Teacher and Student Identity Intersections in International School Contexts

1. Teacher and Student Identity Intersections in International School Contexts Jim CumminsThe University of Toronto ECIS ESLMT Conference, Dusseldorf, March 4, 2011

2. OverviewPedagogies of Choice • Teachers, individually and collectively, are never powerless – teachers have the power of choice. There are always choices in how we orchestrate interactions with our students and shape the interpersonal space within the classroom. • By articulating and acting on the choices we have available, we can create contexts of empowerment for both us and our students.

3. Mary AshworthClosing Keynote at Ontario TESL Conference Autumn 1978 • Many students come to school either already bilingual in their home language and English or in the process of becoming bilingual. However, 12 years later, a large proportion of these students leave school essentially monolingual in English. • The whole point of education is to make students more than they were when they entered school. But when the messages bilingual children receive in school cause them to replace their L1 with English, education has made them less than they were. The very essence of the term education --the nurturing of students’ abilities and talents—was negated by the education they received in Canadian schools. • Startling and disturbing insight -- Mary was talking about the Canadian educational system which, at that that time, was busy wrapping itself in the cloak of multiculturalism. The idea that Canadian schools and educators could be agents in the reduction of students’ potential and the constriction of possibilities—whether inadvertently or intentionally—was provocative. • However, Mary’s point was that, as educators, we have the power to challenge these discriminatory structures and discourses and expand rather than constrict students’ identity options

4. The Power of Choice Regardless of institutional constraints, educators have individual and collective choices • in how we interact with students, • in how we engage them cognitively, • in how we activate their prior knowledge, • in how we use technology to amplify imagination, • in how we involve parents in their children’s education, and • in what we communicate to students regarding home language and culture.

8. Bilingual Instructional Strategies: A Decade of Evolution Stories are the most important things in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all. Philip Pullman

9. http://schools.peelschools.org/1363/pages/dual.aspx

17. The Collaborative Creation of Power in One Classroom • Lisa Leoni: Year 1 – Grade 7/8 mainstream class; Year 2 – Grades 4-6 ESL; • Large Muslim student population from Pakistan; • Lisa explored implementation of bilingual instructional strategies as a way of enabling literacy engagement from a very early stage of students’ learning of English. In a “normal” classroom, it would be several years before newcomer students could engage in extended creative writing (in English).

18. Identity Negotiation in the Classroom • My overarching goal as a teacher is to uncover all that is unknown to me about my students–linguistically and culturally, and especially understand the community they are part of (their parents, their friends, their faith) and the list goes on. So when students enters my class, I want to discover all that is unknown to me not only about them as learners but them as people. • The way I see it everything has to relate to the identity of the students; children have to see themselves in every aspect of their work at school. • For example, when Tomer entered my class last year, a lot of the work he produced was in Hebrew. Why? Because that is where his knowledge was encoded and I wanted to make sure that Tomer was an active member and participant in my class. It was also a way for me to gain insight into his level of literacy and oral language development.

19. Tomer’s Identity Text I think using your first language is so helpful because when you don’t understand something after you’ve just come here it is like beginning as a baby. You don’t know English and you need to learn it all from the beginning; but if you already have it in another language then it is easier, you can translate it, and you can do it in your language too, then it is easier to understand the second language. The first time I couldn’t understand what she [Lisa] was saying except the word Hebrew, but I think it’s very smart that she said for us to do it in our language because we can’t just sit on our hands doing nothing.

22. Kanta’s Perspective • And how it helped me was when I came here in grade 4 the teachers didn’t know what I was capable of. • I was given a pack of crayons and a coloring book and told to get on coloring with it. And after I felt so bad about that--I’m capable of doing much more than just that. I have my own inner skills to show the world than just coloring and I felt that those skills of mine are important also. So when we started writing the book [The New Country], I could actually show the world that I am something instead of just coloring. • And that's how it helped me and it made me so proud of myself that I am actually capable of doing something, and here today [at the Ontario TESL conference] I am actually doing something. I’m not just a coloring person—I can show you that I am something.

23. Teaching for Cross-Language Transfer: Madiha’s Perspective I think it helps my learning to be able to write in both languages because if I’m writing English and Ms. Leoni says you can write Urdu too it helps me think of what the word means because I always think in Urdu. That helps me write better in English. When I came here I didn’t know any English, I always speak Urdu to my friends. Other teachers they said to me “Speak English, speak English” but Ms. Leoni didn’t say anything when she heard me speak Urdu and I liked this because if I don’t know English, what can I do? It helps me a lot to be able to speak Urdu and English.

25. Identity Texts: a tool for cognitive engagement and identity investment • Identity textsrefer to artifacts that students produce. Students take ownership of these artifacts as a result of having invested their identities in them. • Once produced, these texts (written, spoken, visual, musical, or combinations in multimodal form) hold a mirror up to the student in which his or her identity is reflected back in a positive light. • Students invest their identities in these texts which then become ambassadors of students’ identities. When students share identity texts with multiple audiences (peers, teachers, parents, grandparents, sister classes, the media, etc.) they are likely to receive positive feedback and affirmation of self in interaction with these audiences.

26. What’s the Deep Structure Underlying this Kind of Instructional Practice? What Are the Implications for School Language Policy? • Instruction aims explicitly to promote cognitive/literacy engagement and identity investment on the part of students. • Instruction constructs an image of the student as intelligent, imaginative, and linguistically talented. Lack of English does not imply less intelligence, imagination, or linguistic talent. • Instruction acknowledges and builds on the cultural and linguistic capital (prior knowledge) of students and communities. if students’ prior knowledge is encoded in L1, then L1 should be encouraged as a cognitive tool; • Knowledge and skills transfer across languages – teachers should encourage and enable that transfer rather than restricting it. Bilingual instructional strategies represent an important complement to monolingual instructional strategies

27. The Starting Point for Developing School Language Policy:What Image of the Student Are We Sketching in Our Instruction?(What Image of Our Own Individual and Collective Identities as Educators Are We Sketching in Our Instruction) Capable of becoming bilingual and biliterate? Capable of higher-order thinking and intellectual accomplishments? Capable of creative and imaginative thinking? Capable of creating literature and art? Capable of generating new knowledge? Capable of thinking about and finding solutions to social issues?

28. Nested Pedagogical Orientations

29. Nested Pedagogical Orientations • Transmission-oriented pedagogy is represented in the inner circle with the narrowest focus. The goal is to transmit information and skills articulated in the curriculum directly to students. • Social constructivist pedagogy, occupying the middle pedagogical space, incorporates the curriculum focus of transmitting information and skills but broadens it to include the development among students of higher-order thinking abilities based on teachers and students co-constructing knowledge and understanding. • Finally, transformative approaches to pedagogy broaden the focus still further by emphasizing the relevance not only of transmitting the curriculum and constructing knowledge but also of enabling students to gain insight into how knowledge intersects with social realities and power relations. The goal is to promote critical literacy among students (e.g., Sunny Man Chu Lau and Eithne Gallagher presentations)

30. Understanding Literacy Development in Multilingual School Contexts Literacy Achievement ↑ Print Access/Literacy Engagement ↑ Activate prior knowledge/Build background knowledge ↔ ↔ ↔

31. Literacy Engagement What Is It? • Amount and range of reading and writing; • Use of effective strategies for deep understanding of text; • Positive affect and identity investment in reading and writing; Drawing on both the 1998 NAEP data from the United States and the results of the PISA study of reading achievement among 15-year olds in international contexts, Guthrie (2004, p. 5) notes that students “…whose family background was characterized by low income and low education, but who were highly engaged readers, substantially outscored students who came from backgrounds with higher education and higher income, but who themselves were less engaged readers. Based on a massive sample, this finding suggests the stunning conclusion that engaged reading can overcome traditional barriers to reading achievement, including gender, parental education, and income.”

32. Empirical Support for the Role of Engaged Reading Drawing on both the 1998 NAEP data from the United States and the results of the PISA study of reading achievement in international contexts, Guthrie (2004, p. 5) notes that students “…whose family background was characterized by low income and low education, but who were highly engaged readers, substantially outscored students who came from backgrounds with higher education and higher income, but who themselves were less engaged readers. Based on a massive sample, this finding suggests the stunning conclusion that engaged reading can overcome traditional barriers to reading achievement, including gender, parental education, and income.”

33. “Reports of studies that do use rigorous research designs do show that increasing children’s access to print material generally does improve children’s outcomes. … Increasing children’s access to print material appears to produce more positive attitudes toward reading, increases the amount of reading that children do, increases children’s emergent literacy skills, and improves children’s reading achievement” (Lindsay, 2010).

34. The Deeper Roots of Underachievement Isidro Lucas (1981): Study of Puerto Rican drop-out students in Chicago: “All my dropout respondents spoke good understandable English.They hadn’t learned math, or social sciences, or natural sciences, unfortunately. But they had learned English…No dropout mentioned lack of English as the reason for quitting. As it evolved through questionnaires and interviews, theirs was a more subtle story—of alienation, of not belonging, of being ‘push-outs’… To my surprise, dropouts expressed more confidence in their ability to speak English than did the stay-ins (seniors in high school). For their part, stay-ins showed more confidence in their Spanish than did dropouts…I had to conclude that identity, expressed in one’s confidence and acceptance of the native culture was more a determinant of school stay-in power than the mere acquisition of the coding-decoding skills involved in a different language, English”. (p. 19)

35. Sociological Factors • Power relations in the broader society play a crucial role in students’ achievement in school Students who experience academic failure predominantly come from social groups who occupy much lower status in the wider society. In some cases (e.g., indigenous groups, Hispanics in the U.S.), identities (culture, language, religion, etc.) have been devalued in the wider society over many generations. • Effective education challenges coercive power relations in the broader society by affirming students’ identities at school.

36. What Do We Mean by “Empowerment?” • Coercive Relations of Power = exercise of power by a dominant individual, group, or country to the detriment of a subordinated individual, group, or country (power over); • Collaborative Relations of Power = collaborative relations of power operate on the assumption that power is not a fixed pre-determined quantity but rather can be generated in interpersonal and intergroup relations. Participants in the relationship are empowered through their collaboration such that each is more affirmed in her or his identity and has a greater sense of efficacy to create change in his or her life or social situation (power with); • Empowerment = the collaborative creation of power

38. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(a) Validating Home Language and Culture

39. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(a) Validating Home Language and Culture

40. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(a) Validating Home Language and Culture

41. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(a) Validating Home Language and Culture

42. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(a) Validating Home Language and Culture

43. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(b) Capable of thinking about and finding solutions to social issues? (c) Capable of higher-order thinking?

44. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(d) Linking Literacy Engagement with Identity Affirmation

45. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(d) Linking Literacy Engagement with Identity Affirmation

46. Creating an Identity-Affirming School Environment(d) Linking Literacy Engagement with Identity Affirmation Reading makes me powerful because… When I grow up I can find a better job than people who can’t read. Somebody can also trick you to do something that will get you in trouble. Reading gives you new words to learn. It gives my brain new ideas. It helps your vocabulary so when you need to write something you can use longer and harder words. In school you can get a better mark using more words. By Tasneem

47. Literacy Expertise Framework

48. Conclusion • Tove/Robert – assumptions about the status of languages, the self-evident superiority of English in comparison to other languages, the obviousness of English-only instruction, etc. etc. reflect patterns of historical and current power relations within our societies. • We often don’t perceive these as coercive power relations because they have become normalized and invisible; yet they directly affect what has been perceived as “effective instructional practice” in our schools. The result is the internalization of shame on the part of many students and the loss of intellectual and personal potential for families and societies. • When we reach up and remove the invisible “English-only zone” sign in our classrooms, identities get negotiated in a totally different way and empowerment (the collaborative creation of power) of both students and teachers can become a reality. • Effective pedagogy challenges the operation of coercive relations of power.

49. Resources • www.multiliteracies.ca (Multiliteracies project) • http://schools.peelschools.org/1363/pages/dual.aspx(Dual Language Showcase) • www.curriculum.org/secretariat/archive.html (webcast on Teaching and Learning in Multilingual Ontario) • www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/whatWorks.html(short pdf files on “what works” including Literacy Development in Multilingual Schools by Jim Cummins) • www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/manyroots/ (Many Roots, Many Voices) • www.wordsift.com(fun site to create “word clouds” and explore vocabulary)