|
By Maureen Purcell
Maureen Purcell, an ESL teacher in the Oregon School District, began her teaching career in 2002. | "Hey, can you two look at my foot? I think I scraped a rock when I jumped in. It kinda hurts. Is it bleeding?” I asked my two Croatian friends, Lana and Tamara, as I poked my foot out of the water for inspection. We had finally gotten to the beach after a day of missed turns, thunderclouds, and ditching two other grumpy traveling companions whom I called interchangeably, “Sunshine.” Once at the beach, we practically ran into the water, but then I made a rookie error that started a chapter in cross cultural relations.
“What’s wrong?” I said as their faces registered surprise and shock.
“Maureen, what did you do? Did you push off with your foot on the rocks near the beach?”
“Yes. What’s wrong with that?”
“You never do that in the sea. There are, oh what are they called, sea hedgehogs with pointy things on the rocks near the shore and you stepped on one.”
“Sea hedgehogs?! You never told me NOT to step on the rocks.”
“Everyone knows not to step on the rocks near a beach,” my two friends stated simply.
Right. Everyone. Everyone who grew up near the sea knows not to step on the rocks near the shore. “Sea hedgehogs,” or sea urchins to the rest of the world, are a part of my friends’ complete picture of a beach (or, for teachers, their schema or background knowledge). It was a valuable experience for me not to have the right word for something that I knew I had learned, but couldn’t readily recall.
I’d like to say that as an English as a second language teacher whenever I deal with misunderstandings based on culture or specific vocabulary, such as words used only in our region (windchill, anyone?), that I sigh and fondly recall the time that I once stepped on a “sea hedgehog” in Croatia. But like all of us, I’m guilty of glossing over words or background knowledge that I assume most students know, mostly when I’m in classrooms of older students. When I’m in kindergarten or 1st-grade classrooms, the teachers are, for the most part, careful to explain any word that is not used regularly in their daily routine. When I team teach in 5th grade, I have to challenge myself to be alert to words that my English language learners might not know.
The whole episode made me think about the idea of perspective. Lana and Tamara had grown up going to the sea a couple times a year their entire lives. As kind friends who assumed I had common sense, they didn’t warn me not to step on underwater rocks near the seashore because everyone knows not to do that. This made me wonder about the common sense knowledge I take for granted. I grew up on a dairy farm: What information did I take for granted? What would I assume, “Oh, everyone knows that” about? To not touch a wire on a fence post? To never touch running machinery? To always know where the bull is in a field?
Applying this perspective to some of the students I work with in school, I wondered what knowledge we assume all students bring to school. Like how to sit for long stretches of time and work quietly? What if your student is an 11-year-old war refugee who has spent little time in formal schooling because he lived in a refugee camp for the last three years? Do we also assume that all ELLs are happy to be here? What if your student’s family fled as refugees but had no choice in their new host country?
Likewise, what assumptions do we make about families knowing how to “do” school? The format or even the idea of parent-teacher conferences can be a new concept for some families. What about setting up quiet study space for a child to do homework? This assumes that there is enough quiet and space at home for doing homework —sometimes a challenge when students are living with extended families. What about the fact that most of my students serve as translators for their parents and are often put into situations that require much more maturity than their years?
Although it is important to realize that students come to our classrooms without the background knowledge of school we take for granted, I think it’s equally important not to look at this as a deficit in knowledge. Rather, rich yet different life experiences shape their background knowledge from perspectives we will never know. This fact stares me in the face when I’m discussing possible land distribution by a leftist government with an 8th grader from Venezuela.
Students bring these perspectives into school, sometimes dramatically. Once when I was student teaching a lesson about writing poetry to music, I chose music that was intense and suggested a chase. One of my students, a Kosovar refugee who had escaped his town in the middle of the night, started writing a poem about the escape. Although it’s six years past, I still remember his intensity while writing and our conversation about his poem.
Honoring all of the experiences English language learners bring while giving them the necessary information to succeed in school is a tricky balancing act.
One of the most rewarding moments this year happened when I tried to bridge this chasm with a 2nd grader when I told him why I was giving him bilingual books. “You are very, very smart. You know Spanish and English, and when your parents read Spanish to you at home, you just get smarter.” His smile bubbled up from deep within him. He nodded and softly said, “Yes.” Like he knew it all along.
Return to New Teachers page Posted April 4, 2008 |