Artifact: Equity and Law Analysis Paper
Artifact: Equity in Library Funding
Artifact: World War II the Homefront: Gallery Walk and Bilingual Texts
Artifact: Texts of Emails with a Student’s Parent
For standards relating to professional development, partnerships and advocacy for my ELL students I completed a wide range of meaningful assignments which made me “continually evaluate the effects of my actions on others” in the context of my position as an ENL teacher for a group of students who are frequently confronted with structural and linguistic challenges that made it challenging for them to meet standards level proficiency across their content areas. I also saw how as an ENL teacher I could bridge that gap while growing professionally.
One insight that I had into the community resources available to my ELL students and to me as a teacher was the inequity in locally funded resources when they are based on town boundaries and local property taxes. My research paper for ESC 502 allowed me to learn about the extreme disparity between access to libraries and their resources as a comparison between different school districts.
When I examined the library system of my school district, I was shocked. Growing up in New York City – even suburban New York City – I was used to every neighborhood or large town having extensive community resources in the form of a library. That is also the way it is in the town where I live in suburban New York and in many of the towns I was familiar with. In the East Ramapo school district, where I worked, which is one of the largest districts in population in the region, there was only one library. In the comparatively populated area of similar size directly to the east, there was almost a dozen libraries.
This doesn’t just affect the ability of students to check out books. Libraries are sources of additional cultural programming, and more importantly for ENL students, the primary venue for ESL classes for adults who would like to increase their command of English. I was asked by the monolingual Spanish-speaking mother of one student where she could find classes to learn English. I told her at the community college and at the single branch of the library. In both cases, there was no easy way for her to get there by public transportation. Were resources such as library ESL programs distributed as evenly in most other regions, this would not have been the case. My research for ESC 502 made me more aware of the unfairness of this fact than I otherwise would have been.
Even more directly linked to students are the tutoring programs available in many libraries. The East Ramapo library had an effective program pairing academically successful high school students (a valuable community resource that comes at an affordable price). Unfortunately, in a district that’s ten miles long, there was hardly a majority of students that could walk to the library or easily arrive by public transportation. Previous to writing my paper, I had not known and thought through the ramifications of library budgets being funded largely through local property tax levies controlled by politicized local school boards who don’t always have the best interests of public school students in mind. On the other hand, by visiting the library and learning about its programs, I made contacts in the larger community that allowed me to support students’ learning and well-being.
These issues were further developed for me personally by writing artifact two, which forced me to examine from a broader viewpoint how the fundamental issues of educational inequality that were addressed by Brown V Board of Education in 1954 were just the start of a long war that has had many successful battles for students rights but left broader inequity and inequality remaining. Throughout many courses I came to know how public issues affect my students but this particular paper made me consider how on balance there are many glaring issues of inequity which are not in the political limelight and how it is my job as an advocate for such students to discuss them publicly and also to keep the student central in lesson planning and deciding what kind of environment I want my classroom to be.
Artifact three, a recent lesson I gave in a classroom composed largely of students of Ecuadorian Spanish-speaking homes, allows me to show how I act on some of these concerns. I collaborated with the social studies teacher, other ENL teachers, and ENL department staff before I designed the lesson to show how World War II affected the United States domestically.
I would not have written this lesson plan the same way at the beginning of my courses. It was only after my classroom experiences that I shifted from the student as vessel into which the main historical points are poured, to the student-centered, bilingual, and culturally relevant lesson that I gave. In writing the lesson plan, I realized how much I myself had learned in the content-area: how World War II was not just a historical and political event in the grand game of world politics and a tragedy for some and hardship for others who served, but also a transformative event that was partially responsible for so many of the Civil Rights and cultural changes that followed the war, primarily the struggles for Civil Rights for a variety of disenfranchised groups and the cultural changes surrounding the women’s liberation.
The texts of a brief conversation I had with the mother of one of my students demonstrates the benefits of family partnerships. By writing in Spanish, albeit not perfect Spanish, I believed I helped to “promote a school environment that value diverse student populations.” This was certainly impactful as I found the mother an extremely helpful resource and together we made sure Inigo did a lot more work and achieve a lot more academically than he would have without staying in close touch.