Collaborative Research in Multilingual Classrooms

Corey Denos, Kelleen Toohey, Kathy Neilson, Bonnie Waterstone

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781847696953
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Reporting on the research collaborations of a group of teachers, graduate students and a university professor, this book weaves together their collective insights about how classrooms might be better for students of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, abilities and socio-economic circumstances, and better for teachers as well. It also shows how research collaborations can result in rich and compelling descriptions of classroom events. Written in a style accessible to teachers and student teachers, it introduces sociocultural perpectives on identity, classroom and community practices, helping and transformative possibilities, using teacher narratives to reflect the complexity of classroom decision-making and reflective action.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Little Girl Who Wanted a Hug

Corey Denos

She is tall for her years, with the long dark, gently curling hair and eyelashes I yearned for when I was her age. Her family is from Iraq, which she refers to as ‘my country’, and consists of her father, mother and three younger brothers. For the first several weeks at school beginning in September, she was just one of 24 new faces and names. Her name was hard for me to pronounce correctly. Her quiet nature made it difficult for me to determine how well she understood English and, at the same time, easy for me take care of the needs of other, more boisterous and disruptive students first. She became a special person to me one October morning when she brought a drawing to me. It had been done in pencil and showed five pairs of long figures facing each other. In each pair, one figure was shorter than the other and was apparently offering something to the taller one – a box tied with a bow, a small bunch of flowers, a heart… ‘Oh my!’ I said. ‘Please tell me about your picture.’ ‘It's about a little girl who wants a hug’, she said quietly.

Since then she comes to talk to me almost every day. She is very polite, waiting until other children have finished telling me… what happened to them last night, that they forgot to bring their lunch, could they go to the library to get a new book, who budged on the way into the building… and then checking, ‘I have something to tell you about. Is it okay if I tell you?… Now?… Is it okay now?’ And then she tells me…

You know what my mom does? She puts an egg in milk and makes me drink it and I do not want to. She says it's good. Is that true? Would you do that? If you say it's good then I like it…. But why doesn't anyone else eat it? I don't see anyone else… so I think it's wrong. When you put the egg in, it makes the milk yellow.

You know my mother doesn't speak English?

Well, when my mother talks on the phone she says ‘I'll kill you’. It sort of scares me. But then I know she means ‘I'll call you’. So I teach her, ‘Say call not kill’. I teach her to say ‘I'll call you’. Not ‘I'll kill you’.

My mom wears a scarf. What do you think? (I think your mom is very pretty.) Oh. (Will you wear a scarf when you are older?) Yes.

I am teaching my little brother – letters and numbers and plusses and take aways. His teacher says he's lazy because he can't do anything. My dad tried to teach him but he still doesn't know anything. So I'm teaching him. If I teach him forever, he'll be the smartest boy in the world. So I guess I'll have to teach him forever.

When my mom and dad go to work I have to babysit. One time my baby brother woke up and he wanted my mom. And he cried. And I cried too because I tried everything. Then finally I put him on my back and he stopped.

When I'm babysitting we play school and I teach my brothers. My dad teaches letters and stuff, but I teach very important things. I teach how to behave so my dad won't get mad. I tell them that when my dad calls them to come, they should come. Sometimes they won't come when my dad wants… and my mom too. But they come if I call. And they shouldn't hit and fight either. That's what I teach. What do you think?

(January 27) Did we have Christmas? Is it over? When was it? I saw Santa Claus. My uncle and me and my brothers saw him. We sat on his lap and he said what do you want for Christmas? I said a Barbie doll and my brothers said guns. You know, not real ones. Santa Claus said he would bring them but he didn't. Why didn't he come? (I don't know how to answer that question.) I think I can. I think he didn't know where my house is. What do you think? He should have asked where I lived.

I wish Jovan and Nathalie and Jasmine would like me. (But they don't?) No. (Why do you think?) Because I'm not the best?… But Irma likes me. Would you do something for me? I brought these little toys and I want you to give them to the other kids. I think when you give things to other people it makes them happy. What do you think?

There's something you said that came true. Yesterday you said that tomorrow Irma and Paige would be my friends again… and it's true! They are! How did you do that?

And so go our conversations… as she daily gifts me with pieces from her life. It is clear that she thinks hard about what she's going to say ahead of time, and sometimes I have to struggle to figure out what she's really asking. But it seems to me that somewhere in almost every one of her conversations lies the basic question, ‘Am I okay? I can see that I am different, but is where I belong and what I am, okay? What do you think?’

She is eight years old. According to provincially-given ‘standards’ she is ‘not yet meeting expectations’ in reading and writing and mathematics. She is seen by the Learning Assistance teacher and the ESL teacher, both of whom complain repeatedly – first, that she smells bad – and second, that she's not making any progress. In December she was given tests that showed she has Moderate Intellectual Disability. She has been waiting for resource room placement ever since. Several years ago her family became involved with social workers at Family Services who felt that the parents needed support in parenting and health issues. The two of her younger brothers who have started school have already had problems with aggressive behavior. Her father has had repeated problems with the police.

Two years have passed. Last year the family announced it was moving to Afghanistan and, within days, disappeared.

But she is still with me. I find the complexities of her situation painful to consider and beyond untangling. In the middle, however, is the clear beauty of the little girl – her burning desire to know herself, to make sense of the world, and to make whatever it is better. I am truly blessed to have known her. I look for her now in all of my students – and give them a hug.

While the difficulties faced by The Little Girl Who Wanted a Hug are overwhelming – learning English as a second language (ESL), an intellectual disability, an abusive father, poverty and more – she, along with Jake and Raminder and Surjeet and the others whose stories are told in this book, can be seen as representative of all students in all classrooms. She, like all children, is struggling to figure out who she is and to decide whether that is okay. She is struggling to become an active participant in her classroom community. She brings resources to her struggle; she knows she is a good babysitter and teacher of her younger brothers and sisters. She knows she is learning English well and she corrects her mom's English pronunciation. However, she is somewhat puzzled by school in this new country and she looks to her teacher for support – for some of the information she needs to negotiate a place for herself in this new setting. This particular little girl may be unusually articulate and uncommonly forthright in her insistence on help from her teacher. But the big questions she asks are the questions we all must answer. And her teacher, like most teachers, knows that the answers matter.

It is a HARD job, being a teacher. For one thing, we do not have very much time to do the job we set for ourselves. In Canada, children enter our lives in September and are gone in June. They arrive already highly complex individuals – as big as life, in the middle of their own stories and then they go away – for better or worse, with no endings, happy or otherwise. Most of the time we do not have the opportunity to learn what happened next or to reflect on the effects of whatever decisions we made in our attempts to help with those big questions.

As well, today's classrooms are fabulously diverse, and teachers are both privileged and challenged to be sharing their days with children who come from experiences virtually incomprehensible to them – children intimately familiar with poverty, war and violence… living with intellectual and physical disability… thinking and dreaming and communicating in languages we do not understand… already expert in negotiating between two cultures… being nurtured in ways that challenge middle-class North American ideas about family. Educational research reminds us of the difficulties schools have encountered in providing for children of various skills, abilities and familial and socioeconomic backgrounds; other research stresses the link between the micro worlds of classrooms and the macro worlds of globalizing economies, in which historical inequities are reinforced and reproduced. Feminist work illustrates the inequities schooling contributes to in positioning girls differently from boys. In all, this research is not very encouraging as it continually points out that social inequities persist in all kinds of institutions, including schools.

As American teacher-educator Gloria Ladson-Billings put it:

Today teachers walk into urban classrooms with children who represent an incredible range of diversity. Not only are there students of different races and ethnicities but there are students whose parents are incarcerated or drug-addicted, whose parents have never held a steady job, whose parents are themselves children (at least chronologically), and who are bounced from one foster home to the next. And there are children who have no homes or parents. (Ladson-Billings, 2001: 14)

Ladson-Billings described two different challenges for urban teachers here. She pointed out the cultural, racial and linguistic diversity of students, and much of her book addresses how this kind of diversity might be a resource in classrooms. Ladson-Billings also pointed to profound social problems in the communities from which many students come. For teachers to recognize, respect, and when possible, cooperate with parents and communities to maintain diversity in the cultural, linguistic, religious, family constellations and other backgrounds of North American students is one challenge. Another is to develop ways of teaching that contribute to the extraordinary social change required to address the problems she identifies, as well as other pressing environmental, political, economic and social problems. As teachers working with our students every day, we know that we have to rely on more than our own past experiences in supporting our students and their families, and to contribute to necessary social change. The world is much more complicated than that.

Those of us who have made a commitment to teaching in this new century are acquainted first-hand with the diversity of our world and work hard to make our classrooms places where all can grow and learn. We believe that students who feel good about themselves – who feel strong and capable and competent as individuals – do better in school and generally in life. We also believe that students who participate in classroom activities – who feel comfortable and confident and needed in their classroom communities – do better in school and generally in life. We have these beliefs because we live intimately with students, day after day and year after year, and because we know that we ourselves are more effective teachers when we feel strong, capable, competent and members of communities. We want to do everything possible to create inclusive classroom communities that promote strong identities. But as we move through the demanding complexities of our days, it is difficult to tell whether our sincere intentions to provide optimal conditions for the growth of each student are being met. We worry that we are not doing the job we want to do. Why, despite our very best efforts, do some students continue to regard themselves as ‘inadequate’? What prevents our classrooms from being the warm, caring and educative places we would like them to be for everyone, all of the time? What more can we do to make classrooms better places for all of us? What, if anything, do school ‘systems’ contribute to our unease with the outcomes of schooling? What, if anything, might Faculties of Education or educational researchers do about any of this?

Sometimes the problems that lead us to such questions become large enough to come to the attention to the world outside the school. Everyone has some awareness of turmoil in schools, and there is no shortage of advice. However, many of us are suspicious of the ‘quick fixes’ offered by publishers and their publicists in the form of yet another program complete with a thick teacher's guide and piles of supporting materials. We reject out of hand those politicians and bureaucrats who seek to create success by making failure illegal. We roll our eyes at those who look backwards to a fantasy time when everyone was the same and the rules all worked. We try to resist school staffroom colleagues who cite the numbers of ESL, disabled, single parent, transient, low income students and then throw up their hands in helpless despair – ‘Well what can we do? It's not our fault!’ These many voices are persistent and omnipresent. We hear them on TV and the radio and read them in newspapers and journals. We encounter them at teaching conferences and professional development days. Even at dinner parties and our own children's soccer games, we are lectured by people with simple answers to unbelievably complex issues.

As teachers, post-secondary educators and citizens, we know the sad results of the marginalizing of large numbers of our population. We know that teachers and schools need to do things differently – we need to speak to the multiplicity of voices and to the ambiguities and complexities we encounter in our classrooms. We need to understand our students differently, to stop defining them in terms of what they do not have or do not do, and instead, to discover and build on their strengths. We need new ways to look more closely and listen more carefully – ways that will open up new possibilities for our students and for ourselves. Most important, we need to believe in the possibility that things can change and be better.

The Teacher Action Research Group

It was essentially that search for something different that united the members of the Teacher Action Research Group, or TARG as we have come to call it, whose work we describe here. About 10 in number, we are in some respects a diverse group – elementary classroom teachers, adult education teachers, ESL specialists, student teachers, an Aboriginal teacher, university teachers, graduate students and a video ethnographer. Among us, we speak Punjabi, Bulgarian, French, Japanese and English. There are more than 30 years between the youngest and oldest members. TARG met at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in a small, blue room with a large oval table in the middle, starting in 1999. We came together on Wednesdays at 4:00 from all over the Lower Mainland area of British Columbia – Vancouver, Burnaby, the Sechelt Peninsula, the Fraser Valley and even Bellingham, Washington.

We first met in September, 1999, when Kelleen Toohey, Professor of Education at SFU, invited us to form a group that would be concerned with ‘investigating what practices in classrooms might make a difference to the learning of minority language background children’ (Toohey, 1999). Kelleen's then newly published book, Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice (LEaS) (Toohey, 2000) provided the base for our explorations. LEaS is an ethnographic study of a group of children of minority language backgrounds attending a Canadian school, from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of Grade 2. Identity construction practices, resource distribution and discourse practices together are shown to affect the children's possibilities for learning English. The book was primarily descriptive and theoretical and aimed at an academic audience. When it was being published, reviewers asked for explicit suggestions for changing school practices and Kelleen thought that teachers, better than she, could design practices in line with what she had found in the LEaS research. So she invited five elementary school classroom teachers, three graduate students and two ESL specialist teachers to help her with this design.

When the group first began to meet, we read and discussed a chapter of LEaS each week, bringing additional data, experiences and stories from our own classrooms, personal and professional lives, and experiences as variously situated educators. As we followed their progress through kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade 2, the six focal children from LEaS were joined by the students whose stories TARG participants told, and we began to know each other and each other's students. In addition, we read Vivian Paley's (1993) You Can't Say You Can't Play, and it was extremely important in our developing shared understandings and commitments. Paley's attempts to make a rule against exclusion, captured in the title, resonated soundly with us and provided a standard both for looking at our own classrooms and for our work as members of TARG.

While the research proposal that initiated TARG indicated that the group would design, execute and analyze classroom practices that enabled better access to English by English language learners, the TARG classroom teachers, especially those who were more experienced, indicated that they were not interested just in designing or trying out particular practices in their classrooms to see if they ‘worked’. Years of attending professional development workshops had dulled their enthusiasm for workable techniques. Instead, they were interested in deeper, more fundamental questions of their own. With focus on their own classrooms, they asked questions like: Who ‘belongs’ in classrooms? Who has power in classrooms? Do we really want all learners to be ‘powerful’? Whose expectations are we assessing against when we say a student is meeting or is not meeting expectations on report cards? These broader questions were collaboratively discussed, and over time participants chose to engage in a variety of kinds of investigation of thei...