

 

One strategy for adopting a substantive self-reflective stance is to pay keen attention when we find ourselves naming something that students can’t do or don’t know. In these cases, we should make explicit for ourselves and others from what value framework we are operating ...Are these skills that our students themselves value, ones we believe they should acquire, or ones that are imposed from the outside? We can then counter deficit framings by asking, “What do our students know?” “What can they do?” “What are their skills, contributions, or experiences that can be useful for them or for the world?” This can lead to more generative questions such as how schools can be transformed to open up more equitable spaces for robust learning for all students. (pp. 119–120)

 

SOURCE: Orellana, M. F., & Kris D. Gutiérrez, K. D. (2006). What’s the problem? Constructing different genres for the study of English Learners. Research in the Teaching of English, 41(1).

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Reading C: Community cultural wealth (from “Reclaiming Our Histories” by Yosso & Burciaga, 2016)

 

Professors Tara Yosso and Rebeca Burciaga describe “community cultural wealth” as “an array of knowledges, skills, abilities, and networks possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist racism and other forms of oppression” (p. 1). This framework, derived from critical race theory, provides an alternative to traditional ways of thinking about “social capital” and “cultural capital,” which both imply that the main problem with inequitable education is that members of Communities of Color (often bilingual) lack what dominant White (and monolingual) people have, and that the main solution is for people from non-dominant backgrounds to acquire what people from dominant backgrounds have. While equalizing available capital and other resources is obviously essential, Yosso and Burciaga point out that “examining the lived experiences of Communities of Color” allows us to see various kinds of “dynamic and overlapping forms of capital” that minoritized students and their families already possess, and that can be leveraged as strengths and assets for learning.

 

Yosso and Burciaga (2016, p. 2) define six different kinds “community cultural wealth” that Communities of Color bring with them by virtue of their experiences living in a racially stratified and unequal society:

 

• Linguistic capital includes the intellectual and social skills attained through communication in multiple languages and/or language styles (including communication through art, music, poetry, theatre, and dance).

 

• Social capital can be understood as networks of people and community resources.

 

• Familial capital refers to those cultural knowledges nurtured among familia (kin) that carry a sense of community history, memory, and cultural intuition.

 

• Aspirational capital refers to the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers

 

• Navigational capital refers to skills in maneuvering through social institutions. Historically, this implies the ability to maneuver through institutions not created with Communities of Color in mind.

 

• Resistant capital refers to those knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenge inequality.

 

Source: Tara J. Yosso & Rebeca Burciaga (2016). Reclaiming our histories. Center for Critical Race Studies (5), 1–4.

 

 

 

Reading D: A summary of “Funds of Knowledge” (Moje et al., 2004)

 

In an article exploring “everyday funds of knowledge,” Moje and colleagues documented the “funds of knowledge” that middle school students from working class Latina/o/x families raised when speaking with researchers after a middle school science unit on air and water quality—knowledge and experience that was only rarely tapped into in the classroom itself. Drawing from classroom observations, interviews with students, and home visits, the authors identify and analyze knowledge and discourses that students have access to deriving from a number of sources: family, community, peers, and popular culture. Below are examples from two of those sources.

 

Family funds of knowledge and discourse

As researchers asked students in focal groups about environmental issues relevant to the air and water quality unit they had just completed, students referenced their parents’ work outside of the home. For example, students talked about issues of water quality in relation to their fathers’ work in landscaping and farming, both in Mexico and the United States, and their concerns about their family members losing jobs in factories were they to close in response to air quality concerns. Researchers also conducted home visits, learning about other ways in which students’ experiences were connected to the unit but not discussed in class. For example, one mother explained the process of “sweating” chili peppers (placing them in plastic bags until their skins detach)—an example of the concepts of condensation and evaporation that were part of the classroom water-quality unit. The authors argue that encouraging some of these connections in the classroom could have served as “bridges from everyday to academic knowledges and as scaffolds for students’ readings of classroom texts” and could serve “to challenge academic or scientific knowledges by illustrating that much of what is valued as scientific grows out of and is informed by everyday practice” (p. 54).

 

Popular cultural funds of knowledge and discourse

Youth participating in the study invoked popular culture as much as, if not more than, their own experiences when discussing issues related to science curricula. For example, they discussed genres of music that they listened to, played music excerpts and had each other guess who the artist was, and shared excerpts from music articles they were reading. Music, therefore, “served as an activity, an identifier, a source of conversation, and as a dominant source of literacy practice.” (p. 61). With relevance to science instruction, Moje and colleagues argue that “each of the practices described above requires literate and discursive skills that could be mobilized as bridges to conventional content literacy learning, as navigational tools for examining different discourse communities and learning different skills, and as tools for challenging and reshaping representations of the world in science and in popular culture:

 

How, teachers might ask students, do you know the differences among categories of music? Why can a listener detect that one piece of music is Mexican and another rap? Why, students might be encouraged to ask, are claims about music made differently from claims about scientific data; are such claims always made differently; and are there times when the same standards apply? When and how, if at all, might the practices of discerning types of popular culture inform or reshape the practices of science? (p. 61)

 

Students in the study also discussed the ways in which they engaged with a wide range of news and entertainment media outlets, demonstrating literacy skills that could be capitalized upon in school:

 

...although content literacy strategies often have been suggested as ways to help youth access information from texts, these young women appeared to have little difficulty extracting the information they needed from texts that they cared about. This suggests that the strategies may need to be refocused to better help youth employ the skills and strategies they already possess, rather than assuming that youth need help learning skills such as setting a purpose, skimming or scanning, and notetaking. Of course, these data and previously presented data on Internet text searches beg the question of the role of a reader’s engagement with texts as part of the mobilization of comprehension strategies... These young women appeared to be engaged with the texts they were searching, and their conversation around the texts indicated that they saw a clear purpose for reading them. Such factors need to be accounted for when thinking about how to encourage youth to draw upon everyday literacy skills to engage in, negotiate, and challenge scientific Discourses and knowledges represented in classroom texts. (p. 63)

             

SOURCE: Moje, E. B., et al. (2004). Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of funds of knowledge and Discourse. Reading Research Quarterly 39(1), 38–70.

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Activity 2.4 (Optional): Mapping students’ language background and language use

 

In this activity, adapted from similar activities used in teacher preparation courses by George Bunch at University of California, Santa Cruz (with input from a related activity done by Ramón Martínez at Stanford University), you will have the opportunity to learn about the linguistic backgrounds of students who are designated as English Learners—from the students themselves!

 

This activity allows you to speak with one or more students to learn more about their language background and their current language use in a variety of academic and non-academic settings. You will ask one or more students some questions about their language background and language use, then ask them to “map” or otherwise visually represent their “linguistic repertoire” (i.e., the variety of languages and styles of language they use for communicating with different audiences for different purposes).

 

Directions

STEP 1: Choose one or more students who speak languages other than English at home. Ideally, they will be students classified as English Learners, but speaking with other students from linguistically minoritized backgrounds will give you important insights as well (e.g., students from homes where languages other than English are spoken who are either reclassified as “fluent English proficient” or who have never been classified as English Learners).

 

You could have a one-on-one conversation (with one student or with several students at different times), a conversation with a small group of students at once (like a little “focus group”), or even an entire class (if you have access to one and can spend some class time on this activity).

 

STEP 2: Have a conversation with your student(s) about their language use (and take good notes!). Here are some tips, topics, and questions to guide your conversations (adapted and expanded from Brooks, 2020):

 

• Start by telling the student(s) what you are doing (e.g., I am learning more about the languages that my students and their families speak at home, and how students use language in various ways at home, at work, in the community, with their friends, and at school.)
   

• Help students feel comfortable and get them talking: (How are things going today? Do you like school? Why or why not? What is your favorite part of the day right now? [Or other ideas you have to make them feel comfortable and get the ball rolling.])
   

• Then, tell them you have a few questions about what languages they speak and how they use language differently with different people for different purposes. After these questions, you are going to ask them to do some drawing (in Step 3)! Try to make the conversation organic, but here are some topics you will want to cover (adapted and expanded from Brooks, 2020):

  • Language development:

    • When and how did you learn your languages?

  • Languages spoken at home:

    • Which languages are spoken in your home?

  • Language use at home:

    • Which languages do the people living in your home speak?

    • Which languages do you use with the various people in your home?

  • Language use outside the home and outside of school:

    • Which languages do you use with people outside of your home and school?

    • How do you communicate with them (in person, text, social media, etc.)?

  • Language use for school:

    • Which languages do you use in school? With whom and for what purposes?

    • What, if anything, do you find difficult about using English in school? [You might probe for reading, writing, listening, speaking.]

    • What helps you with your understanding of English? Your reading? Your writing?

  • Translating and interpreting:

    • Do you ever help people to communicate in languages that they do not understand, either in school or outside of school? Like translating or interpreting? When, and with whom, and in what languages? Do you like doing this? What is difficult about it? What do you enjoy? What do you not like about it?

  • Language variation:

    • Within every language, there are different styles of language used with different people for different purposes. Have you noticed this in the languages you speak?

    • Think about one of the languages you use at home or with friends and relatives. Do you speak to some people in this language differently than you speak with others?

    • Think about one of the languages you use at school. Do you speak to some people in this language differently than you speak with others?

    • Has anyone ever told you that there is a “good” or “bad” way to speak one of your languages? Tell me about that . . .

  • How you and others feel about your use of language:

    • Do you feel certain ways when you use different languages, or different varieties of language (happy, sad, lonely, angry, excited, scared, safe)?

    • How do you feel when others say good or bad things about the way you are speaking? What are some examples of this?

  • Thank you for talking with me. You are so smart to be able to use languages in the ways that you have described to me!

 

STEP 3: Ask the student(s) to create a “language map” that represents their language background, and/or how they use language at home and elsewhere.

 

You can also browse the following articles to see some examples of language maps (you can decide whether you want to show students some examples or not):

 

• Exploring linguistic repertoires: Multiple language use and multimodal activity in five classrooms (D’warte, J. (2014)

• Mapping students’ everyday multimodal language practices in a high needs school (Somerville, M., D’Warte, J., & Brown, L., 2015)

 

NOTE: If you cannot ask students to create their own language map, then you can create a language map based on what the student(s) have shared with you orally, in response to the questions you asked them. You could also work with the student(s) to create a language map together.

 

STEP 4: Reflection

Reflecting on your conversation with the student(s) about their language background and language practices, what stands out to you as interesting or important? Was anything surprising about what you learned? What are the implications of all of the above for your own teaching of English Learners, Emergent Bilinguals, and Multilingual Learners, now and in the future?

 

Share with others completing this module what you learned from your conversations with students. Share the language maps themselves if available.