The Arts and Emergent Bilingual Youth

Building Culturally Responsive, Critical and Creative Education in School and Community Contexts

Sharon Verner Chappell, Christian J. Faltis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415509732
• eBook ISBN: 9781136446375
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Arts and Emergent Bilingual Youth offers a critical sociopolitical perspective on working with emerging bilingual youth at the intersection of the arts and language learning. Utilizing research from both arts and language education to explore the ways they work in tandem to contribute to emergent bilingual students' language and academic development, the book analyzes model arts projects to raise questions about "best practices" for and with marginalized bilingual young people, in terms of relevance to their languages, cultures, and communities as they envision better worlds. A central assumption is that the arts can be especially valuable for contributing to English learning by enabling learners to experience ideas, patterns, and relationship (form) in ways that lead to new knowledge (content). Each chapter features vignettes showcasing current projects with ELL populations both in and out of school and visual art pieces and poems, to prompt reflection on key issues and relevant concepts and theories in the arts and language learning. Taking a stance about language and culture in English learners' lives, this book shows the intimate connections among art, narrative, and resistance for addressing topics of social injustice.

1

Introduction

A monolingual, white seventh grade teacher answers the knock at her classroom door. The principal walks in and introduces Yanira, a student who has immigrated from El Salvador a couple of days before. Yanira looks around shyly and sees a sea of faces staring at her. She hides behind her notebook and thumbs through her bilingual dictionary, anxious to learn the pronunciation of a few words and to find someone who speaks her native language.

A bicultural teacher with some second language experience examines her class roster and learns that four of her students have been designated as English learners for the last six years. The group of students clusters together and alternates between English and their home language carrying on conversations bilingually. The students debate about movies they have seen and then switch to stories of their older siblings and cousins living across the border in México.

A third grade teacher, who is bilingual, learns from the district office that she can no longer use the children’s home language for classroom instruction because of a state law that mandates English only. Her students are forced to whisper to each other in their home language (also the native language of the teacher) in order to ask questions about class assignments.

In the above examples, teachers and students struggle to negotiate the complexities of a bilingual or multilingual school environment. Now consider what might happen when they work through the arts to understand these complexities.

The teacher in the first example designs a curricular unit in which the students create identity boxes using collage and popular culture to explore cross-cultural interactions. The teacher guides the newcomer Yanira to explore her impressions of living in the U.S. and the impact of this new culture on her life. Yanira smiles for the first time as she works on her identity box, with a self-portrait of her hands over her eyes inserted into its center.

The second teacher instructs her long-term English learner students in the use of ethnographic interviewing techniques (questioning and photography) to gather family stories, which they compile into a class performance along with pictorial images. The students negotiate the placement of stories in order to convey emotional arcs of characters and thematic issues of living within two cultural groups in the Southwest.

The third teacher selects bilingual poetry to integrate into her social studies unit on immigration and assimilation. Although under an English-only mandate, she learns that the students can work in multiple languages as long as her whole group instruction is in English. She speaks individually to students using both languages, and they begin to build confidence including their native language in their own poetry compositions. The teacher learns how to use both languages to reinforce the development of bilingualism, as well as how to intertwine aspects of culture with language development.

Purpose of the Book

These scenarios point toward the purpose of this book: to explore the power of interrelating the arts, bilingualism, second language learning, and critical inquiry about the world. As teachers and artists, we can work toward understanding the experiences of emergent bilingual youth (labeled English language learners [ELLs] by the state) and how they are affected by curricular practices in and through the arts in school and community-based settings. This book is one such effort, requiring that we forge diverse connections among the fields of the arts disciplines, art education, English language development (ELD), and bilingual education in educators’ personal arts practices and pedagogical strategies with bilingual youth. Among the questions explored in this book are:

• How do teachers and learners engage in the arts to explore school and community topics while both enriching their primary language and acquiring English as their second language?
• How do teachers’ personal arts practices facilitate understanding of issues affecting emergent bilingual students?
• How do drama, visual arts and media tools help students develop bilingually (including acquiring English as a second language) in various settings, such as in formal schooling, community centers, and afterschool sessions?
• How does arts-based learning tie into what is understood theoretically about bilingualism and second language acquisition in and through young people’s life experiences?

As authors, we come to this project with personal and professional experiences that position our beliefs about the imperative of both the arts and social justice in the educational lives of emergent bilingual youth. Sharon grew up in a suburb north of Los Angeles, aware of the presence and absence of bilingualism and biculturalism in her life:

We drive past the groves on the way to a play with my dad. After seeing the Great White Witch and Aslan the Lion battle over good and evil, we stop at a roadside stand. I am between worlds. I inhale the sweet perfume of oranges and watch as a big pulpy glass is poured, freshly squeezed by the man behind the counter. I say “gracias” and nod, because I don’t know how to say much else in Spanish. I see a girl packaging sugared rolls and try to place her. I think she goes to my school. But she is not in my classes. Now I realize that few of the bilingual students were. Where did the school put them? Why weren’t we together? I could have learned a lot from her. But we weren’t and I didn’t.

(Chappell, 2009, p. 15)

Sharon identified teaching as the space where she could explore what it means to live, work, and learn across borders. She has struggled to learn Spanish as her second language throughout her K-8 arts and language teaching career, and she has shared this humbling process with her emergent bilingual students in Texas and California. Sharon’s degrees in English, Women’s Studies, Arts Education and Curriculum Studies inform her approach to teaching at California State University Fullerton. She writes poetry and creates artist books as an integral part of her university teaching and research practice. Her role as a mother of a young child also influences her drive to conceptualize creative, critical, caring education.

Chris’s early years of life were spent living between Northern California and México, where he studied in elementary school in Morelia, México City and Hermosillo, and became bilingual and identified as Mexican as a child. The son of a Spanish teacher and artist, Chris went on to study Spanish as an undergraduate, and eventually went on to earn a Master’s in Chicano Studies, and a doctorate in bilingual education in the early 1980s. A political activist throughout his life, Chris turned to art while in Arizona as a faculty member at Arizona State University. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, conditions for Mexican immigrants worsened in the state, as anti-immigrant hate groups became increasingly emboldened in their efforts to deny basic human rights to Mexican children and families, regardless of their legal status. In 2005, Chris created the persona of Simón Candú to promote his political art aimed at portraying through what he calls “visceral realist art,” that portrays Mexican immigrants’ lived experiences in Arizona, intensified by visceral emotions about their mistreatment in schools and society.

Our biographies inform the organization, content, and ideological positioning of this book. We work to clarify our own values, beliefs, and practices in our daily efforts to become more culturally and linguistically responsive educators, researchers, and artists. This book is a tangible artifact of our ongoing process.

Overall Organization of the Book

In each chapter, you will read two to three narrative portraits from practicing artists, teachers and researchers who work with emergent bilingual young people particularly around issues of social and cultural importance. As editors, we will reflect on particular practices, tools and theories related through these stories that enhance English language learning and native language development for critical social inquiry. Each of the stories is comprised of: a narrative focusing on a key turning point in the project; the goals and objectives of the project; a description of project participants and context; arts and language strategies utilized in the project; and suggestions for future applications of these strategies. We end each chapter with reflection questions and suggested activities for applying relevant concepts and theories in the arts and language learning to your own teaching practice. You will also find two Appendices in the back of the book. Appendix A outlines a process of planning, implementing and evaluating critical, creative, caring projects with emergent bilingual youth through a series of questions and action steps. Appendix B contains a list of resources for educators of organizations and websites in arts education, multicultural and social justice education, and family and community partnerships.

In this chapter, we lay a foundation for the importance of a balanced interdisciplinary approach to arts and language education, as well as highlighting key concepts and terminology regarding the education of emergent bilingual youth. We use this term to portray the potential development of both languages in young people in the United States who come from homes speaking languages other than English. The most common term used by the state to identify this preK-12 student population is English language learners (ELLs or ELs). Older terms include limited English proficient (LEP) and language minority students. The term emergent bilingual youth (García and Kleifgen, 2010) emphasizes an asset-based stance about languages and cultures in young people’s lives, and reminds us all that bilingual youth are much more than passive recipients of English instruction; they are developing dual languages and literacies from a social and cultural base of home and community language practices.

Our primary goal is to articulate the potential of current practices to become more culturally and linguistically responsive, critical, and creative. We are interested in moving toward arts processes and products in educational settings that focus on resistance and counter-narration, taking a stance about language and culture in the lives of emergent bilingual youth against political domination (Freire, 2000; hooks, 1995; Pacheco, 2012). Given the past twenty years of restrictive language and immigration policies in the U.S., adults and youth alike have utilized art-making as a means to portray the life stories of bilingual and immigrant youth, as well as to raise questions about how language, identity, culture and power intersect in their lives. This book is significant because it forges intimate connections among art, narrative, and resistance, addressing topics of social (in)justice that have been virtually silenced in mainstream educational conversations and research (Olsen, 2008; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco, 2002). We hope that making art and discussing it through specific analytical approaches such as those in this book can produce dialogue toward social change in, with and by emergent bilingual youth communities.

Contemporary Contexts of Teaching Emergent Bilingual Youth

In order to appreciate the importance of becoming culturally and linguistically responsive as an educator, we include the following contemporary contexts of teaching emergent bilingual youth. Currently, over one hundred languages other than English are spoken in homes and communities across the United States, solely and/or bilingually. The most common of these languages used for daily communication is Spanish, although there are some states in which Spanish is not the most common second language. It is predicted that there will be approximately 15 million students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) enrolled in U.S. schools by 2026 (Gollnick and Chinn, 2004) and 40 percent of the K-12 school age population nationwide will be comprised of children whose first language is other than English by 2030. In California alone, nearly 1.6 million pupils in the kindergarten through grade twelve (K-12) public educational system, or one in four, are English learners (ELs) and emergent bilinguals. This represents almost one-third of the ELs in the nation.

Among those LEP children, the Hispanic population shows a marked increase (Lucas and Ginberg, 2008). ELL/LEP students are more likely to be at risk in terms of performing poorly academically than English speaking counterparts (Verdugo and Flores, 2007). The dropout rate of Latina/o students is disproportionately high, reaching 44.2 percent in the year 2001, compared with 7.4 percent among non-Latina/o student population (Gollnick and Chinn, 2004).¹ Verdugo and Flores (2007) argue:

Although the challenges posed by ELL students are significant, it is less clear what strategies and programs educators can use to improve the educational experiences of this population. Much of this ambiguity is due to the lack of research and information, inappropriate educational policies, and the inability of educators to understand ELL students and their backgrounds.

(p. 168)

As researchers and teachers, we suggest ways of educating emergent bilingual youth with pedagogy divergent from the technical, test-driven, discrete skills, English-only curricula that confront educators on a daily basis in the classroom. In this book, you will see projects and approaches that engage the critical and creative alternatives that lead to complex knowledge building in communities of language learners.

There have been numerous efforts in the history of U.S. public education to legislate the programs of instruction for emergent bilingual students. In California alone, these efforts include:

1976—Chacón–Moscone Bilingual Education Act establishes legal frame work for mandatory bilingual programs.

1987—Legislators allow the Chacón–Moscone Act to sunset but maintain support of the bill’s principles.

1997—Proposition 227, “English for the Children,” passes which generally bans instruction in California schools in any other language than English. Yet many bilingual programs survive as a result of parental waiver demands for instruction in such languages as Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean. Similar bills followed in Arizona and Massachusetts.

2002—The current authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known popularly as NCLB or No Child Left Behind. This policy effectively removes any mention of bilingual education as a program model, language of instruction, or office of leadership in the federal government. Instead, NCLB and state departments of education use the terms “limited English proficient,” “English learner,” and “Structured English Immersion” to describe the learners and classroom setting. Importantly, the new policy frames the discussion of educating emergent bilingual youth as a schooling effort to improve their English proficiency without the consideration of home language or culture as either an educational tool or necessary context of these young people’s development.

In response to NCLB’s discursive practices that exclusively emphasize English language learning, this book recursively portrays the vita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Images
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Knowing Your Students: Becoming a Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teacher
• 3. Building Family–Community–School Partnerships
• 4. Playing with Language, Playing through the Arts
• 5. Living Stories, Telling Stories
• 6. Responding Critically to Literature
• 7. Responding Critically to World Events
• 8. Talking to the System through Youth Media
• 9. Creating Counter-Narrative Practices at School
• 10. Epilogue: Building Sustainability in/with Multilingual Communities
• Appendix A: A Process for Building Critical, Creative, Caring Experiences
• Appendix B: Resources for Educators and Artists
• About the Contributors
• Index