The Inner World of the Immigrant Child

Cristina Igoa

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136751943
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Éducation
• Thema: Éducation générale

This powerful book tells the story of one teacher's odyssey to understand the inner world of immigrant children, and to create a learning environment that is responsive to these students' feelings and their needs. Featuring the voices and artwork of many immigrant children, this text portrays the immigrant experience of uprooting, culture shock, and adjustment to a new world, and then describes cultural, academic, and psychological interventions that facilitate learning as immigrant students make the transition to a new language and culture.Particularly relevant for courses dealing with multicultural and bilingual education, foundations of education, and literacy curriculum and instruction, this text is essential reading for all teachers who will -- or currently do -- work in today's school environment.

Part One

Understanding
the Needs
and Feelings
of Immigrant
Children

1
The Silent Stage

This is a totally different environment than I have been used to. The change is different because it upsets the kind of life I had. It was different back home. School was different, teachers were different. I feel depressed because I miss my friends in my country.

IMMIGRANT CHILD FROM CHINA, AGE 11

Dennis

Dennis stood by my classroom door. He was a small, serious, visibly frightened 12-year-old boy. I asked him to come in and sit at the table I had prepared. I had been told by his previous teacher that there was a "problem." Dennis had spent the past school year without speaking to anyone. In the schoolyard he always sat on a bench in silence. A year is an eternity for a child to be locked up inside, I thought.

Dennis was clearly Chinese, but his name, Dennis, confused me—it didn't fit him. I knew he had come from the Hunan Province of Mainland China, which had been under the domination of Chairman Mao for many years. Both his parents had been doctors in China, but now his father carried crates in San Francisco's Chinatown for a living. The other Asian students in the school were from Hong Kong and Vietnam, and Dennis didn't connect with these children.

Gently, I gave Dennis a paper and pencil and gestured to him to write his name in Chinese, If I could help him feel at home, I thought, and show him that I appreciated and valued who he was as a person, including his Chineseness, perhaps he would relax and allow me to teach him. Picking up the pencil obediently, Dennis began to form some lines, but abruptly he pushed the pencil away and shook his head with an emphatic "No!" At that moment, he revealed to me the energy and force inside him. He acted out the lack of connection between us that still was unable to find expression in words. Silence.

Reflecting on Dennis that evening, I wrote in my journal:

How important it is for this boy to own his cultural roots; he cannot just push them aside. Should I mention to him that he is Chinese? Or should I wait for him to tell me?

With Dennis, I decided to wait. I recalled Irene de Castillejo's concept of meeting:

We are exhausted when talking to other people if we do not meet them, when one or both of us are hiding behind screens.

When we are fortunate enough to meet someone, . . . both are refreshed, for something has happened. It is as though a door had opened, and life suddenly takes on new meaning. For there to be a meeting, it seems as though a third, a something else, is always present. You may call it Love.

(de Castillejo, 1974, p. 11)

Both teacher and student are fortunate when a meeting occurs such as de Castillejo describes. I wondered if Dennis would ever come to trust me enough so he would no longer have to hide behind a screen.

The Language Center

The school where Dennis had his first Western English-speaking experience was in a Department of Housing and Urban Development (DHUD) project in a city near San Francisco, California. Over 50 percent of the students in that project lived with single parents. Most of these families received federal assistance through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. The school served approximately 180 children: 22 percent Filipino, 21 percent Hispanic, 21 percent Samoan, 17 percent African American, 7 percent Asian, 7 percent white, and 5 percent other.

The teachers in the school were tenured teachers in a two-school district. The teachers' union would not allow them to be replaced by untenured, bilingual teachers. Economic difficulties in the district had caused a semi-retired superintendent to be relegated to the position of principal, and he acted only as a figurehead. In essence, the teachers were the administrators of the school.

An attempt had been made to hire bilingual assistants, but it became difficult for school staff to find enough hours to teach, administrate, and also train assistants from the community. What was needed was a full-time professional bicultural teacher to work directly with all the immigrant children. That became my position. It was meant to be a "pull-out" program whereby the children came to me for periods of time from their own home classrooms.

The immigrant children entrusted to my care were from Mexico, El Salvador, Samoa, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the Philippines. These children, ages 10 to 12, were considered "language minority" and were all immigrants.

Generally speaking, not all so-called language minority children are immigrants; but in my work with these particular children, I needed to address the unique phenomenon of their having been uprooted. Understanding and respecting the immigrants' native cultural attitude was as important as helping them learn a second language. I felt it was necessary to understand the trauma the children may have experienced in the chaos of the immigration process: culture shock, fears, the sudden inability to communicate, and the loss of the homeland.

Recollections of My Own Immigrant Experience

The child's unique perspective on immigration and second language literacy was well known to me. In my encounter with Dennis, I recalled my own uprooting experiences—to South America as a 5-year-old, and to the United States as a 13-year-old. Serious reflection about these experiences gave me a sense of what my immigrant students were feeling. I sought to give them what I would have liked teachers to have given me.

As a kindergarten-age child in a school in Colombia, South America, I felt uprooted from the known warmth and familiar images of my native country. Although I spoke the language of the new country, I needed the closeness of a teacher; I needed friends; I needed to be taken by the hand and shown how to use the pencil and write my name. I recall staring at a blank piece of paper, feeling inadequate and at a loss. I convinced my parents that school was too painful and that home was a safer place.

When I was a 13-year-old immigrant child in America, I again felt uprooted and had a deep sense of loss, missing familiar signs, friendships, and customs. Even though I was able to speak English well, I withdrew into silence because of culture shock. I withdrew even farther when I was surrounded by English-speaking children. They requested me to "Speak! Say something!" They meant well, but silence was my response.

"Are you an Indian?" they asked.

So as not to have my classmates mistake my identity—instead, to have them accept me—I made a pronounced attempt to conceal my accent. "What do you want me to say?"

"She speaks English!" I was overwhelmed that they hadn't realized I spoke English. I wondered why that was so unusual.

They flooded me with a deluge of questions, which, to my childish perspective, revealed their lack of knowledge about my country. Why is it, I thought, that I knew more about their country than they did about mine? I felt isolated. Soon thereafter, I asked my mother to have my hair curled because my traditional Asian bobbed haircut might be causing the other kids to see me as an Indian. I began to lose the sense of who I was in the thrall of their projections.

In the Philippines, we customarily greet each other with a kiss on the cheek; in America, we greet each other with a handshake or less. Each time I encountered an unexplained cultural difference such as this, I would feel awkward, confused, ashamed, or inadequate. The innumerable differences had nothing to do with language, because I was raised bilingually. I was more affected by the sense of cultural difference; loss of cultural identity and feelings of inadequacy would well up within me as I sat in class, I felt an unexplained void, an emptiness inside. I read well. I could illustrate. But these were mere skills. What I needed was a cultural connection. I was constantly adapting to the system. I needed the system to meet me halfway, to collaborate, to include my thoughts and feelings.

A School within a School

Was Dennis having a similar identity confusion to that which I experienced as an immigrant child? Certainly, his discarding of his cultural identity was visible. What were his inner feelings and thoughts, I wondered? How could I guide him to bridge the gap between his world and the new world? In the past, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Polish children went through the school system and were transformed into American kids. They all looked, talked, and acted like mainstream Americans. (However, the pain and confusion of feeling ashamed of their parents and grandparents have not been sufficiently documented in college texts; these emotions have been described in poignant novels and films.) Was Dennis trying to be like the others? How could he, when the school was so diverse?

Dennis's silence provided me with enough information to begin to design a program for him. My first encounter with him took place while the classroom was still empty, and he was the first of twenty immigrant children to meet with me. I also became acquainted with the other children assigned to the program, either alone (as with Dennis) or in cultural groups. I observed them carefully in order to structure a classroom to encompass all their needs. Because the room would be their center, a "school within a school," I felt it should be a place in which each and all could feel as comfortable as if they were at home in their countries of origin.

I had noticed that each child instinctively gravitated to an area in the classroom where he or she was comfortable. Dennis appeared to favor introversion and went to a quiet corner of the room. This would become the designated corner for silent work. I enclosed the area with a cardboard partition. It was a place for listening to stories on cassette and enjoying privacy.

Different cultures have different norms, values, worldviews, and expectations. These shape their members' patterns of individual and collective behavior. Although an entire culture also can express itself in an introverted or extroverted way (Wilson, 1988), individuals can move beyond a collective way of behaving when they begin to integrate other cultural ways within themselves. The most culturally alive people, says Henderson (1984), are those who are changing and recombining new attitudes all their lives.

In my work with immigrant children, I have become aware that each student's response and behavior in my classroom and out in the yard are a result of the complex interaction of his or her cultural background, individual nature, and length of time that student has been in the host country. When I speak of a group of children behaving in a certain way, my intentions are not meant to stereotype but to present what I have observed. For instance, when the Filipino and Hispanic students entered the classroom, it was evident by their chatter that they had been in the host country for some time. I arranged their desks in a cluster to accommodate their extroverted nature. When the Samoan children came in, they scoffed at the desks and sat on the floor in the far corner of the room. "Desks, desks, I hate desks," one of them said. So I brought in a large rug and placed it on the very spot where they sat; then I surrounded the area with a tree and some plants. I created an "island" to remind them of their homeland.

Because Dennis seemed so alone, I wanted to find a way to encourage him to come forward and relate to others. I had set up an art table in the middle of the room where children could express themselves nonverbally when they needed a break from the task of learning a second language. A filmstrip-making table set up at the opposite end of the quiet corner served for story writing and held a filmstrip projector for viewing. I also created a place with a table and two chairs where I could have a dialogue with each child one-to-one. I provided each child with a box in which to put confidential work or precious objects; this would give each child a sense of ownership and safety (see diagram on faci...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Prologue
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE Understanding the Needs and Feelings of Immigrant Children
• PART TWO Teaching Immigrant Students: Integrating the Cultural/Academic/Psychological Dimensions of the Whole Child
• Suggested Readings
• References
• Index