Kouritzin in the readings calls the home language the "language of the heart” and I think this speaks to how people treasure the language of your culture as it is the repository of identity, history, and belonging. In my undergrad, I studied at UBC with a Linguistics professor who was doing research on how children when born have the capacity to distinguish and learn all the languages of the world but we usually just win one language in the culture lottery.
Carmen our 5-year-old daughter swims in a sea of English all day and then comes home to a life raft of Spanish. She comprehends everything we say to her in Spanish but she chooses to answer us often in English. This battle to maintain a mother tongue at home for parents is exhausting but essential. I have had so many conversations tinged with melancholy with immigrant parents on how they mourn how they didn't teach their children their language.
Lost of language leads to a loss of cultural knowledge and this contributes to a fuzzy identity. The child grows up and says, "Oh my grandparents used to speak German but they didn’t teach me". I lost the languages of Welsh, French, German, and Scots from my grandparents. I have little idea about what I have lost as I lost the connection to these cultures: language. When I worked at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, I gained some understanding when I lost as I learned about the ramifications for First Nations communities of the loss of their languages. Perhaps, this is why I have dedicated my life to learning first French to reclaim a part of my cultural identity and then I added on Spanish and Portuguese. Language opens the magic door to a culture with a doorman gesturing you to come inside to the party. It is the golden ticket to the Willy Wonka Candy Factory!
I re-claimed French as a teenager as it was the first language of my Grandma Edith but she stopped speaking it when she moved from Franco-Ontarian town to an English-speaking village in Manitoba. It brought her and I much solace in the last years of her life when Alzheimer's was stealing her back to her past to be able to converse a bit in French.
My husband and I decided to always speak in Spanish at home and our daughter is being brought up both bi-lingual and bi-culturally. When she lost her first tooth this year, she chose to leave her tooth in her shoe for el ratoncito/the mouse from Mexico to come and get her tooth and leave her a loony. Her cultural landscape is wider than that of her English-speaking friends. Learning both English and Spanish forge pathways in her brain that hopefully will be active for other endeavors in her life. She automatically knows that there is not just one way to do something or to express an idea. This normalcy of cultural diversity is a dream of mine for everyone!
Often people who come from one place and move to another are described as caught between two worlds. I hope that one day soon we can teach our students that existing in the borderland between two cultures gives you an unique set of skills to adapt to an ever changing world. As a cultural hybrid, you can move in between these cultures and even make a home for yourself in a world that encompasses the best of both. But you can’t know where you are going if you don’t know where you have come from. A link to your heritage languages is the key to confidence to learn other languages. We can interpret heritage as “something that is inherited from the past” and I like this idea of the mother tongue being an inheritance from the past. We tend to think of inheritance as only monetary but in fact the inheritance of language and culture is priceless as it guides me in my life. Everything I do is part of my upbringing and cultural inheritance.
The readings point to the importance of heritage language maintenance and how it influences the acquisition of English so why are we as educators constantly harping "Speak English!" to our students? Why are we so threatened by the existence of another language other than English in our classes? As a Spanish teacher, I loved it when students would whisper explanations to each other in a myriad of languages. Students and parents would freak if we did not allow them to speak English in a Spanish or French class. This is accepted but subject teachers get very upset if they hear Korean, Cantonese or Urdu spoken in their classrooms. Each language that I speak informs the next one that I have learned. It gives me a language bank to pull from to compare and contrast structures, verbs and idioms. I have always viewed the home language as a positive force in the learning process of English. I model how all languages are equal; I ask questions to students about their languages and talk to students about the advantages of knowing another language for their future jobs. I do not want the learning of English to threaten a student’s cultural identity, as there is room in my classroom and my home for many languages.
The readings and links this week have deepened my understanding of the invisible immigrants in our society who pick our food, care for our children, clean our homes and do our dry-cleaning and we have no idea who they are or what kind of working conditions they have. The mother of one of my English students who was from Vietnam worked at a chicken farm and she never came to parent teacher interviews first because she couldn't read English and second because of her work schedule. Now, the issue of farm workers is becoming more complex by the addition of migrant guest workers that do not even have the right to bring their family members to Canada. When a small group of migrant Mexican workers voted to start the process to form a union, their contracts were revoked and put on a plane back to Mexico by their employers.
The Global Village is not something that is "out there". We live in the Global Village. So if the first step to get to know about another culture is knowing about our own then we have some work to do as teachers. Most British Columbians have no idea about the racist history of BC from the treatment of First Nations people to the Asian Race Riots of the 1900s. The challenge is that culture and history are messy and complex and there is no easy fix for bringing about "cultural harmony" considering the struggle for power, land, and other resources. There are countless opportunities as a classroom teacher to address the issues of race and culture. Teachable moments arise every day to do with cultural perceptions, as our natural inclination is to judge another person's action instead of asking why.
The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit.
-Wade Davis
Our school attempts to help ESL/Immigrant students but we need to do more. We need to teach cultural literacy to all of our students. "Tolerance" of others is not enough. Counselors buddy up new students with a student from their culture and this helps to promote their integration into the school. Most teachers view ESL students as another student with special needs and do not value the richness they bring into the classroom. Often people who come from one place and move to another are described as caught between two worlds but this fails to address the complexity of an immigrant's identity. Sure ESL students need help with their language but they bring a unique perspective about the world that our monolingual Canadian students do not have and need to survive in the global market. Immigrant students learn how to live bi-culturally and this provides them a unique set of tools for their future. If a student has survived a refugee camp in Africa, can you imagine what he or she will do when you give them the same opportunities of a mainstream student? Our students think they are so on the cutting edge of technology with their cell phones but people in Africa are revolutionizing how they use the cell phone to check prices of fish in the market, pay for taxi rides and do paid work (check out the interview of researcher Nathan Eagle on Episode #47 of CBC program Spark).
An ESL teacher is a cultural translator as well as a language teacher and can show students how to be more comfortable in their new bi-cultural skin. When teachers and students share stories of their forage into the swamp of cultural integration, students learn that their challenges are “normal” and part of their integration. Adaptation to a new culture takes time and adolescents want everything NOW! My Mexican-Canadian husband comes up against this wall of frustration every day when he talks to monolingual Canadians who need to stretch their ears and tolerate a variety of accents in English. One interaction on the phone of Jesus repeating a street address 5 times to get a taxi to pick him up sends him straight to the “Angry ESL Adult Land”.
Jesus is from Veracruz, Mexico has lived in Canada for 8 years and he calls himself “The Fiesta Immigrant”. When people ask him the question “Where are you from?” he receives automatic acceptance as his country evokes for Canadians la playa/the beach, margaritas, fiestas, siestas and burritos (that don't exist in Mexico but that is another story for another time). So far in Canada, Canadians do not have many negative connotations of Mexico. This is a double-edged sword for my husband as people accept him as a “nice” immigrant compared to other cultural groups that they don't accept. Jesus, even though accepted into the Canadian fold, faces the up hill struggle of trying to straighten out inaccurate Canadian assumptions of his Mexican culture.
So, our homes are in the Global Village but when are we going to start inviting our neighbors over for a potluck? This is my Prairie Celtic upbringing kicking in as we feel that everything can be resolved with a good cuppa tea and a snack.
E-resources:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan/
http://txteagle.com/
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/DEBCLASS/anzal.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/09/16/bc-farmworkers
-sent-home.html?ref=rss
People don't get along
because they fear each other.
People fear each other
because they don't know each other.
They don't know each other
because they have not properly communicated with each other.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Somos una gente/ We are one people
Hay tantíisimas fronteras
que dividen a la gente,
pero por cada frontera
existe también un puente.
There are so many borders
that divide people
but for each border
there also exists a bridge.
(my translation)
-Gina Valdés
When students have a relationship with another student who is the "other" the concept of the "other' disappears as the student becomes a person and not "one of those people". Stories of how cultures collide and find common ground are vital to show students the importance of the celebration of diversity and not just the "tolerance" of diversity. Race is a cultural construct. Perhaps our tendency to ask others “Where are you from?' stems back to our history as nomads where an other human being you meet on the road could be friend or foe and you need to find this out right away and adapt our actions thus so.
My school began in 1999 as an almost completely white population. Our city is very culturally diverse but this community has only just started to be more reflective of the city it is part of. The school years ago was situated in the middle of houses on large lots and small farms with horses and sheep. Now, new homes, townhouse complexes and malls completely engulf us. It makes me nervous as a Caucasian to be in a space of many white people as I know that it does not reflect the reality of urban Canada.The school now is about 50% Caucasian, 20% Asian (Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino), 20% South Asian (Indian and Pakistani), 10% Mixed (Afro-Canadians, Latinos from Mexico, El Salvador and Ecuador, First Nations, Russian, French, Lebanese, Afghani).
The majority of ESL students in my school are Korean and there are a few Japanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Afghani, and Latino students. The Latino students are from Mexico, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Panama. Almost half of the ESL students are high or intermediate and the other half are beginners.
Years ago we had some students in pseudo Gang gangs broken up along race lines but these wannabes were manly playing at being gangs members because they thought it was "cool". Students arrive at school with misconceptions of race from their parents and family. Years ago, it was shocking to me that students studying Spanish with me were spouting racist ideas. There criticism of new immigrants was based on ignorance and incredibly insulting to me since I am married to a new immigrant. A couple of years ago, a group of Korean businessmen purchased a local mall and there were some protests about them bringing in mainly Korean businesses. Since some students have never left this community to see the normal racial mix that there is for example in Vancouver I told them to "wake up and smell the multicultural breakfast".
In the early 1990s I lived in Ecuador in a city named Riobamba and after the killing of an indigenous man by the army, indigenous communities staged a march in the city. They all descended from the small villages around the city and marched in protest for human rights and better access to clean drinking water, health care and education. As the news of the demonstration spread through the city people started yelling, "Vienen los Indios/The Indians are Coming" as they quickly drew down the metal blinds on store window and locked padlocks. This reaction reminds me of what has happened in my school's community. There have been all kinds of change in the cultural composition of the community and change is hard for people. Our community used to be viewed as "red neck" but these attitudes are changing. I am glad about the changes in the community as racial diversity brings vitality.
Our school generally breaks up into racial groups but there is a lot of intermingling in the clubs like Student Council, Global Issues and sports teams. The library is a place of solace for immigrant students and they gather there in the mornings and at lunch. We have a lot of work to do as a school to promote inter-cultural communication and understanding but overall the school community gets along.
The Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat in an interview with the CBC journalist Eleanor Wachtel states that her adaptation to her new life in the United States as a 12 year old as an experience entirely shaped by loss, "My primary feeling the whole first year was one of loss. Loss of my childhood and of the people I left behind and also of being lost. It was like being a baby learning everything for the first time".
This year, Edwidge Danticat published a compelling book about the life and tragic death of her dear uncle and in the CBC radio programme Words at Large Danticat eloquently talks about the sense of dislocation she felt as a young girl when she moved to the U.S. to join her parents. This podcast reminded me of the video we viewed this week Listen with Your Heart. I worked for my years in Latin America away from my family but as my Mexican husband points out to me again and again, "You got to return to your family in Canada". It seems like the pain of immigration is lost as generations adapt to their adopted land. My Great-Grandmother could have gone back to Wales to visit her country but she never did. However, as I watch my husband adapt to Canada his yearning for his family grows stronger and stronger.
This complete loss of everything can be so traumatic to students as they are cast into Canadian society. Some times the body of the new immigrant is in Canada but the heart remains in the country of origin. How can we as educators teach students that dwelling in the Borderlands/La Frontera with one foot in each culture can be a good place to be? At the being of the process of adaptation this state of being just "sucks". I wouldn't go up to someone in a Emergency ward with a major wound and say "Hey don't worry! That will feel better soon!" I found the video Listen with Your Heart so powerful because students were talking from their hearts about their feelings of loss, dislocation and frustration. Several theories present cultural adaptation as simple: a honeymoon period, anger, frustration, confusion and finally acceptance/adaptation. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were that simple? Adaptation is messy especially when learning a new language and culture. Students can think they are doing so well and one interaction can send them right back to Angerland! The challenge is that each student is at a different place in his or her adaptation to Canada. Isn't there a way for students to be able to express their feelings about learning English? I heard something on CBC about an ESL teacher using drama to get students to express their feelings. When I taught English and Spanish, I asked students to respond to ideas or literature using art or music and they were so creative. I love the idea of students helping students and I was glad to see a Grade 12 ESL student in my school working with an ESL beginner's class. She is able to share with the younger students about her adaptation process to life in Canada. Also, I was talking to a student this week and I think it helped her to hear me acknowledge that English is hard to learn and that it will eventually get easier. Compassion and understanding goes a long way to help students feel better about their journey.
How can I as a Teacher Librarian help students with the challenge of adaptation? The library needs to be a welcoming place for ESL/immigrant students. I am entering the second year as a TL and more and more I am realizing that I need to work more with teachers to make more of an impact. I need to help every teacher that comes to collaborate with me on a lesson to consider the needs of ESL students. My collection has books and resources of all levels and the collection is integrated so when a student searches for a book on the Renaissance there are a variety of resources for them to choose from. ESL resources are not isolated in a separate shelf. I do need to augment my collection of books on CD, as students like to listen and read along simultaneously. A Latina told me in a workshop I was facilitating that I was the only person she had met in Canada with an open heart and that other Canadians she had met were "cold". As a society, we need to have empathy towards new immigrants and welcome them!
E-resources:
http://www.cbc.ca/wordsatlarge/blog/2008/07/edwidge_danticats_memoir_is_bo.html
http://books.google.ca/books?as_auth=Edwidge+Danticat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwidge_Danticat
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/DEBCLASS/anzal.htm
