Jane Govoni Discusses SLIFE with Andrea DeCapua

I found an interesting set of videos about Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education over at the ESOL website.  In these four videos, Jane Govoni, Ph.D. puts a series of questions about SLIFE to Andrea DeCapua, Ed.D. They compare Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE) to English Learners (ELs) and discuss how teachers’ strategies may differ for each.  The videos are short (under 5 minutes each), but they provide a good introduction to the background and needs of SLIFE.

ESOL Tip #1 Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education Compared to English Learners

ESOL Tip #2 "SLIFE in the Classroom"

ESOL Tip #3 "Underlying Cultural Differences in SLIFE"

ESOL Tip #4 "Serving All Students"

Reframing the Conversation

Obviously I haven't had a lot of time to blog lately, but sometimes I find an article that is too important not to share.  This is one of those times.

I just finished going through Reframing the Conversation About Students With Limited or Interrupted Formal Education: From Achievement Gap to Cultural Dissonance by Andrea DeCapua and Helaine Marshall.  It is not a long article, but it neatly ties together many of they most important themes in the SLIFE literature.  First off, they describe they key characteristics of SLIFE and the challenges they face.  They emphasize the importance of understanding the learning paradigm of SLIFE and how it may differ from our own.  Next, they summarized the main components of Culturally Responsive Teaching and showed how the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm, which they have promoted, connects with these components.

I was particularly taken by the section of this article where the authors identify three major instructional barriers to learning experienced by SLIFE: (1) the credibility of future reward, (2) classroom discourse routines that emphasize individual participation, and (3) the focus on standardized testing.  In that section, I found a number of passages that accurately describe many of the students at my school.  One particularly relevant section for me was the following:

"the U.S. educational system posits the promise of future reward from education, reflected in the significantly better earning potential of high school and college graduates (National Center for Educational Statistics, n.d.). Members of largely marginalized groups find this promise less than credible given racial, ethnic, and income inequalities, and a lack of strong role models (Altshuler & Schmautz, 2001; Nieto, 2009; Noguera, 2003). Moreover, when SLIFE have long-term future goals, such as wanting to become a doctor or journalist, they are frequently unaware of what they need to do specifically to reach these goals, and whether or not these goals are realistic given their previous educational experience relative to their age. Many SLIFE also become discouraged quickly and give up their goals and efforts to achieve them as they encounter failure and disappointments in school (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2010; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008)."

This quote succinctly captures one of the biggest challenges faced by my students.  It is, however, the challenge that I feel is least understood in my community, even among educators.  I know that I will find myself paraphrasing this description in future conversations with colleagues and other community members.

DeCapua and Marshall conclude by arguing that we must re-frame the conversation from deficit talk to focusing on cultural dissonance.  This is necessary, they explain, for us move ahead with a culturally responsive approach so that we can lessen, if not remove, the barriers to school success for SLIFE.  I have tried, on this blog, to share stories and articles which have helped me to re-frame my thinking.  Not surprisingly, I have often referenced the work of DeCapua and Marshall in these prior posts.  I think that in this article, however, they move the topic significantly forward by deepening our understanding of the challenges faced by SLIFE and by making explicit connections to Culturally Responsive Teaching.  I hope that it will be widely read and discussed among educators of SLIFE.


DeCapua, A. & Marshall, H.W., NASSP Bulletin 0192636515620662, first published on December 4, 2015 doi:10.1177/0192636515620662
http://bul.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/02/0192636515620662.abstract

New WIDA Bulletin: Focus on Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education

The WIDA Consortium released a new Bulletin in May 2015 titled: Focus on Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education.  It is a 14 page document with a lot of practical advice for educators of SLIFE.  The content in the bulletin contains many of the key ideas from the academic literature but  presents them in a very clear and readable format.

A highlight for me in this document was the interview with  Dr. Deborah Short, co-developer of the SIOP Model and director of research on English language learners and newcomer programs for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education.  Some of her main recommendations for SLIFE are to:

1. Use specially designed curriculum to help fill in gaps in knowledge, particularly at the secondary level. Curriculum should integrate content and language instruction from the start, and also integrate academic and social language.
2. Ensure that students’ literacy development is appropriate to their age, not necessarily to their academic levels.
3. Train teachers to make use of the student’s home language by doing simple things like having students annotate the word vocabulary notebooks in the native language.
4. Make a separate class or two available in their first year to provide targeted interventions to help fill in the gaps in content areas and developing English skills.
5. Allow students the time to catch up, by providing programs during summer vacation or holiday vacations, after-school programs and Saturday programs during the school year.

The interview contains a number of other good suggestions and the rest of the bulletin is useful as well.  This document, combined with the most recent DeCapua and Marshall article, would provide an excellent introduction to the main ideas and strategies involved in the education of SLIFE.

What are the limitations of your own education?

I wasn't surprised to see the dad who came to talk to me at lunch break.  I had invited the parents at our meeting the previous night to come in to talk to me any time.  A veteran staff member told me afterward that I should expect to be taken up on my offer.  The parents had been quiet during the meeting, but she knew that they had opinions on the issues that we were discussing.  "Just give them a day or two," she said.  English was the second or third language for all of them, and sometimes they just needed additional time to process our discussion and to think about how to respond.

Still, I was a bit surprised when he told me that he had been thinking all night and all morning about something I had said at the parent meeting.  I worried that it might have been something offensive or controversial, but it turned out to be nothing like that.  Actually, he was responding to a request that I had made.  Since I am the principal of a Mennonite Alternative Program school, I am often asked questions about Mennonite beliefs and practices even though I am not Mennonite. In this case, I asked the parents at our meeting for their advice in how to respond when non-Mennonites ask me why Mennonite families take two days for Epiphany, Ascension, and Pentecost holidays.  This request sometimes comes with suspicion or resentment from non-Mennonites who question why Mennonites will miss multiple days of work or school for religious holidays even if their family is not particularly religious.  At our meeting, one parent responded by stating simply that, "that is how we were taught."  All of the parents nodded in agreement and then there was silence.

The parent who came in the next afternoon wanted me to know that there was more to it.  He explained how he had been taught to use the additional days for thinking about the scriptures and the spiritual meanings of those days and letting them sink in.  They were also for rest and for family, he said.  He had wanted to explain all of this at the meeting, but he wasn't sure how he would come across in English.  Even as he spoke to me in person, it was clear that there was more that he wanted to say, but was prevented from doing so by the language barrier.

At this point in our conversation, he began to apologize for his limited English, but I stopped him.  “Remember that I am the one with the limitation here,” I explained. “If I spoke Low German, I am sure that you could explain this to me easily.  You are the one who speaks two languages; I am the person who only speaks one.”  At the parent meeting, I had also emphasized this point.  I reminded them that speaking more than one language is considered the norm in most of the world.  “In this very important way” I explained, “you are more educated than I am, even with my three university degrees.”

It is a point that I come back to often, in part because it is too often forgotten and in part because these parents often feel inadequate or judged for their own lack of formal education.  I want them to understand that we all have limitations in our education.  I shared with them how I had come to realize that I had a tendency to call the parents of my ELL students less frequently than the other parents because of my fear of my limitation.  It is uncomfortable and embarrassing to misunderstand others and to struggle in getting your point across to them.  I knew that I would have to get over that fear to do my job as a teacher.  "I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one," said one of the parents that night.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

It is true that I have a lot of formal education, or what these parents might call "book learning."  I value this type of learning a great deal, which is why I have put so much time and money into pursuing it.  It is powerful and it helps to transcend the limitations of personal experience and opinion.  I am the first to admit, however, that this type of learning also has limitations.  It tends to be abstract, theoretical, and removed from the context of immediate relevant action.  Unfortunately, in formal schooling, the truest answer to, "Why do I need to know this?" is often "Because it is on the test," or possibly, "Because you might need to know it some day."  Informal education tends to be more immediate, concrete and context embedded. This sort of learning is often more immediately relevant and useful than the academic style "book learning."

In the teaching profession, a key example of this difference is when we try to provide educational experiences which are responsive to student needs.  We can assess students and gather information on reading levels and I.Q. or attendance or frequency of certain behaviours.  We can quantify this data and categorize it to assign codes or provide labels.  This academic approach provides useful data about students, but it does not directly assess their needs, per se.  Student needs are determined as much by the demands of their environment as by the abilities or behaviors of the student.  "Needs" always have context.  Determining student needs means making judgments about how they are using those abilities in their day to day environment.  This immediate, practical information can only be obtained by getting to know the context:  What barriers does the student face in the classroom environment?  What do we know about the family background?  What are the student's interests and strengths?  What are their goals and hopes for the future?  How do these things relate to our curriculum and to the resources available in our classrooms?

This sort of information is particularly important in working with students with limited or interrupted formal education.  Since many of these students are adolescents, they have limited time to meet their educational goals.  They are at great risk of leaving the education system entirely if they are not feeling successful or if they do not see the relevance of the educational programming that we provide. The more we know and understand about the context of a student's educational history, their culture, their family, and their own personal dreams and interests, the more likely we are to be able to find ways to provide what they need.

When it comes to working with SLIFE, then, I encourage teachers to begin by examining the limitations of their own education.  If we do not understand the cultural or family context, we must find ways to connect with those families and let them inform us about themselves.  Where language is a barrier, we need to own some of that limitation for ourselves rather than place it solely on them.  We need to seek out translation services if they are available.  We need to seek more contact with those parents, not less - even when it is uncomfortable to have those conversations at first.  We need to ask them questions rather than make assumptions based on cultural stereotypes.  We need to own up to our own limitations and find ways to accommodate for them.

"What Kind of Person..." - Analyzing SLIFE Reading Comprehension Test Results

Recently, I was analyzing the results of student literacy assessments with a colleague.  We noted that reading comprehension questions which asked the reader to classify a character as a certain "kind" of person were particularly difficult for the adolescent SLIFE we had tested. Questions that began with, "What kind of person is...," were typically met with silence or with the response "good" or "bad."

I was immediately reminded of a section (pg. 53-54) from Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter Ong. In it, Ong refers to a series of interviews that A.R. Luria conducted among illiterate and semi-literate persons in remote areas of Uzbekistan in the 1930's.  Ong notes that:

Luria’s illiterates had difficulty in articulate self-analysis... Luria put his questions only after protracted conversation about people’s characteristics and their individual differences (1976, p. 148). A 38-year-old man, illiterate, from a mountain pasture camp was asked (1976, p. 150), ‘What sort of person are you, what’s your character like, what are your good qualities and shortcomings? How would you describe yourself?’ ‘I came here from Uch-Kurgan, I was very poor, and now I’m married and have children.’ ‘Are you satisfied with yourself or would you like to be different?’ ‘It would be good if I had a little more land and could sow some wheat.’ Externals command attention. ‘And what are your shortcomings?’ ‘This year I sowed one pood of wheat, and we’re gradually fixing the shortcomings.’ More external situations. ‘Well, people are different - calm, hot-tempered, or sometimes their memory is poor. What do you think of yourself?’ ‘We behave well - if we were bad people, no one would respect us’ (1976, p. 15). Self-evaluation modulated into group evaluation (‘we’) and then handled in terms of expected reactions from others. Another man, a peasant aged 36, asked what sort of person he was, responded with touching and humane directness: ‘What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.’

 I couldn't see my students giving those exact answers, but the pragmatic style of the responses and the emphasis on concrete details rather than abstract categories sounded very familiar!  Ong's explanation of this tendency stands out for me as still being particularly relevant:

These are a few samples from Luria’s many, but they are typical. One could argue that responses were not optimal because the respondents were not used to being asked these kinds of questions, no matter how cleverly Luria could work them into riddle-like settings. But lack of familiarity is precisely the point: an oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought. Luria’s questions are schoolroom questions associated with the use of texts, and indeed closely resemble or are identical with standard intelligence test questions got up by literates. They are legitimate, but they come from a world the oral respondent does not share.

This passage reminded me of the power of literacy and the ability of text-based education to profoundly affect how we think about ourselves and others.  It also reminded me of the need to interpret reading comprehension questions with caution.  Our SLIFE who had difficulty answering the "What kind of person..." questions could often recall specific details and events from the story.  It wasn't necessarily that the text was too advanced for them to understand and that we needed to give them easier stories.  It was just that they were thinking about the story differently and focusing on different aspects of it.  This does not mean that we should avoid teaching them the skills for character analysis or the abstract vocabulary for describing kinds of characters.  Instead, I would suggest that we continue to do so, but that we teach those things with texts at their appropriate decoding levels and with content which they find engaging.  We should not to restrict them to texts designed for less mature learners while we build those character analysis skills and vocabulary banks.


- - - - - - - - - - -

Luria, A. R. (1976) Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, ed. Michael Cole, trans. by Lopez-Morillas, M. & Solotaroff, L. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London, England: Methuen

Segregation vs Inclusion? or Assimilation vs Diversity? (Part 1)

Aren't alternative programs and outreach schools for specific cultural groups a form of segregation?  I have heard this question posed explicitly several times in the last few years, but I hear it implied or even assumed far more often.  It is an accusation that stings, because for many years I have identified myself as a strong advocate for educational inclusion.  The term "segregation," with it's connotations of discrimination and bias against diversity, is the antithesis of my beliefs as an educator.  And yet the students in my small Mennonite Outreach school are in a building separate (segregated?) from the public high school in our rural community.  Is this not a contradiction?

I have spent a lot of time researching, pondering and discussing this issue, and I could probably write a book about it.  This blog is not that book.  My intentions here are more modest; I just wish to share a few key ideas that rarely get mentioned in those discussions.  It seems to me that some important considerations are too often being missed. I hope to show how these considerations have shifted my thinking away from a perspective of segregation vs inclusion towards one of assimilation vs diversity.  It may take a few posts to get there, however.

- - - - - -

One key component missing from the discussion has been a full appreciation of the significance of cultural heritage as a form of inheritance.  I see how important it is, for example, for the Low German Mennonite families in my school pass on their language, their faith, and their traditions.  Most of them seem to value this cultural inheritance well above wealth, social status, or educational attainment.  They know that their forebears sacrificed a great deal and endured multiple migrations to preserve that heritage, and they feel a strong duty to communicate that inheritance to their children.

At the same time, I see how challenging it is for them to maintain their heritage in the face of the social and economic pressures that they encounter when they move to Canada. In Preserving Cultural Heritage in the Context of Migratory Livelihoods, Luann Good Gingrich describes and analyzes these challenges in great detail.  She explains how language, education, and work are the primary tools of inheritance in traditional cultures and religions, but how it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, for them to use these tools for that purpose in their new context. The necessary act of migration, which helped preserve the cultural heritage in the past, now threatens to spoil the inheritance.  This double-bind which the immigrant families experience is distressing and confusing and results in divisions within families, churches and communities.  Some will end up rejecting this inheritance altogether and separating from their communities.   Others try to hold on to some aspects of their heritage while adopting other, sometimes conflicting, practices.  Still others will try to maintain the heritage as fully as possible, even if it ends up resulting in severe hardship and isolation.  None of these paths is easy, and each one comes with internal as well as external conflict.

It is easy for those of us who do not experience that conflict to misinterpret the actions and motivations of those who do.  One prime example is when we ask "Why are they so reluctant to send their kids to school?"  We can be tempted to respond out of hurt or rejection, assuming that the issue is primarily about our practices or beliefs that offend them.  We can get overly focused on whether or not to allow Halloween celebrations or books about dinosaurs, or whether to require students to change clothes for gym class.  This focus can lead us to feelings of resentment that lurk behind questions such as, "How far do we need to go to accommodate for them?" and "Why do they get special treatment when others don't?"  At other times we may respond with criticism and judgment, such as when we complain about students who take off religious holidays that they don't understand or when we accuse the parents of hypocrisy for allowing their children to party with other Mennonite teens while rejecting public schools for fear of the "corrupting" influence of the non-Mennonites.

In each of these cases, we make assumptions that miss the point. It never was about us or about their rejection of us.  Instead, it was about the challenges and contradictions that these families face in trying to preserve and pass on their valued inheritance when the old tools of inheritance are either no longer available to them or are no longer effective.

In the meantime, it is necessary to recognize that the false assumptions we make interfere with our ability to respond with empathy and respect for the families who face this dilemma.  Without that empathy and respect, we can not expect to be trusted.  And without that relationship of respect and trust, we can not expect Low German Mennonite families to participate fully in the public education system.  This, it seems to me, is the context that must be considered for any meaningful conversation about segregation vs inclusion of Mennonite students.

This is not the only consideration, however, in in future posts I will address a few other key points.

- - - - - -

Good Gingrich, L. (2014), Preserving Cultural Heritage in the Context of Migratory Livelihoods. International Migration, 52: 1–20. doi: 10.1111/imig.12066

What Factors Affect the Resiliencey of SLIFE?

A little while back, I mentioned the work of Christopher Browder and how I found his research on the education of SLIFE to be very significant.  Recently I have been re-reading his Phd Thesis, which focused on risk and resilience factors in the educational outcomes of SLIFE.  Some of the main findings of that study were that:

• On average, the SLIFE studied had lower achievement on the standardized tests than non-SLIFE English language learners.
• The lower standardized scores for SLIFE were largely due to their lower English proficiency at the time they took the test.
• Lower English proficiency at testing seems mainly to have resulted from having arrived with lower English proficiency and lower first language literacy.
• English acquisition, however, was also slower for SLIFE than other ELs.
• ESOL classes helped students to acquire English faster, and SLIFE generally took more ESOL classes than non-SLIFE English learners.
• Students with lower L1 literacy acquired English more slowly.
• Higher parental education was significantly associated with higher test scores for all ELs; this association was even stronger for SLIFE than for non-SLIFE.
• In general SLIFE reported lower academic self-concepts, pedagogical caring, and social integration than non-SLIFE. 
• After controlling for differences in English proficiency, students’ perceptions of social distance appeared to predict their academic achievement on standardized tests better than their academic self-concept and the other protective or risk factors.  
• Students who perceived a higher social distance had lower HSA scores, even though they had higher English proficiency.
• Low L1 literacy was not well correlated with beginner English and schooling gaps.

Each of these findings have important implications, but the real significance, it seems to me, comes from weaving them together.  In upcoming posts I will dig into those implications and flesh out the bigger picture that Browder's study paints for us.