Empowering English Language Learners

Successful Strategies of Christian Educators

Jeanne C. DeFazio, William David Spencer, DeFazio, Spencer

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532640032
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Empowering English Language Learners showcases strategies of those who teach English as a second language in pre-schools, graduate schools, secular public schools, and private Christian schools. What makes this book unique is the way each teacher evaluates teaching strategy through personal experience. This book explains what works and what doesn't.With additional contributions from: Dean BorgmanJulia DavisJean DimockCherry GortonSeong ParkOlga SolerVirginia D. WardGemma Wenger

Part One:

Strategies of Christian Teachers in a Secular Setting

Chapter One

Jeremiah 29:7

Bridge Builders

Olga Soler

My experience as a teacher has served both the immigrant and the dominant culture. I have taught English as a Second Language to pre-K through twelfth grade students in the inner city to minorities in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, taught Spanish in the suburbs of Keene, Texas and Holden, MA, and worked with those of affluence who had learning difficulties in Sudbury, MA. As a second-generation immigrant, I had a unique perspective in all my teaching situations informed not only by my education but by my own experience as student in the inner city. I also did a stint in professional theater in New York, ran my own licensed day care while my children were young, directed an itinerant ministry to the abused and addicted coast to coast, worked as a clinician in the human services and peppered it all with the performing and graphic arts. Teaching was the common thread through these diverse and multi-cultural experiences.

When you are second generation from another culture, you are born to be a special kind of teacher. You are born to be a bridge. This means you have one foot in the old world of your parents and the other in the new world to which you were born. The precipice you straddle is nothing to laugh at. You often long to leave one side and join the other, but bridges are so necessary. Being a bridge means being in a lonely place, but it also means you have a unique perspective. Like Moses, you are a stranger in a strange land, but you have a mission to build more bridges between the old and the new, the needy and resources, students and information and essentially from death to life.

As low-income kids from the South Bronx in New York City, my brother and I came up with an eleventh commandment; “Do what you can with what you got.” So, I learned early to improvise, invent, and tell stories. These are primary teaching strategies as far as I am concerned, because teachers must learn to improvise to accommodate the diversity in their students and stories personalize knowledge, even those which may seem, at first, abstract to the student. The art of storytelling is an ancient one used to inspire. Data informs, but it seldom inspires, and, without inspiration, there is no motivation to learn.

Where the rudder of a human ship may be the mind, the inspiration is the wind in our sails. Inspiration moves us. Every good teacher knows motivation is everything. When we have so much content that there is no time for motivation, the outcome will not be favorable. The student will lose interest, not study regularly, and then cram. A UCLA study showed that spacing out learning was more effective than cramming for 90% of the participants.1 Keeping students’ interest throughout will inspire them to study regularly. If they cram, they may even be able to make succeed on a test, but what good will it do them in the long run if they do not retain their knowledge?

We are made to retain stories. Assistant professor of cinema arts in the Vanguard Sundance Program Aaron Daniel Annas put it this way, “Everything is based on story. If you are a math teacher and you are looking at one plus one equals two, your characters are One and One and your conflict is that they must add together. The solution of two resolves the story structure.”2 Even calculus, when viewed from the perspective of one’s story, is far more engaging. This is why rabbis traditionally teach with stories and the Teacher of Teachers was the quintessential story teller.

When I had my day care on 81 acres of forest land in Sterling, MA, I brought the children outdoors every day, and I was constantly telling them stories that had to do with creation and nature. The experience of the children there was much like that of the children in the Forest schools of Denmark, which I will mention later. In his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,3 Robert Fulghum told the truth. I learned the same lessons in my day care and my kids learned along with me. Some think Fulghum’s book should be a guide for global leadership, and I agree with them because through sharing, storytelling, validation, respect for one another, valuing wonder and curiosity, and lots of finger paint, we learned. The children in my day care all grew up and in high school wrote compositions about our time together. My day care became part of their personal stories. They said it was the best time of their lives. Mine too. One even tattooed a favorite quotation from Shel Silverstein (one of our favorite authors at the day care) on her back. She is a good mother now and she is a close friend. The best learning is done in community. The best teachers are accessible, and the best students integrate what they have learned into their daily lives because they were taught well. The controversy of teaching values or not is a moot point. We teach them by modeling and storytelling whether we mean to or not. Therefore, we must strive to be good models and pick our stories well.

Being multilingual, I made myself useful to English speakers as a teacher of Spanish. Multilingual should go both ways and the best place to start is—preschool. When I was asked to teach a preschool Spanish class, I saw these little toddlers as the perfect students: “blank slates” or people who did not yet have any prejudices about who was better than who. They were happy to learn, and we got to it with happy songs, stories, and many role plays. And, by the way, we never grow out of multi-sensory education. When we learn on many sensory levels, it makes what we learn more permanent,4 hence the value of a good power point presentation to adults.

Fifteen years later in the atrium of a large church, I met one of my students who had grown into a sophisticated lady. She hugged me tightly and informed me that my preschool Spanish class had saved her life. She was in a South American country acting as a liaison for an American company and an attack broke out that the military answered with helicopters, tanks, and guns. She was trapped in an office building with a non-English speaking woman, and they needed to communicate to get out. All she had was preschool Spanish but between that and sign language it was enough.

Most Americans are not multilingual. Some glibly tell others to learn English, but they do not learn other languages themselves. In Europe and Africa, it is not uncommon for people to speak 4 or 5 languages. If real education became a priority in this country, we would be multilingual. The point of a complete education is to have a knowledge of one’s world that is well rounded. In a world of so many languages, being unilingual is very limiting. Bridges like we are have that gift to give to all people, a greater understanding through multiculturalism.5 And even our students with learning disabilities ca33n benefit from this opportunity to expand their capability in unexpected ways since we are told that learning another language can help neurological connections in the brain.6

Another remarkable teaching assignment I had was a sixth grade class of mostly gifted young people. I attended this class as a substitute for a few days and told God to kill me before I ever had a class like this one again. Of course, the following year I had them as my home room class. They started off by demanding I answer why they needed to comply with what teachers said. I knew we would go nowhere till we covered this subject, and so we all sat on the floor and explored the ancient relationship between student and teacher. When we were done, they gave me a chair. I wanted to be respected, but the way I got respect was to model it by speaking to them as equals not underlings. Modeling is a fine method of teaching. People rebel when you say, “Do as I say and not as I do.”

After that, we made that our style. They asked questions, and I asked questions in return, then we found the answers together as we examined our method of reasoning. I believe we call this the Socratic Method.7 Eventually, we steered things towards the curriculum, and they all did splendidly and learned some critical thinking skills as well. A fringe benefit of this method was that in sharing the answers to our queries we became cohesive. I never countenanced exclusiveness or cliquishness, and we did have a few kids who didn’t fit a mold easily. In the end, even these unusual ones felt included, and we became an enviable, supportive community. The young people began to help each other without my prompts. The creativity and cohesiveness were infectious. We had youth in other classrooms requesting to join our class.

If we are bilingual and multicultural, we will no doubt be employed at some point in a position that will use those skills. I wanted to teach drama, but administrators at inner city schools at which I applied felt the students had enough “drama” and they needed math and world history. I, therefore, became an ESL, Math, and World History teacher. My class consisted of 32 Hispanic and Hmong students ranging from 12 to 16 years of age. This assignment started in October because this group of children had scared away two other teachers already. The first thing these hostile adolescents told me was that they would get rid of me too. I lasted the rest of the year by the grace of God, but I lost so much weight I looked like a lamp stand. The stress was amazing.

With these kids there were times I got through and there were times I had to ask the ones who wanted to learn to sit up front and the rest to do what they wanted. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was not going to save all of them. I know why Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr might have formulated the prayer of serenity because his specialty, after all, was Christian Realism:

God, grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.8

As teachers of this most precious but imperiled population of the poor in the inner city, we need to come to terms with our limitation. We will not build a Utopia on this earth, but we can make our corner of it better by leaving behind what positive impression that we can: a bit of wisdom, a good message for the soul, a show of respect or love in a time of need. We can’t save everyone, but we can do something. When a lamb wanders into our pasture, we are responsible to give it a token at least that will sustain it to the next level. Who knows but what we leave may be just the thing to break a hole through the darkness.

With apologies to those who favor right or left, I am a moderate and also a shameless follower of Christ. I pray constantly for the creativity to improvise and innovate in a classroom whether it is in a suburban preschool or the streets of the urban jungle. It is the best and only way I know of meeting the needs of so multifaceted and diverse an audience. I pray for the needs of each student. I pray their eyes be opened and their ears unstopped to all the good knowledge that surrounds them. I pray against the evil that would assail them. I also model learning. If I do not learn every day from all those around me and from the One higher than I, then I have no right to require learning from others.

What we contend with in the inner city is formidable. It is difficult to teach those who need a therapist, and some well-adjusted friends, or food and shelter more than they need the three R’s. Remember your educational psychology? Abraham Maslow saw that, when basic ne...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Strategies of Christian Teachers in a Secular Setting
• Part Two: Strategies of Christian Teachers in a Christian Setting
• Conclusion