Blog 4-EDU 411 Advocating for ELLs

I have worked as a teacher at Head Start for 6 years. In the past three years the my classroom has completely transformed. When I started teaching I worked with 34 English speaking families. I now work with 5 Arabic speaking families, 2 Swahili speaking families, 3 Kirundi speaking families, and 24 English speaking families. The families that speak languages other than English have very limited English language skills, yet the services I am to provide for them are identical to the services I provide for the English speaking families. From the first year working with these families I became an advocate for them. It was easy to tell that we were ill prepared for the influx of refugee families speaking languages we had no support services for and that is where my journey began. I reached out to the families, visiting their homes when I knew older siblings would be present to help me speak with parents and writing notes to send home that would allow them to take the note to someone else for translation or to have a child translate and help them respond. I invited them to come to the classrooms, come on field trips, attend meetings encouraging them to be as active as possible in their child's education. I encouraged them to continue to speak their native language at home but also to take ESL classes. And I switched my specialization here at Kendall from Special Education to ESL. I don't anticipate that this trend will reverse itself and as an educator I feel it is crucial that I am able to work effectively with these students and families.

We send home surveys at the end of the year for parents to fill out asking them to rate our program and give feedback. Several of my ESL families sent back their surveys. Their comments were very similar; thank you for teaching my child, thank you for teaching my child English, please be patient while we learn English, we try very hard to learn. This is the same message I hear at meetings and conferences.    

This year I have had my first sibling of one of my first refugee families, so I have had the privilege of teaching two of their children. This family received a Habit House this year and I have been volunteering on Saturdays at the construction site. As I have been working, I have been able to serve as a go between with the family, who is more comfortable with me now, and the construction team, who are unfamiliar with working with ESL adults. I can help the crew communicate with the family because I am familiar with them and also I understand how to communicate, that I have to use basic vocabulary and gestures and patience. It has given me more insight into what this process is like for these families and how difficult it really is.

These families need to be empowered in multiple ways. First they need to learn English so that they can support their children's education. Next they need help in understanding that they have rights and certain guarantees in this country, which most likely was not the case in their country. We need to extend a hand to them in educating them, as well as their children, and this often means thinking way outside the box because of the language barriers. Most importantly we need to be vocal about what these children need in our classrooms.