ENCOURAGING

Tatiana Joseph works with aspiring teachers so they can better serve second language learners.

The language of learning

TATIANA JOSEPH VIVIDLY REMEMBERS HER first day of school in the United States at age 10. She and her family had moved from Costa Rica to Milwaukee, and she was suddenly plunged into a new school system where everything was in a different language. She knew only three words in English, emergency ones that her father had taught her: lost, help and bathroom.

“Every time I walk into a classroom now where there are English language learners, I remember that first day and thinking, ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to survive this?’” says Joseph, now an assistant professor of teaching and learning in the School of Education. She knows she was fortunate to have a bilingual fifth-grade teacher who made her feel welcome and helped with academics, because her education was conducted mostly in English.

All of this played a role in Joseph’s career – she’s now chair of UWM’s second language education program – as well as her research interests. “I think it’s those life experiences,” she says, “that have really helped me adopt a different lens on what I want to do in teacher education, and how I want to rethink the way we work with English language learners.”

Some school systems have a student population in which more than 20 percent of the children speak a home language other than English. Teachers may find themselves working with children who speak Spanish at home, or perhaps Rohingya, Swahili, Arabic, Laotian or any number of other languages. These are the reasons that Joseph, a former teacher and member of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, believes that teachers must be properly prepared to work in linguistically diverse classrooms.

Research that Joseph and others have done shows that teachers can build on their students’ first language to help improve their overall educational progress. That includes building proficiency in the English language. “In order for children to learn English,” Joseph says, “they have to have a strong foundation in their primary language.”

Backed by that research, educators are shifting their focus from treating a student’s non-English home language as a deficit and instead appreciating it as an asset. The change in approach is reflected in new terminology like “biliteracy” and “dual-language learners.” It’s also prompted some innovative programs that have shown positive educational results, such as sending young children home with books printed in their home language to be read with their parents.

To be clear, educators agree that children need to learn English. “There is no thought that we should neglect that,” Joseph says, “but the argument is that we teach it from an approach where we are respectful of who the student is and what they bring to the table.”

With that in mind, Joseph and School of Education colleague Leanne Evans authored a 2018 article in the Bilingual Research Journal that addressed preparing teachers to do more than teach language skills. In it, they highlighted the need to prepare teachers to uphold children’s cultures and languages as cornerstones of building anti-racist and anti-biased classrooms and communities.

Joseph notes how English as a second language education was once seen as an entirely separate endeavor within schools. Now, the trend has moved away from sending children to separate classrooms and toward helping classroom teachers work with all children, while also supporting students with extra help when needed.

That doesn’t mean teachers need to be fluent in another language to work with English language learners. The key, Joseph says, is offering these students a welcoming environment, and showing respect for the home language and culture. “You can bring books, you can bring experts, you can bring in families,” Joseph says.

Evans, an associate professor of teaching and learning who focuses on early childhood education, explains how children can build literacy across languages, even at a very young age. Just learning how books in print work, for example, builds a foundation.

“If children know how to track words left to right in Spanish, when it comes time to read an English book, they already have that knowledge. They don’t need to relearn that,” Evans says. “What they need is just to have that vocabulary in a second language. It’s called language transfer.”

Evans points to some promising research that resulted from her work with children in Head Start centers that serve a primarily Latinx population. The Leyendo Juntos project – Spanish for “Reading Together” – involved schools providing books in Spanish or Spanish/ English that children would take home and read with their parents.

Families would get a note with suggestions on ways the books could be used and how to talk about the books together. Children might, for example, draw their favorite part of the book, sometimes with parents transcribing what the child said.

“We teach children to think and talk about their languages,” Evans says, “and make it OK to wonder about how it’s done in one language versus how it’s done in another language.”

“In order for children to learn English, they have to have a strong foundation in their primary language.”

Evans began the project by working with 4-year-olds in both center-based and home-based programs that served more than 400 families. Later, she and undergraduate student Alexandra Campos expanded it to include about 60 children up to age 3 in similar programs.

Leyendo Juntos proved helpful to the children and their families. Researchers learned that discussions between parent and child, as well as teacher and child, were critical. The project also allowed teachers and parents to partner toward a better understanding of the nuances of bilingualism and biliteracy.

“We wanted to create school-to-home and home-to-school partnerships around the children’s literacy in both languages,” Evans says. “We wanted the parents to know when you work with the children in the language they first learned to speak, those skills will transfer over.”

Their research continues to examine how early childhood teachers are designing and implementing home literacy programs, as well as what support they need and the challenges they face. It is one of many important building blocks that help construct a child’s educational foundation. But the value of encouraging bilingual or multilingual classrooms goes beyond learning languages.

“By teaching or learning another language and culture, and all the components that come with that, we are teaching empathy,” Joseph says. “As language teachers, we have that power to re-create and re-establish what mainstream society could look like.”

Reaching out to children in their own language

Lynn Sedivy with some of the multiple children’s books she’s found in different languages.

LYNN SEDIVY IS WORKING HARD to get books into the hands of refugee children and their parents – no matter what language they speak.

With the help of funding from the School of Education, she’s finding books written in Burmese, Swahili, Malay, Somali, Arabic, Karen, Rohingya (which is only just developing a written language) and multiple other languages used by immigrant children.

The books are just one part of Sedivy’s efforts to help these children and their families make the transition to America, while helping them retain their own language and culture.

Sedivy, a senior lecturer in ESL (English as a Second Language) and early childhood education, teaches aspiring teachers to work with children who speak a variety of non-English languages. The goal is to help teachers of kindergarten through third grade classes develop tools and strategies to work with children who come into their classrooms. A recent report estimated there are 20,000 children in Milwaukee Public Schools who don’t speak English as their first language; of these approximately 9,600 have arrived in the last five years.

While many future teachers know some Spanish, most would be lost in trying to communicate in Swahili or Rohingya, one of several languages spoken in Burma. Milwaukee has seen an influx of refugees from that country, also known as Myanmar.

“I’ve placed my field students in classrooms in MPS that have refugee children in them. I’m trying to provide them with these experiences because it is more challenging to teach English when you can’t necessarily use their first language.”

The challenges are often more difficult for children who’ve spent time in refugee camps before coming to America. “They may originally be from Burma and spoke Rohingya and maybe some Burmese,” says Sedivy. “Then they fled to Malaysia and they grew up speaking Malay. It can be pretty complex.”

Providing books in English and their native language through the student teachers is one way to help the children make the transition to a new country. For the past several years, Sedivy has also been helping refugee children make their own books about their new home and school. At first, the books were made with photos cut out and pasted in with brief captions written below them. Now, with the help of UWM Printing Services, the children’s books are printed so the children can take a more professional

looking book home to show to their families.

Through all the work, the goal is to teach aspiring teachers how to support and encourage the children’s home language while helping them make the transition to American skills, says Sedivy. (See story on biliteracy on page 4).

“It’s important that the children can continue to interact in English, but also be able to keep their social connections going and keep that part of their identity.”

Research has also shown that, in general, bilingual individuals are better problem solvers, and exhibit more flexible thinking skills and creativity as well, says Sedivy. “It just creates more pathways in your brain that connect more sections of your brain. For brain development, it is good.”

Conference looks at literacy through different lenses

LITERACY IS ABOUT MORE THAN READING AND WRITING and letter recognition.

That was a key message of a two-day June conference on literacy that the School of Education organized in June 2019. The 38th annual Literacy Symposium, which is hosted by a different UW System school each year, focused on the complexity of literacy. Leanne Evans, associate professor of early childhood education, and Johanna Groene, a doctoral student, helped organize the gathering of teachers and researchers.

A number of faculty and staff members worked more than a year on the project also. The committee included Evans and Groene as well as Candance Doerr-Stevens, assistant professor; Sara Jozwik, assistant professor; Tania Habek, associate professor; Nick Husbye, associate professor; Krissy Lize, director of the Education Resource Center; and Kathy Champeau of the Wisconsin State Reading Association.

Barbara Comber, a research professor in the School of Education at the University of South Australia, talked about the importance of engaging children in issues like climate change, refugees, the wealth gap and intergenerational poverty.

She discussed her team’s pilot projects involving children in a literacy of place and power – researching and writing about changes such as urban renewal rather than focusing on “connect the dots,” copying worksheets and other drills.

Another conference speaker, Eurydice Bouchereau Bauer, spoke about the importance and value of encouraging biliteracy in children. She is the John E. Swearingen Chair of Education and the director of Bilingualism Matters at the University of South Carolina. Bauer, who grew up in Haiti, remembers when she first moved to the U.S., her teachers viewed speaking a language other than English as a deficit rather than an asset.

She highlighted writers who grew up bilingual like Sandra Cisneros and Edwidge Danticat. “Their ability to use both their languages is why they are the success they are.”

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas grew up as a huge fan of fantasy literature. When she began reading the Harry Potter books, she immediately identified with Hermione, Harry’s friend, who was described as having bushy brown hair and brown eyes.

As an African American girl, she loved having a strong, smart character she could identify with, said Thomas, who is an associate professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

While Hermione’s race was never specified, Thomas was disappointed when white actor Emma Watson was chosen to play the role in the movies. However, she was heartened when a black actor years later played the role in a London Harry Potter production.

Thomas’ research focuses on youth literature, media and culture, particularly how African American characters are portrayed. She’s written fantasy fiction and blogs herself, and has just published a book about the role of race in media and popular culture — “The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games.”

On the final day of the conference, a panel of local educators shared some of the literacy projects they’ve been involved in.

Ann Marie Nelson, a first-grade MPS teacher, and Doerr-Stevens presented the program Classroom in Residency: Bringing Lab Learning to the Teachers, highlighting project-based learning at an MPS dual language school, Escuela Fratney.

La Tasha Fields, a teacher equity support coach at MPS, presented a project called, We’ve Got This: Making Literacy Accessible for Black Boys.

Other presenters included: Timothy San Pedro, assistant professor of multicultural and equity studies in education at Ohio State University, who talked about how American Indians were marginalized; and Karen Wohlwend, an associate professor of literacy, culture, and language education at Indiana University, who discussed how play-based literacy can help young students.

For more about the conference, go to uwm.edu/edline-literacy.

Adding to a positive math identity

WHAT DOES A MATHEMATICIAN look like? An older white man with a beard.

That’s how students at Brown Street Academy drew pictures of mathematicians and scientists at the beginning of the last school year.

“When we Google mathematicians, the images are primarily older or nolonger-with-us white men,” said Danielle Robinson, the school’s mathematics intervention specialist. “We wanted to change that narrative for our kids.”

Most of the students at the school are African American, so Robinson, a UWM alumna, and her colleagues wondered if reading stories about mathematicians and scientists of color might change their perceptions. They teamed up with DeAnn Huinker, professor of mathematics education at UWM and one of Robinson’s teachers to do some research.

“We wanted to focus on literature that highlights mathematicians and scientists who look like our students so that they can begin to realize that there are people in the world of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) that look like them,” Robinson said.

The Women’s Giving Circle, a team of education alumni who support education research, provided funding.

With the funds, Robinson and teachers were able to buy books about mathematicians and scientists of color like Katherine Johnson, of “Hidden Figures,” whose work helped propel America to the moon; Benjamin Banneker, an early astronomer/ mathematician; and Mae Jemison, an engineer, physician and astronaut.

Younger children read “Scientist, Scientist, What Do You See?,” which follows the format of popular children’s book, “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?,” and features a diverse group of scientists and mathematicians.

Robinson and Huinker worked with six teachers and 139 students at Brown Street Academy throughout the 2018- 2019 school year. Teachers built lesson plans around the books and also made them available during free reading time.

The results: By the end of the school year, the children were drawing pictures of mathematicians and scientists who looked like them. That was one of the goals, according to the researchers.

DeAnn Huinker

“We really wanted to help them see themselves as being capable of doing math and being able to possibly change the world someday.”

“We really wanted to help them see themselves as being capable of doing math and being able to possibly change the world someday,” said Robinson.

Another result of reading about mathematicians and scientists was that students began to understand better how these professionals work.

When the students were first asked about what it took to be good at mathematics, they answered that mathematicians “never made mistakes,” or “the answer just pops into their head,” said Robinson.

When they finished reading about real mathematicians, the students’ responses were different.

“What they said they learned about mathematicians was that they make mistakes, they fix them and learn from them,” said Robinson. One student wrote: “They never give up. They solve problems.” Another student wrote: “If someone’s good at math…even when they get a problem wrong, they work hard, and they help other people and ask questions.”

Now, said Robinson, when students struggle with math homework, they’re thinking: “I can do hard things; that’s part of being a mathematician. I make mistakes.”

The researchers are applying for additional funding, but the project is continuing this year with more students and teachers becoming involved. Students are taking the lessons they’ve learned home. One fifth grader’s grandmother told Robinson at a school conference: “You’re the one who keeps telling my kid he’s a mathematician. He comes home and talks about it.”

The Women's Giving Circle helped provide a selection of books for the class featuring scientists and mathematicians of color.