The LeadScape blog on current issues and practices in inclusive education

This blog is intended to engage you in ongoing conversations about a wide range of issues surrounding inclusive education. We strive to bring you ideas and viewpoints from researchers, practitioners, and authors that provoke, inspire, and complexify the way we understand and effect inclusive practices in our classrooms, schools, and communities. Keep watching for new blog topics, as well as accessing past topics for interesting information and dialogue. You can put this on a RSS feed that will tell you when a new blog is posted. We’re imagining that you’ll find a little bit of time each week in a favorite place to sit down with a cup of coffee or tea to relax, check out the topics and conversations, and think about our work.

Karen Smith is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy, and Director of Professional Development in the Division of Curriculum & Instruction at Arizona State University (ASU). Her research is conducted in collaboration with teachers in urban settings and focuses on literacy teaching and learning, and teacher research. She speaks and consults widely on literacy development and teaching as a scholarly activity. She has received numerous awards for her teaching including the 2002 Richard Halle Outstanding Middle School Educator award from the National Council of Teachers of English, the 2003 ASU College of Education Dean’s Excellent Award for Faculty Teaching, and the 2008 John Chorlton Manning Public School Service Award from the International Reading Association.

During the last forty years, our understanding about how all children learn has grown enormously. Research has yielded new insights into how children and adolescents learn and what instructional approaches work best in particular contexts. At the same time, the learning demands for our entire country are higher than they have ever been. As learning demands grow, so does the need for teachers and administrators to stay current with new knowledge and new pedagogical practices.

While we have the professional knowledge base in school reform to respond to these higher demands, most professional development efforts fail to do so. Research in school reform suggests that traditional professional development models (lecture, courses, brief in-service) result in little change in classroom instruction and learning. These traditional models are generally short term and cursory. Joyce and Showers (2002) report that only 5% of traditional professional development programs (workshops with a lecture format, classes, conferences, reading books and journal articles) ever results in classroom implementation. However, they also found that implementation can skyrocket to over 90% when teachers have the opportunity to direct their learning and professional growth. Professional development has traditionally followed the same routes that tend to reinforce current practice rather than change it. To reverse this trend, teachers, like all learners, need to identify questions that have personal/professional relevance, and they need to have the opportunity and support to explore them at a time and in a place when their minds are fresh and where they are treated like professionals.

The teachers and principals at school where I currently facilitate professional development embrace this trend. For example, my colleague, Sarah Hudelson, and I meet with classroom teachers, special education teachers and the principal at a K-8 school every other Wednesday afternoon from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. where we explore together what balanced literacy means and what balanced literacy looks like in practice in the school’s rich linguistically and culturally diverse setting. While the whole group collectively explores the meaning of balanced literacy, each teacher and the principal enters the conversation with a particular aspect of balanced literacy that he or she wants to explore. For example, the kindergarten teachers are working on creating classroom environments that offer rigorous literacy curriculum but also honor the need for play as a way of knowing for their young learners. Some teachers are interested in creating guided reading groups and they are working through their understandings of this practice by reading professional literature, viewing videos, and trying out guided reading groups with their students. The principal’s inquiry is about supporting struggling readers within a balanced literacy classroom.

A fundamental part of sound professional development is the opportunity for teachers to engage each other during the process of their growth and learning. Shared knowledge strengthens what we know and increases the possibility of current insights taking root so that they have a chance to generate staying power.

In his inspiring book, The Courage to Teach, Parker J. Palmer notes:

If we want to grow in our practice, we have two primary places to go: to the inner ground from which good teaching comes and to the community of fellow teachers from whom we can learn more about ourselves and our craft. The resources we need in order to grow as teachers are abundant within the community of colleagues. Good talk about good teaching is what we need—to enhance both our professional practice and the selfhood from which it comes (pp. 141, 144).

Part of our professional development time with the faculty mentioned above is built around study groups that are made up of five or six participants discussing their personal inquiries together. The groups are structured so that members rotate the responsibility of facilitator and group historian each session. The facilitator’s job is to keep the discussion on topic and make sure everyone gets a chance to participate. The historian logs what happens during the discussion and shares the log with the other teachers and administrators so that knowledge is shared and made available for all to use. This “good talk” has resulted in teachers requesting time to visit each other’s classrooms, teachers presenting new strategies at staff meetings, and teachers presenting at local and state conferences. It moves teachers from being just congenial to being collegial with each other (Barth, 1990), where they assume responsibility for their own learning and the learning of others and their community of colleagues.

School reform efforts should also focus on the school context. Educators like Roland Barth (1990) talk about “improving schools from within” where the relationships in a school are viewed as crucial to change as well as teacher satisfaction. Central to Barth’s concept of a healthy, effective school is the idea of community where principals learn alongside teachers.

The involvement of school principals is a critical feature of any reform movement. If teachers are to take risks and implement curricular changes consistent with their developing knowledge, they must feel confident that the school administration is knowledgeable of and supports these endeavors. Principals cannot be outsiders to professional development experiences. They must participate as equal members and active participants where they, along side teachers, systematically pursue their own inquiries into the phenomena under study. The principals I work with value the professional development time and in most cases this time is not a negotiable part of their schedule.

Changing schools from within is where reform begins. It is not enough however for teachers and principals to keep what is learned within the four walls of their school. As they investigate questions and issues, they should consider publishing what they have learned. Sharing professional knowledge demonstrates to teachers and principals that what they know is critical to the health and progress of the profession and it adds their voice to the knowledge base on teaching and learning—voices long absent from this body of knowledge. When educators do write or speak, it is often because they live in an environment that values, encourages, and rewards the sharing of professional knowledge.

I hope you will take time to make public what your school community is currently exploring, so we can all learn and grow by sharing with each other.

References

Barth, R. (1990). Improving schools from within: teachers, parents, and principals can make the difference. San Francisco :Jossey-Bass,1990.

Joyce, B. & Showers, B. (2002). Student achievement through staff development, 3^rd edition. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Palmer, Parker (1998). The courage to teach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Carole Edelsky is a Professor of Language Arts in the Division of Curriculum and Instruction at Arizona State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of New Mexico in 1974. Her dissertation was the first study of children’s awareness of gender stereotypes in language use; it won the Popejoy Outstanding Dissertation Award (Outstanding Dissertation from the College of Education, Business, and Liberal Arts for 1974-1977) in 1977. Dr. Edelsky has won several additional awards for her work in education and has participated in numerous other service projects throughout her career. Dr. Edelsky’s research interests include first and second language literacy, gender and language, critical literacy, and classroom discourse. Her influence on education and research within her field of study has been and continues to be great.

Students with disabilities have a right to a high quality education, an education that goes beyond a focus on skills and instead sets its sights on loftier goals (promoting equity), more ethical dispositions (e.g., a concern for fairness), and more elusive but critical habits of mind (e.g., engaging with inquiry). All students deserve such an education, and students with disabilities are no exception. What does such an education look like? What is the teacher doing? And what is the principal doing?

To answer those questions, it is necessary to step back and note some requirements that are not easily observable. Education for social justice requires a stance and particular understandings—as much a set of dispositions and habits of mind on the part of teachers and principals as it does for students. Educating for social justice requires that teachers and principals are passionate about promoting equity and lessening injustice. It requires that educational personnel understand how society-wide privilege and oppression are systemic, not merely matters of individual prejudice or unfair actions by individuals but, rather, are built into the premises and activities of institutions and of representatives of those institutions. Beyond these goals and understandings, education for social justice requires a willingness to include concerns for equity in plans for long-term units of study and also in spur of the moment teaching.

Back to the question of what education for social justice looks like in a classroom and in school. First, it is much more than inserting a unit on “difficult” topics (e.g., poverty, homelessness, stereotypes, racism, sexism, prejudice against disabled people) into a traditional curriculum. Although teachers aiming to teach for social justice would most likely work with children’s literature dealing with such topics, and although they might also teach occasional units with a potentially explicit justice-based focus (e.g., a unit on unemployment or on child labor), their social justice goals would not be reserved only for such obvious topics. They would be working hard to develop students’ empathy and concern for others, their curiosity and respect for differences, their appreciation of the existence of multiple perspectives, their willingness to work with others, and their desire to have an impact on the world and make it better. These dispositions are developed through open-ended discussion of children’s literature, role-playing, drama, and other expressive media. To the extent possible, social justice teachers plan curriculum by observing their students, noting reactions to race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and various disabilities and attending to students’ concerns about fairness. Teachers then plan ways for students to seriously investigate questions that begin from these observations. Teachers also deliberately foreground serious study of individuals, events, and movements that, throughout history, have resisted injustice. Throughout their work in regard to many topics, social justice teachers ask themselves—and teach students to ask—some key questions:

*Whose story is this?

How would it be a different story if it were someone else’s story?

What voices are consistently missing from this version?

*How did “things” (this phenomenon) get to be like this?

Who benefits from it being like this?

How else could it be?

What can we do—and what can we stop doing—to begin to make this better?

What principals do on behalf of social justice education is promote, support, and protect. They promote it by encouraging teachers to develop their own professional study groups using materials such as those published by Rethinking Schools (http://www.rethinkingschools.org/), “alternative” histories such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1998, Harper), and anti-bias curriculum materials; and by carving out time for these study groups. Principals support this kind of education by, again, providing time, space, and materials, and, importantly, by decreasing pressure to teach from scripted programs or “with fidelity” to commercial programs that do little or nothing to promote critical awareness and social justice. And principals protect teachers who teach for social justice by justifying the educational and societal value of such teaching to those who might criticize it.

Education for social justice is supremely optimistic. Its premise is that we are not condemned to continue the present, that, instead, people working together can make the world more just and equitable. Teachers and principals can join with other educators who are already working in this way, and they can ensure that students with disabilities, too, benefit from this kind of high quality, thoughtful, emotionally enriching, and socially relevant education.

Donna Y. Ford, Ph.D., is Professor of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. She teaches in the Department of Special Education. Professor Ford conducts research primarily in gifted education and multicultural/urban education. Specifically, her work focuses on: (1) recruiting and retaining culturally diverse students in gifted education; (2) multicultural and urban education; (3) minority student achievement and underachievement; and (4) family involvement. She consults with school districts and educational organizations in the areas of gifted education and multicultural/urban education. Dr. Ford is the author of Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students (1996) and co-author of Multicultural Gifted Education (1999), In search of the dream: Designing schools and classrooms that work for high potential students from diverse cultural backgrounds (2004), and Teaching culturally diverse gifted students. Dr. Ford, is co-founder of the Scholar Identity Institute for Black Males with Dr. Gilman Whiting. Donna is a returning board member of the National Association for Gifted Children, and has served on numerous editorial boards, such as Gifted Child Quarterly, Exceptional Children, Journal of Negro Education, and Roeper Review.

According to virtually every report and study focusing on the achievement gap between Black and White students, Black students are under-performing in school settings compared to their White counterparts. Of the more than 16,000 school districts in the U.S., few (if any) can report that no achievement gap exists, that the achievement gap is marginal, or that the gap has been narrowed or closed. Nationally, there is the average of a four-year gap in which Black students at the age of 17 perform at the level of a 13-year old White student. Of course, and sadly so, this gap is greater than four years in some states and school districts. Also sad and pathetic is the reality that, while the gap is evident when students start school, it is roughly a one-year gap in the early years; however, during the educational process, the gap increases or widens! The achievement gap exists because of home and school variables, with schools playing a significant role.

Both the persistence of and widening of the achievement gap during the formal school years cannot be ignored. Why is it that educators, with all their credentials in testing and curriculum and child development, have not been able to narrow or close the gap in recent years? One explanation lies in the fact too few colleges and universities offer courses in cultural diversity or endeavor to help their students to become culturally competent. Thus, many educators and other college students graduate with undergraduate and graduate degrees that do not adequately prepare them to work with students from backgrounds that are different from their own. Stated another way, too few courses and programs have been created and designed to equip future and current educators/professionals with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to work with our nation’s increasing diversity. This increasing diversity cannot be ignored or trivialized in any way – especially given that over 40% of public school students are Black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian. Yet, few teachers come from these racial/ethnic backgrounds. Instead, approximately 85% of classroom teachers are White and most of them (75%) are White females. Our society is becoming increasingly diverse, but our teaching force is not. The implications are clear and important. We must have educators, regardless of their race/ethnicity, who are committed to doing all they can for ALL students, who are committed to being non-discriminatory and culturally competent, and who are committed to their profession and the students in their care. More bluntly, I heard Rev. Lawry say on CNN over a year ago that, “We must be as diligent about closing the achievement gap as we were about creating it.” I cannot think of a more powerful statement (or indictment) to describe the achievement gap – its existence and persistence – than this assertion. The achievement gap is unnecessary and we must commit ourselves to not just narrowing the gap, but also closing it.

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her diverse experiences as an elementary school teacher, researcher and teacher educator have shaped her primary commitment to teaching and research that fosters the development of just and equitable educational practices for all children. Her writing is focused in two areas: how equity is conceptualized in everyday practice; and the meanings and practices of citizenship education in the context of globalization.

When my daughter was five she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. It was clear from the first moment that my daughter returned to her kindergarten class that, as a parent advocating for a child with a medical disability, the stance I took toward difference would matter greatly. One approach, perhaps the obvious one, would have focused on her physiological disability and understood the “problem of difference” as an individual one, making the fewest possible demands on the school community. The simplest way to manage her diabetes would be to pack her snacks and lunch daily and to provide special treats that she could eat when the classroom had birthdays or holiday celebrations. This solution would make it reasonably easy to calculate my daughter’s insulin requirements; however, it would also burden her with the sole responsibility for the challenge her difference posed. She would be constantly marked as different, excluded from routine classroom activities such as the sharing of daily snacks and lunches and the pleasure of special foods on festive occasions.

Instead, drawing on my work as an educational anthropologist and teacher, I sought an alternate solution that took what I call a “relational approach to difference.” I asked my daughter’s teachers to reconsider their routine classroom practices¾how they served snacks to children, how they supervised the playground, what kinds of snacks parents prepared for special celebrations¾in order to ensure that my daughter could participate in the normal routine activities of kindergarten. Essentially, they had to consider how the normative practices of the classroom were structured for people without diabetes.

I tell this story to offer a tangible example of what I mean by taking a relational stance toward difference. It means shifting from thinking about “difference” only in terms of what we believe children and youth bring to the classroom, to thinking about how our classrooms are structured with some students, but not others, in mind. Thinking about difference from a relational standpoint requires that educators make visible the assumptions embedded in everyday practices that exclude some individuals or groups. Equally importantly, it requires that the community make the substantive inclusion of all its members its primary value, whatever that takes in terms of reconfiguring practice. This is no small task.

I also do not tell this story to suggest that the problems of educational inequality would be simple to solve if we would only take a relational stance toward difference. Nor do I wish to imply that being left out of the routines of classroom meals and special celebrations represents an educational inequality of comparable weight or consequence to those that are the effects of the systemic oppression of people on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, class, disability, and sexuality. However, my story of advocating for a child with a medical disability is useful in illuminating four key observations that I propose are essential for making educational justice a reality in our schools.

First, inclusion in an educational community must be substantive. By substantive I mean that all students must be included as full members of the community, able to participate in all aspects of the life of the classroom and school. Substantive inclusion asks us to notice whether the opportunities we offer reflect real opportunities from which all students can truly learn and benefit. Substantive inclusion depends on my second and third observations: that we must simultaneously focus on the equality of all members in the community and we must recognize their differences. This focus certainly drove the advocacy position I took as a parent.

The stance that my daughter must be valued as an equal member of the classroom community led me to the conclusion that there would be no acceptable reason for excluding her from any of the routine activities of the classroom. At the same time, being an equal member of the classroom required focusing on, rather than ignoring her difference, and doing so from a relational perspective. Critically, while I believe that we need to focus on, rather than ignore difference, I caution us to think very carefully about how we do this. Achieving substantive inclusion requires understanding that difference always signals a relationship between people and groups. In educational practice, taking a relational stance toward difference means that we must be vigilant in constantly examining the underlying norms, assumptions and values that guide our work so that we might see how these work to include some students and exclude others.

This brings me to my fourth observation: when we take a relational stance toward difference, everyone is included in the process of change, often with clear benefits for all. In the case of my daughter, the changes required to include her in the routines of the community led to a healthier diet for everyone and fostered a climate in which everyone was equally involved in creating an inclusive environment.

References

Abu El-Haj, T. (2006). Elusive Justice: Wrestling with difference and educational equity in everyday practice. New York: Routledge.

McDermott, R. & Varenne, H. (1995). Culture as disability. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26 (3): 324-248.

Maria Adelaida Restrepo Ph,D, CCC-SLP, is an associate professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. She currently heads three funded projects on intervention for English Language Learners through Tier 2 interventions or professional training of preschool teachers, and one funded project in assessment of Spanish-speaking children. She is a bilingual Speech-Language Pathologist who has worked in schools and a variety of settings with Latin-American children and families. Her research and writing focus on best practices in speech and language assessment and intervention with bilingual populations and prevention of academic failure in children at risk due to language or environmental issues.

What is a bilingual speech and language assessment? Children who speak a language other than English and children who are bilingual need to be evaluated in their native language or the languages that they speak. When children are evaluated only in one of the languages, or in the language in which they are least proficient, such as English for English Language Learners (ELLs), they are often misdiagnosed with speech and language problems when they do not exist, or the nature of the child’s difficulty is not determined accurately (Artiles, Rueda, Salazar, & Higareda, 2005). Some times, however, we find that the monolingual speech-language pathologist (SLP) evaluating a child who is learning English overcorrects for the lack of knowledge of the child’s native language and culture, and misses that the child has a disability by attributing low performance to cultural and linguistic difference.

So what are the advantages of the bilingual assessment? For example, a child who speaks Spanish as a native language and is entering the school with English-only instruction will have to be evaluated in Spanish if there is parent or teacher concern about his/her development. The bilingual SLP will evaluate the child’s native language skills and check progression of English as a second language acquisition. If a bilingual child is tested in only one language, test results will only demonstrate partial knowledge, especially in terms of vocabulary development. Conversely, if the child were evaluated bilingually, the child would demonstrate a whole range of vocabulary knowledge in the two languages and possibly not appear as having a disorder. A bilingual assessment provides a better understanding of the nature of the difficulty, or helps determine whether the child presents with a language difference due to linguistic or cultural differences.

What about if a child presents with a medical diagnosis of Down Syndrome or autism, do we really need a bilingual SLP to evaluate the child? A good bilingual SLP would evaluate the child’s strengths and weaknesses in each language. For example, the child may present with low syntactic development or comprehension skills in English when those skills may be a strength rather than a weakness in the child’s native language. Because the child was evaluated in his/her weakest language, accurate determination of the nature of the difficulties would not be possible and the child may end up receiving the wrong quantity and quality of services to be successful academically.

What about providing services to the child; what is the role of the bilingual SLP? Although some systems across the country advocate for English-only schooling, ELLs with disabilities must navigate the home language and culture as well as the school’s language and culture. Emphasis on developing only one language often results in a child with limited ability to communicate in the home language (Restrepo, 2003). Many parents, however, tell me that their child’s teacher or SLP told them to speak English at home to “help” their child. A bilingual SLP not only understands that the research does not support the view that speaking only in the school language will help the child, but can provide communication to the home on how to best help the child in the languages that he or she speaks. Focusing on language use in only the school language can have detrimental effects on the child’s home communication and the language that the children use with parents. This results in parents with limited tools to communicate with their child, to support their overall cognitive and emotional development, to educate them, to mediate school, and to transmit values, culture, and language (Kohnert, Yim, Nett, Kan, & Duran, 2005).

Providing bilingual services to ELLs with disabilities has many benefits to the school, the child and the family:

• It will help the child develop skills in all the languages that he or she speaks, which in turn will improve communication at home and at school for better learning of culture and home values, better development of language and cognitive skills, and better emotional support (e.g., Restrepo et al., 2006; Restrepo & Dubasik, 2007).
• It will provide the school with a better home-school connection that acknowledges and values the whole child, which includes the home language and culture.
• It will enhance the ELL’s learning of skills that transfer from native language to the second language such as conceptual development, phonemic awareness, narrative structure, and comprehension monitoring, for example (e.g., Dickinson, McCabe, Clark–Chiarelli, & Wolf, 2004).

The bilingual SLP, therefore, has an integral role in evaluating and providing intervention support for bilingual and ELL children with disabilities. Additional roles the bilingual SLP play in the schools include to connect, collaborate, and consult with the other school professionals and staff to ensure that ELLs are not left behind in curriculum development, response to intervention, and family access to school events. The bilingual SLP has a critical role in understanding native language development and English as a second language development and techniques to promote development, language learning disabilities, and the interrelations among all these with culture. Collaborating with special education, regular education, and ELL teachers is a natural place for the bilingual SLP to provide strong support and to benefit the whole child. Research on such collaboration indicates that these interactions benefit all involved (e.g., Hadley, Simmerman, Long, & Luna, 2000). Although finding bilingual language providers is difficult, the benefits to the school and the children pay off in the long run.

References

Artiles, A. J., Rueda, R., Salazar, J. J., & Higareda, I. (2005). Within-Group Diversity in Minority Disproportionate Representation: English Language Learners in Urban School Districts. Exceptional Children, 71, 283-300.

Dickinson, D. K., McCabe, A., Clark–Chiarelli, N., & Wolf, A. (2004). Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness in low-income Spanish and English bilingual preschool children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25.

Hadley, P. A., Simmerman, A., Long, M., & Luna, M. (2000). Facilitating Language Development for Inner-City Children: Experimental Evaluation of a Collaborative, Classroom-Based Intervention. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 31, 280-295.

Kohnert, K., Yim, D., Nett, K., Kan, P. F., & Duran, L. (2005). Intervention with linguistically diverse preschool children: A focus on developing home language(s). Language Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools., 251-263.

Restrepo, M. A., Castilla, A. P., Arboleda, A., Schwanenflugel P.J., Neuharth-Pritchett, S., & Hamilton, C. (2006). Sentence length, complexity and grammaticality growth in Spanish-speaking children attending English-only and bilingual preschool programs. Language, Speech, Hearing Serivces in the Schools.

Restrepo, M. A. & Dubasik, V. (2007). Language and Literacy Practice for English language Learners in the Preschool Settings. In L.Justice & C.Vukelich (Eds.), Achieving Excellence in Preschool Literacy Instruction (pp. 242-260). New York: The Guilford Press.

Restrepo, M. A. (2003). Spanish language skills in bilingual children with specific language impairment. In S.Montrul & F.Ordoñez (Eds.), Linguistic Theory and Language Development in Hispanic Languages. Papers from the 5th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium and the 4th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese (pp. 365-374). Summerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for 25 years. Before that, she was a junior high and elementary school teacher. She has written widely on issues of multicultural education and on the education of students of diverse backgrounds, and she has written numerous books, journal articles, and book chapters on these topics.

Sometimes as soon as I step foot in a school, I can tell of its commitment, or lack of commitment, to affirming the diversity of their students. Some things are obvious, of course: posters, bulletin boards, the nature of the books in the library, the diversity of the staff, and the language or languages displayed in the school – not only whether the home language or languages of your students are visible, but also the tone of signs in the building such as “Visitors must go to Principal’s Office,” versus “Welcome to our school! Please stop by the Principal’s Office to let us know you’re here.” Other things are less obvious: whether there is a consistent and committed outreach to all families; the curriculum and how it actually unfolds in the classroom; and whether or not students’ identities are truly accepted and honored.

It is one thing to say that all students are affirmed in a school but quite another to show this affirmation in concrete ways. Take language, for example: although many children in U. S. schools are native speakers of languages other than English – and the number is growing larger each day – they are frequently advised, either overtly or in subtle ways, that their language is not acceptable in the school setting. In my case, it happened almost 6 decades ago when my sister and I started school in our mostly immigrant school in Brooklyn, New York. My mother was asked by our well-meaning teachers to “speak only English at home, Mrs. Cortés!”, as if she could magically wipe out her own socialization and education, and her natural inclination to speak to her children in the language in which she had been brought up, nurtured, and loved. Naturally, she nodded her head in agreement (after all, one had to respect teachers) but then, luckily for my sister and me, she paid no attention whatsoever to our well-meaning teachers. My mother and father went right on speaking Spanish to us at home. I am certain that neither of us would be where we are today – both highly educated women, my sister a poet and short story writer, and me, a teacher educator and writer – had it not been for our parents’ insistence that Spanish be spoken at home.

Why tell you this story? For me, it epitomizes a small but significant action that principals and teachers can take to affirm students’ identities. Even if it is well-meaning, a teacher’s advice to bar students’ home languages from the school setting is in the end both self-defeating for schools and alienating for students. The usual result is that students feel unwelcome and unsupported in the school setting, and they may conclude that school is no place for them. Even if they do well in school, as my sister and I did, children may learn to feel ashamed of their identities and their families, neither of which is very healthy for them or for our society.

No matter how one feels about bilingual education – some see it as a scourge while others see it as redemption– the truth is that research is clear that when students speak a language other than English, and when that language is firmly established and developed, it is an asset to learning English (for a review of this literature, see Chapter 7 in Nieto & Bode, 2008, below). Even more important, research has also found that students who are bilingual (rather than those who are fluent in neither language, or those who begin as fluent speakers of one language and become fluent speakers of English while losing their native language) have a much better track record in terms of academic achievement, high school graduation, and even mental health (see Portes & Rumbaut, 2006).

Bilingual education is not the issue here. I wish it were available in more schools, but it is not. In the meantime, what can principals and teachers do to affirm their students’ languages? I offer one simple piece of advice: Even if they themselves do not speak the language of their students, teachers and principals can demonstrate their support for students’ languages by saying to parents, “Please, Mrs. Chung, keep speaking Chinese at home,” or “Mr. Rosario, read to Ricardito in Spanish at home.” Rather than making children ashamed of the tremendous resource they have – a resource that many native English speakers try in vain to attain – accepting and affirming students’ home languages is a concrete way for teachers to put into practice a respect for diversity.

Reminding parents that they have a rich literacy legacy to pass on to their children and that we all benefit both individually and as a society by our multilingual and multicultural reality is, it seems to me, a win-win situation.

References

Nieto, S. & Bode, P. (2008). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Portes, A. & Rumbaut, R. G. (2006). Immigrant America: A portrait, 3^rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dr. Glass is a philosopher of education whose work focuses on education as a practice of freedom, school reform in low-income, racially, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and the role of education in the struggle for a just, pluralistic democracy.

Dr. Glass is currently an Associate Professor in the Education Department of the University of California Santa Cruz, where he chairs the Social Context and Policy Studies Ph.D. program, and also directs the Ed.D. in Collaborative Leadership program. Before joining the UC Santa Cruz faculty, Dr. Glass had taught at Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, and Arizona State University. He has provided consultation on program development and evaluation, educational reform, and institutional strategic planning for community organizations, schools, districts, and universities. Prior to being on university faculties, he directed the San Francisco-based Adult Education Development Project, benefiting from the collaboration of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, the world-renowned educators for democracy.

Dr. Glass is the recipient of numerous honors, including: the Stanford University School of Education Outstanding Teaching Award; the Arizona State University Excellence in Diversity Award and the Dondrell Swanson Advocate for Social Justice Award; and, the City of Phoenix, AZ, Human Relations Commission Martin Luther King, Jr., Living the Dream Award.

Dr. Glass received a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education and an M.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University, a C.Phil. in Philosophy of Education from the University of California, Berkeley, and an Ed.M. and an A.B. with honors in History and Science from Harvard University.

It is probably never easy to have a deep conversation with another person; each person’s hopes, fears, anxieties, doubts, dreams, and many other powerful feelings, conscious and unconscious, easily get in the way of honest and full expression. To have a deep conversation with a stranger, or with whole groups of strangers and even an entire community, can seem impossible.

To talk openly and honestly about our experiences of schooling is equally challenging. Some of our most significant identities get shaped in schools: we are judged to be smart or not, popular or not, attractive or not, athletic or not; we discover that our race, class, and gender are significant for how we are judged in school and for the opportunities we will have beyond school. In school most of us learn that we are an Anybody, anonymous members of a mass; some, who can exceed the norms and standards, learn they can be a Somebody; and some, who cannot or refuse to meet the norms and standards, learn that they are Nobodies.[i] Thus, the stakes in conversations about schooling are huge; far too often, students and parents feel that they are on opposite sides of an enormous divide separating them from teachers and administrators, so the conversations can barely get started.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has written poignantly of the barriers that must be confronted in that perennial ritual, the parent-teacher conference, in order to move those conversations to essential matters and enable parents, students, and teachers to become real partners in the growth and development of the student.[ii] Existing school structures indeed must be re-imagined and re-created to establish the deep connections required to insure that schools provide the kind of caring support needed by children and youth, especially those who are low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse (LI/RCLD) and thus face substantial additional barriers to the realization of their full potentials.

These conversations and connections are even more important in the face of pressures that have narrowed discourse about schooling to shallow talk of test scores and measures of annual yearly progress; many students who don’t ‘measure up,’ along with their parents, find such talk to be disrespectful and humiliating, even when proffered with the best of intentions. Conversations that begin from a place marking a deficit in the student, with implications about deficits in the parenting they received, are very unlikely to reach the depths of honesty and openness that are needed to identify pathways for success for the Anybodies and Nobodies in school. Many teachers in ‘failing’ schools similarly find that test score talk denies their knowledge of what their students need from school in addition to opportunities to gain academic proficiencies.

Underlying the difficulties of these conversations are elemental questions about the purposes of public education. Teachers, parents, and students need to agree on what schools are for in order for assessments to have meaning. But how can we know what we want from public education if we don’t talk with one another from within the spaces of our deep knowing and feeling? Since schooling shapes the depths of our identities, life possibilities, and even our hopes and dreams, only conversations that emanate from those depths can lead to insightful strategies for re-imagining and re-creating schools so that they truly leave no child behind and give every child the fullest opportunity to learn and grow.

I am working with a project in a LI/RCLD community that is developing precisely these sorts of deep dialogues by employing new media to create digital stories that serve as anchor points for the dialogues. The stories reveal the ways that the community contends with extreme pressures from very high rates of poverty, transience, overcrowded and sub-standard housing, poor health, unstable employment, substance abuse, and crime. They reveal that schools must address the special needs produced by these conditions, and by a high percentage of students who are English Learners and/or members of migrant families (80% of the district’s schools are in program improvement status). Through the stories, parents, youth, teachers and other community members share the experiences that shape their own hopes and dreams for the schools and community.[iii]

Recognizing that overall outcomes for LI/RCLD children and youth will not improve until the strengthening of their schools is linked to improvements in their community and the expansion of educational, social, economic, and political opportunities for their families, this project is founded on the conviction that “another school and another community are possible” when the community is brought together in deep and systematic dialogues to understand the present situation, to identify both the hindrances to progress and the strengths on which change can be built, and to plan and act toward shared goals.

We are learning that when we approach one another with a genuine desire to understand, with openness and curiosity, we create opportunities to discover common aims even as we respect our differences. When a community can engage in deep dialogues about what it wants and needs from its schools, then we can begin to re-imagine and re-create public education so that it truly meets the needs of those who teach and learn in schools, and also meets the needs of the community that relies on schools to form its members and strengthen democratic life.

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[i] For an extended analysis of Anybody, Nobody, and Somebody in school, see: Ronald David Glass. (2000). Education and the ethics of democratic citizenship. Studies in Philosophy and Education. 19(3), 275-296.
[ii] Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. (2003). The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers can Learn about Each Other. New York: Random House.
[iii] This project and some of the digital stories were recently featured on a Community TV program: “What’s Happening in Education” (#5): http://communitytv.org/programs/video

Randy Bomer is an associate professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Heart of Texas Writing Project. He has also been on the faculties of Indiana University and Queens College of the City University of New York, and he was Co-Director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Randy has also worked as a literacy consultant with K-12 teachers and administrators in districts all over the United States. He is the author of Time for Meaning and For a Better World, and he holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

I’m honored to have an opportunity to participate in the discussion on NIUSI-Leadscape. I want to think with you about the most vulnerable people in our schools—children from low-income homes. Principals are aware, probably more than anyone else, that NCLB requires reporting of the progress of economically disadvantaged students. The naming of that category makes students from poor families visible and vulnerable in a whole new way. Kids were poor before, and poverty created gaps in achievement and opportunity, but now there is a newly motivated interest in “fixing” poor children, and that interest fits into longstanding American traditions, which have not served the poor well. One of the problems in this effort to improve people is that it positions educators toward adopting a focus on children’s deficits.

Curt Dudley-Marling has written that we are now seeing a “return of the deficit.” A deficit perspective is one that regards students, their families, and/or their communities as defective, as having internal or cultural flaws that get in the way of successful learning. Adopting this form of blaming the victim can make a teacher approach the student differently—asking lower-level questions, assigning lower-level tasks, expecting lower-level outcomes. Teachers, like anyone else, act like they know whom they are talking to—so whenever they speak, they assign students positions. The teacher may position a student from a low-income household as less thoughtful, engaged, and curious, more likely to misbehave or disengage from complex tasks. When treated that way, minute by minute, day by day, students often become the people their teachers expect to walk into the classroom.

Some professional development for teachers tends to trade in deficit perspectives. Such experiences build upon people’s existing biases creating collective biases about families and children living with poverty —that they have brought poverty upon themselves because they are lazy, morally questionable, full of bad habits, living unstructured lives.   And, that all people who experience poverty are similar in their habits, cultural histories, languages, perspectives, dreams, and aspirations. The  workshop offering then intensifies those prejudices into psuedo-academic knowledge. I have demonstrated in a couple of research articles that this pattern well describes the work of Ruby Payne and her company here and here (or email me for copies). Payne, as my colleagues and I have demonstrated, makes many claims about poor children, their families, and their communities, and uses these unsubstantiated perspectives as the basis for recommendations for how to teach children from economically disadvantaged environments.

Educators would be well advised to look critically at any research on the impact of poverty on families, children, and educational experiences.Instead of stiffening their deficit thinking, teachers need to build an asset-based assessment of poor students’ competence. This assessment is not just walking on the sunny side of the street. Rather, I am calling for a recognition that anyone who learns does so by constructing new understandings from what they already know. And the knowledge that the poorest students bring to school must be seen as sufficient for building new thinking. Furthermore, middle class people, including educators, are notoriously and persistently ignorant about the wealth contained in homes that they view as lower class. An antidote to this ignorance is a curious, inquiring approach to parents, caregivers, and communities, such as that detailed in Gonzáles, Moll, and their colleagues in their work on “funds of knowledge.”

Teachers need support in some tricky aspects of teaching students from economically disadvantaged households. Poor students’ lives are often touched by material and social threat, and some of the topics and stories they bring to school may not fit into the official curriculum or the teacher’s sense of what is safe to discuss in school. Teachers need help in expecting and thinking through humane and compassionate (but not sentimentalizing or over-dramatizing) responses when a student writes or talks about such topics as: housing insecurity, food insecurity, violence against family members, absent members of the household, problems with police and other authorities, and limited privacy both within and around a household. Be cautious also in assuming that these experiences are only those of children who live in economically deprived households.  Economic security does not prevent children from experiencing a variety of harmful contexts that can include over-reliance on medication, alcohol and other substances, various forms of sexual predation, the absence of parental leadership and support, and lack of role models for civic engagement.  And educators need to be aware, too, of how much their assumptions about normal life are grounded in a consumer-oriented, relatively leisured style of living that many students have never shared.

Students from disadvantaged families and communities often have another resource that tends to be overlooked—a deep, personal understanding of inequality and an instinct for social critique. When educational goals are explicitly oriented toward a more fair and just world, students who experience disadvantage have a special perspective to offer and a strong voice in the conversation. They may, as Patrick Finn has suggested, be able to contribute an attitude of critique that they have developed through their awareness of inequity, and even their family’s conversations about fairness, difficulty, and hope.

Isn’t it hope, after all, that is the point of an education for democracy? Hope that the world is not finished yet, that others may join us in redressing wrongs, that the inequalities we face at present are not permanent.

Elaine Mulligan is currently the project coordinator for the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI), the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), and the NIUSI-LeadScape principal leadership academy initiative.  Elaine has had extensive experience as a classroom teacher, has served as education coordinator for a private residential treatment facility, and has worked directly with adolescents in residential treatment.  She has also worked in a variety of different cultural environments including student teaching in Portslade, England; working as an itinerant teacher in the Peace Corps in St. Lucia, West Indies; and teaching resource students on the Gila River Pima-Maricopa Reservation in Bapchule, Arizona.  Elaine is currently finishing a Master of Arts in Special Education at Arizona State University, focusing on Multicultural Exceptionalities.

Two weeks ago, the participating LeadScape principals met in Seattle, Washington for a week of professional learning, engaging with a variety of topics including school-wide instructional design, scheduling support for inclusive classrooms, school-wide Positive Behavior Supports, and student voice.  To supplement their learning, we invited nationally recognized experts to provide information about the implementation of these new practices, the usage of data for decision making, and the importance of attending to all of the aspects of systemic change.  It was exciting to watch the principals encounter so many new ideas and new practices, but, for me, the most important element of the week was the collaboration of talented, diverse, committed principals. 

As school leaders, principals often work in isolation or are positioned as “lone deciders.”  When they do meet together in district groups, they often have very specific agendas that restrict opportunities for discussion.  I’ve found that as we’ve worked with this group of principals over time, they’ve engaged in deeper and more difficult complex discussions and planning each time we meet. 

Our first meeting was a year ago in Denver, Colorado, and during that time we shared a set of LeadScape beliefs and goals that focused on an equity agenda for access, participation, and opportunity to learn for ALL students.  To do this work requires transformation in classroom practices and in the structures and organizational patterns that schools use to manage their people, practices, and policies.    Schools offer both hidden and explicit curricula that are based on assumptions about students, families, and learning.  These hidden assumptions maintain the way that schools have been traditionally run.  If we want to improve opportunities, equity, access, and learning for every student, we have to look at our data and our results as opportunities to focus on making sure that every student benefits from our practice.    

After that first meeting, Elizabeth and I got to know each of the principals individually during site visits in the fall of 2007, and when we all got together again in January of 2008 there was a stronger group identity.  At that Institute we visited some Arizona schools, examined the cultures in school and how the cultures of both teachers and students contribute to disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education.  Most importantly, we were able to engage in frank conversations about inclusive practices that we had tried with varying degrees of success, and it seemed to me that we finally began to gel as a community of practice of like-minded people.   

This summer’s Institute felt more like a family reunion!  We caught up with each other, shared successes and struggles, welcomed new additions, and felt comfortable enough to grapple with the hard issues of how to transform practices in our schools in a substantive way.  In groups and individually, people started finding ways to move their school’s transformation process to a deeper level, whether it was through PBS, redesigning service delivery models, expanding co-teaching, or focusing professional learning for inclusive practices. 

I think it’s important that we nurture this community of practice so that we can support each other all year round, not just at the Institutes.  This group can provide great support for one another, whether it’s the new principals engaging in ongoing dialogues about their transition processes, middle school principals from different states comparing support models, or individual principals sharing resources and successes with each other.  Let’s keep up the dialogue! 

I’d love to get some ideas from you LeadScape principals on ways you’d like to keep connected.  Whether it’s posting informal blog entries, sending out a monthly newsletter, or setting up periodic conference calls, it’s not so much about the content of the connection as it is about providing the most useful medium to generate an ongoing interaction that can support your individual work.   

This group is a unique collection of bright, driven school leaders who are all working in different environments toward a common goal:  improving opportunities, equity, and access for ALL of the students in our schools.  We need to find ways to stay connected with one another throughout the year to fuel our motivation and share ideas. 

Kenneth Goodman is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona.  His work as a practical theorist, researcher and teacher educator has changed our understanding of literacy processes, how they are learned and how best to teach them. His sociotransactional theory of the reading process is the most widely cited in the world. This research based theory demonstrates that reading is a unitary process in which readers actively construct meaning.  It is a practical theory because teachers who come to understand this view of reading and the related view of writing can understand what it is that learners are doing as they develop literacy.

Recently, a teacher told me that her colleagues believe a mandated early reading test I critiqued is necessary because “the parents of these kids don’t get them ready to learn to read in school.”

Too often we expect urban youngsters to be low achievers. My years of research have convinced me that “these kids” are just as capable of learning to read and write as all the others. But if we make the old mistake of confusing difference with deficiency, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

John Dewey advised us to “start where the learners are.” Dewey also said that we can make kids fit into a fixed and inflexible curriculum or we can fit the school to the learners. Human beings have a universal ability to learn and use language.  Our job as educators is to know our multilingual, multicultural students and build on their strengths and experiences.

In my article, “Do you have to be smart to read? Do you have to read to be smart?” I concluded from my reading research with urban and rural children that any child who has learned an oral language is capable of learning written language.  Children who have learned two or more oral languages without professional help are often strangely treated as “disadvantaged”.  These successful language learners can all learn to read, regardless of the social status of their first language or the dialects of English they speak.

The answer to my article’s first question is, “No, you don’t have to be smart to read.” The answer to the second question is a bit more complex. Speaking at the International Reading Association Conference in Atlanta, Alice Walker cautioned against assuming illiterate folks are unintelligent and don’t care about their children. Being illiterate in modern societies is a disadvantage, but illiterate people often show great wisdom, and being literate doesn’t guarantee that people will act intelligently.

When I was a beginning teacher I discovered a conundrum. In my eighth grade classroom my students seemed to be inarticulate and weak in language learning. Yet on the playground and just outside my classroom they were articulate, effective, and inventive in their language.  They played with language, knew all the words of popular songs, and communicated successfully with their friends, families, and neighbors. Today, young people also text message and engage in internet interactions that involve complex uses of written language not learned in school.

I learned early in my career that the reason why learners don’t do as well in school is not their fault but ours, their educators.  In our zeal to teach them what they need to know, we have made it harder. Language, including written language, is easy to learn when it is authentic and whole, within a real linguistic context, has a real purpose for the learner, and makes sense. All of us learn language easily as we use language to communicate, to think and to learn. It is hard to learn when it is decontextualized, broken into pieces, and meaningless and irrelevant to the learners.

Educators do not intentionally make literacy hard to learn. They think they’re making it easy. They teach letter-sound correspondences, word identification, decontextualized spelling, and grammar rules that don’t fit the learner’s dialect. And they postpone getting the learners into real language until they prove they know all of these disconnected skills. Such teaching disadvantages all learners but is particularly hard for kids whose home language or dialect is not valued in school.

Nothing I’ve said so far is particularly new. Dedicated professional administrators, curriculum directors, teachers, and teacher educators have learned over many decades that virtually all kids can learn if they feel accepted and supported in school and if the experiences they have in school build on and accept those they have outside of school.  When we work with our students rather than at cross purposes to their natural development and when we respect them as learners they show remarkable ability. The key of course is compassionate, knowledgeable teachers and administrators who trust and support their teachers.  Tragically almost all of our urban school districts have shortages of certified teachers.

Unfortunately, there is also a long simplistic tradition in education that periodically gains control.  The assumption is that all children need to learn the same body of knowledge, in the same way, in the same sequence and at the same pace. In this view, if kids don’t learn in school it is their fault for not trying hard enough, their parents’ fault for not be being strict enough, or because their teachers don’t make them learn.  In this simplistic view they will all learn if we break all content down into bits and pieces which are tightly sequenced and taught directly. If they don’t succeed they are made to repeat the same content over and over again until they have mastered it all and can demonstrate that through “objective” tests. And those who fail are punished with retention.

I believe there is a continuous struggle in education between those who trust children to learn and those who do not, those who trust professional teachers to teach and those who do not. I’m an optimist. I see a progression with two steps forward and one back until there is a wide recognition by educational decision makers and the public that all children can become literate if they have interesting relevant programs and teachers who trust them to learn.

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