|
|
 | “This Place Nurtures My Spirit:” Creating Contexts of Empowerment in Linguistically-Diverse Schools |
| |
  | |||
| |
“This Place Nurtures My Spirit:” Creating Contexts of Empowerment in Linguistically-Diverse Schools Jim
Cummins University
of Toronto
The “quotation” in the title is wishful thinking. It expresses what I and
every other contributor to this volume would hope that schools might at least
aspire to achieve. Instead, as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas’ writing and presentations
have powerfully articulated, schools frequently inculcate shame among culturally
diverse students, constrict their identities and their minds, and leave them
spiritually numb rather than vibrant. This
reality emerges clearly from the study carried out by Mary Poplin and Joseph
Weeres in four multicultural urban schools in southern California, termed Voices
from the Inside: A Report on Schooling from Inside the Classroom
(Poplin & Weeres,
1992)
. Among
the 24,000 pages of interview transcriptions, essays, drawings, journal entries
and notes that formed the data for this study was a poignant observation by one
of the students: “This place hurts my spirit.” Poplin and Weeres
reported that the schools exhibited “a pervasive sense of despair” largely
as a result of the problematic relationships that were the norm in these
schools: Relationships dominated all participant discussions
about issues of schooling in the U.S. No group inside the schools felt
adequately respected, connected or affirmed. Students, over and over again,
raised the issue of care. What they liked best about school was when people,
particularly teachers, cared about them or did special things for them.
Dominating their complaints were being ignored, not being cared for and
receiving negative treatment. (1992, p. 19) Clearly,
schools do not have to be like this. Yet,
these kinds of relationships, however well-intentioned on the part of educators,
tend to be the norm rather than the exception when the language or language
variety that students bring to school is constructed as a problem to be resolved
or fixed. We see too few examples,
at least in North America, of schools that have taken as their starting point
the conviction that linguistically diverse students have the right to
maintain and develop their mother tongue within the context of the school and
that their cultural identities are worthy of respect and nurturing.
We also see too few schools that take as their starting point the
conviction that the languages and cultures that students bring to school are resources
for other students, teachers, and the society as a whole
(Ruiz, 1988)
. Although the major
reason for this is the prevalence of coercive relations of power in most spheres
of human endeavor, the lack of knowledge of documented alternatives also
contributes to the perpetuation of destructive forms of schooling. In
this paper, I attempt to redress this lack of knowledge of alternatives by
sketching three school models that have clearly succeeded in “nurturing
students’ spirits” as well as expanding their options for both academic
achievement and identity formation. The
schools come from three different continents and I have chosen them because they
illustrate well what is possible when we as educators change our orientation
from focusing on language as problem to a focus on language as right
and/or language as resource. In describing each school, I first provide a
summary of its main features in tabular form and then draw out some of the
commonalities that characterize all
three programs. In each case, I draw primarily on book-length documentation
relating to the school so there is ample scope for those interested to pursue
further details. All three programs were “mature” at the time the reports
were written, ranging from approximately 10-20 years of operation. The
information is accurate as of the time of the publications cited; however,
schools evolve and personnel change so it is quite likely that the portraits
presented here do not fully represent these schools as they are now. The point,
however, is that they illustrate what educators, students, and communities can
achieve when the ideology that permeates the school challenges the constricting
and devaluing ideology that subordinated groups have typically endured in the
wider society. Richmond Road
School
Location:
New Zealand (Auckland)
Languages:
Cook Islands, English, Maori, Samoan Students: Cook
Islands L1,English L1, Maori L1, Samoan L1 L1/L2%:
Model
A: 100 % English
Model B: 50 % Maori, 50 % English
Model C: 50 % Samoan, 50 % English
Model D: 50 % Cook Islands, 50 % English Goals:
To affirm and incorporate the languages and cultures of the students
within the school. Results:
By the end of elementary school, students’ reading attainment improved
dramatically compared to their performance in the first few years of schooling.
Most children (26/35) in the cohort analyzed longitudinally were performing at
or above grade expectations compared to only 3/35 who were at or above grade
norms on entry to school. This contrasts with the pattern in large scale studies
which showed similar students in New Zealand far below grade level with the gap
increasing as students progressed through the grades
(Elley, 1992)
. Comments:
The classes are organized in vertical family groupings rather than
according to chronological age. Peer tutoring and cooperative learning are
central to the instructional approach.
Students stay in the same program from 5 to 13 years old and parents are
given the choice of which model to enter. Thus, children from English-speaking
backgrounds also entered the bilingual (Maori) program (Cazden, 1989; May 1994). Oyster
Bilingual School Location:
USA
(Washington, DC) Languages:
Spanish,
English Students:
Approximately
60% Spanish L1 (primarily Salvadorean), 40% English L1 (about half African
American, half Euro-American). L1/L2
%:
Approximately 50% Spanish, 50% English; students read in both
languages each day. Each class is taught by two teachers, one responsible for
English-medium instruction and one for Spanish-medium instruction. This
organization is achieved through larger class sizes and assigning ancilliary or
resource teacher allocations to classroom instruction. Goals:
The development of students who are biliterate and
bicultural. Results:
Grade
3 Reading, Mathematics, Language and Science scores were 1.6--1.8 median grade
equivalents above norms (percentiles 74—81); grade 6 grade equivalents were
4.4—6.2 above norms (percentiles 85—96) (1991 data). Comments:
Started in 1971, the school has evolved a social
identities project
(Freeman, 1998)
that communicates
strongly to students the value of linguistic and cultural diversity.
In the words of one of the teachers: “It’s much more than
language.” The
Foyer Model of Trilingual/Bicultural Education Location:
Belgium
(Brussels) Languages:
Dutch,
French, and one of the following: Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Students:
Students
from the following backgrounds: Italian (2 schools), Spanish (2 schools),
Turkish (1 school) and Moroccan (1 school) L1/L2%:
Nursery
school (ages 3-5):
50% L1 (L1 grouping), 50% Dutch (integrated in multi-ethnic groups); Primary school (ages 6-12): Year 1:
Year 2:
Year 3+:
Goals: 1.
To prepare all children and teachers to live together in a
complex, multicultural society; 2.
To enable migrant children to acquire fluency and literacy in three
languages by the end of elementary schooling; 3. To increase migrant children’s opportunities for integration in both the host country and in their countries of origin; 4.
To
increase family involvement in the school and society in general; Results:
Project
students develop better L1 knowledge than those in monolingual Dutch schools,
although their L1 knowledge is less than that of students in their countries of
origin. Students also develop a level of Dutch sufficient to enable them to keep
up with subsequent classes at secondary school, although there are still
differences between them Dutch-L1 Belgian students. Comments:
Started in 1981 by Foyer (a non-state
organization concerned with the well-being of immigrant communities in
Brussels), the project assumed as axiomatic that children should be taught in
part by teachers of the same origin as themselves in order to support their
sense of identity (Byram & Leman, 1989; Reid & Reich, 1992). According
to the evaluation report on Dutch proficiency “children in the experimental
group succeed in catching up on most of their arrears in proficiency in the
course of primary school” (p. 47)
(Jaspaert, 1989)
. The Deep Structure
of Educational Change
At
a superficial level, these three programs have obvious similarities and
differences. Each has developed
over a number of years and each has demonstrated sustained positive results.
Each of the programs also incorporates instruction through the mother
tongue for children from linguistic minority backgrounds. However, the amounts
of L1 instruction differ considerably as do the school organization and patterns
of contact/integration with students from the dominant language background.
Similar
surface structure variation could be found in bilingual and trilingual programs
around the world. This is not at all surprising in view of the variation of
sociolinguistic and sociopolitical contexts within and between countries.
What appears to be crucial for the success of any program (monolingual,
bilingual, trilingual) in reversing patterns of academic failure among students
of bilingual/bicultural heritage is the extent to which the patterns of
interaction between educators and students in the school (henceforth micro-interactions)
actively challenge the historical and current patterns of relationship between
dominant and subordinated communities in the wider society (henceforth macro-interactions).
The framework in Figure 1 expresses this point. The
framework proposes that relations of power in the wider society
(macro-interactions), ranging from coercive to collaborative in varying degrees,
influence both the ways in which educators define their roles and the types of
structures that are established in the educational system. Coercive
relations of power refer to the exercise of power by a dominant individual,
group, or country to the detriment of a subordinated individual, group or
country. For example, in the past, dominant group institutions (e.g. schools)
have required that subordinated groups deny their cultural identity and give up
their languages as a necessary condition for success in the
"mainstream" society. For
educators to become partners in the transmission of knowledge,
culturally-diverse students were required to acquiesce in the subordination of
their identities and to celebrate as "truth" the perspectives of the
dominant group (e.g. the "truth" that Columbus "discovered"
America and brought "civilization" to its indigenous peoples). Collaborative
relations of power, by contrast, reflect the sense of the term “power” that
refers to “being enabled,” or “empowered” to achieve more.
Within collaborative relations of power, “power” is not a fixed
quantity but is generated through interaction with others.
The more empowered one individual or group becomes, the more is generated
for others to share, as is the case when two people love each other or when we
really connect with children we are teaching.
Within this context, the term empowerment can be defined as the
collaborative creation of power. Students whose schooling experiences
reflect collaborative relations of power participate confidently in instruction
as a result of the fact that their sense of identity is being affirmed and
extended in their interactions with educators. They also know that their voices
will be heard and respected within the classroom. Schooling amplifies rather
than silences their power of self-expression. Educator
role definitions refer to the mindset of expectations, assumptions and goals
that educators bring to the task of educating culturally diverse students.
Educational structures refer to the organization of schooling in a broad sense
that includes policies, programs, curriculum, and assessment. While these
structures will generally reflect the values and priorities of dominant groups
in society, they are not by any means fixed or static. As with most other
aspects of the way societies are organized and resources distributed,
educational structures are contested by individuals and groups. Educational
structures, together with educator role definitions, determine the
micro-interactions between educators, students, and communities. These
micro-interactions form an interpersonal or interactional space within which the
acquisition of knowledge and formation of identity is negotiated. Power is
created and shared within this interpersonal space where minds and identities
meet. As such, these
micro-interactions constitute the most immediate determinant of student academic
success or failure. Micro-interactions
between educators, students and communities are never neutral; in varying
degrees, they either reinforce coercive relations of power or promote
collaborative relations of power. In the former case, they contribute to the
disempowerment of culturally diverse students and communities; in the latter
case, the micro-interactions constitute a process of empowerment that enables
educators, students and communities to challenge the operation of coercive power
structures. In
short, the framework
(Cummins, 1996)
suggests that the deep
structure of educational change reflects the extent to which educators
individually and collectively challenge the coercive power structure of the
wider society. In what ways do the three programs sketched above challenge
coercive structures and promote collaborate relations of power? The Collaborative
Creation of Power in Three School Programs
Some
commonalities are immediately obvious. All
three schools articulate the value for individual students and their families of
developing strong L1 proficiency in both oral and written modes. In doing so,
they are challenging the still pervasive devaluation and sometimes
“linguicidal” orientation towards the mother tongues of subordinated groups
in the wider society (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1999) The goals of these schools reflect
both language as right and language as resource orientations. FIGURE 1 COERCIVE
AND COLLABORATIVE RELATIONS OF POWER MANIFESTED IN MACRO- AND MICRO-INTERACTIONS COERCIVE AND COLLABORATIVE
RELATIONS OF POWER MANIFESTED IN MACRO-INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SUBORDINATED COMMUNITIES AND DOMINANT GROUP INSTITUTIONS í
î EDUCATOR ROLE DEFINITIONS «
EDUCATIONAL STRUCTURES î
í MICRO-INTERACTIONS BETWEEN EDUCATORS AND STUDENTS forming an INTERPERSONAL SPACE within which knowledge is generated and identities are negotiated EITHER REINFORCING COERCIVE RELATIONS
OF POWER OR PROMOTING COLLABORATIVE RELATIONS OF POWER The
following quotations from evaluation reports and other documentation illustrate
other aspects of the deep structure of collaborative empowerment and willingness
to challenge coercive relations of power that characterizes these schools. Richmond
Road. From
Courtney Cazden’s (1989) report comes these quotes from teachers in Richmond
Road that illustrate the ways in which identities are negotiated between
teachers and students and among teachers from different backgrounds: We, as teachers, share our various ethnic backgrounds
with each other. This helps to enrich us as a group working together. And not
only that—the children also share their backgrounds with each other and with
the teachers. The whole basis of
the subject content matter of the school is who we are in this school.
(p. 148) I’m learning from the kids—their cultures, and
not only that, their languages as well. (p. 148) It’s taken a long time, but for me—like many
people before—I think of Richmond Road now as my turangawaiwai [a place
to stand]. It’s the place, and what it represents to me, in my mind and my
heart. I left Fiji with a chip on
my shoulder, and I had nothing to do with Fijian people for ten years. It’s only by being involved with the philosophy here:
we’re constantly telling people not to be sucked up in the system that says
you have to speak English and be like an English person before you can succeed.
And I realized that here I was, telling them to do these things,
and I wasn’t even doing them myself.
I had never spoken to my children in Fijian.
This was a big discovery to me. I felt good about myself before, but as a
New Zealand person. Whereas
now, because of the experiences that I had here, I feel totally different. (p.
149) When I was a child, my mother never came near the
school, because she felt she didn’t have a place in it. Here people come and
feel they’re helping, and I think that’s what’s important—that
everybody’s got something they can do for the school.
If parents and children feel that school is a special place for them,
then the child benefits from this liaison. When you, as a teacher, have the
support of the parents who feel good about the place, then there’s nothing
that can’t be done for that child. That’s
special about Richmond Road. And, of course, it’s happening for each
ethnic group. (pp. 158-159) When
teachers who belong to groups with differential status in the wider society
share as equals within the school, this constitutes a challenge to the pattern
of coercive macro-interactions in the society.
Similarly, when teachers learn from their culturally diverse
students, a shift in the pattern of power relations has occurred.
When the school creates a climate of two-way partnership with parents
from varied backgrounds and values the language and cultural resources they can
bring to school, collaborative
empowerment is taking place. Oyster
Bilingual School. Rebecca Freeman provides detailed discourse analyses that
illustrate how the micro-interactions between educators and students in Oyster
bilingual school “refuse” the discourse of subordination that characterizes
the wider society and most conventional school contexts.
She points out that the discourse practices in the school “reflect an
ideological assumption that linguistic and cultural diversity is a resource to
be developed by all students, and not a problem that minority students must
overcome in order to participate and achieve at school” (p. 233).
Specifically, educators have choices in the way they organize
discourse practices and these choices entail significant consequences for both
language minority and majority students. The school requires all students
to become bilingual and biliterate in Spanish and English, and “to expect,
tolerate, and respect diverse ways of interacting” (p. 27). Oyster’s bilingual program has two complementary
agendas that together challenge the unequal distribution of rights in mainstream
US schools and society. First, the dual-language program is organized so that
language minority and language majority students have the opportunity to develop
the ability to speak two languages and to achieve academically through two
languages. Second, the social
identities project is organized so that language minority students gain
experience seeing themselves as having the right to participate equally in the
academic discourse, and the language majority students gain experience
respecting that right. (p. 231) In
other words, the school “aims to promote social change on the local level by
socializing children differently from the way children are socialized in
mainstream US educational discourse” (p. 27). Rather than pressuring language minority students to
assimilate to the positively evaluated majority social identity (white
middle-class native English-speaking) in order to participate and achieve at
school, the Oyster educational discourse is organized to positively evaluate
linguistic and cultural diversity. ... this socializing discourse makes possible
the emergence of a wide range of positively
evaluated social identities, and offers more choices to both language minority
and language majority students than are traditionally available in mainstream US
schools and society. The Oyster educators argue that students’ socialization
through this educational discourse is the reason that [limited English
proficient], language minority, and language majority students are all
participating and achieving more or less equally. (p. 27) There
is an obvious congruence between Freeman’s account of why and how the Oyster
bilingual school succeeds so well and the framework presented in Figure 1. The
Foyer Model. A
number of themes run through the various evaluation reports of the Foyer
project. One is the necessity for schools to focus directly on issues of identity
if they are to prepare students to thrive in a complex multilingual
multicultural social context. In
Brussels (and Belgium as a whole), French is the more prestigious language but
Dutch is the majority language. Because of the similarity of languages, Spanish
and Italian children often acquire French on the street and are frequently more
fluent in French than their Dutch-speaking peers. These students speak their L1
in the home and frequently visit their countries of origin during the summer.
So three languages permeate many aspects of their lives and constitute
significant components of their Belgian identity.
At
one level the school simply reflects and positively valorizes this multilingual
and multicultural reality. However,
the apparent logic and “obviousness” of this approach masks its uniqueness
and the challenge it constitutes to the educational status quo. Unlike more
traditional schools that ignore and (implicitly or explicitly) devalue
students’ home language and culture, Foyer communicates to students (and their
parents) the fact that their languages and cultures are resources that
provide them with expanded options or choices with respect to both
identity and future life choices (e.g. employment possibilities, place or
residence etc.). Also
clear from the Foyer case study is the fact that trilingualism can be developed
at no cost to students’ achievement in the dominant language of society and
school (Dutch). Although the
evaluation comparisons involve small numbers, it is clear that teachers,
researchers, and parents consider the program to be highly successful with most
students coming close to Dutch (L1) norms by the end of elementary school. In
short, the organizational structures of the project together with the ways in
which educators have defined their roles or identities result in a pattern of
micro-interactions that expand the identity options and academic opportunities
available to language minority students. The
language as resource orientation that permeates the ethos of the Foyer
schools challenges and refutes the language as problem/minorities as inferior
orientation that characterizes more typical educational contexts. Conclusion
The
three programs that have been reviewed suggest that the negotiation of identity
in the interactions between educators and minority students is central to
students' academic success or failure. An image of the society that students
will graduate into and the kind of contributions they can make to that society
is embedded implicitly in the interactions between educators and students. These
interactions reflect both the organizational structures that have been
implemented (e.g. L1 promotion or L1 suppression) and the ways in which
educators have defined their roles with respect to the purposes of education in
general and culturally diverse students and communities in particular. Are we
preparing students to accept the societal status quo (and, in many cases, their
own inferior status therein) or are we preparing them to participate actively
and critically in their society as equal partners with those who come from
dominant group backgrounds? This perspective clearly implies that in situations
where coercive relations of power between dominant and subordinated groups
predominate, the creation of interpersonal spaces where students' identities are
validated will entail a direct challenge by educators (and students) to the
societal power structure. School
reform efforts that fail to challenge coercive relations of power rarely succeed
because they do not address the causes of school failure. References
Byram, M., & Leman, J. (1990). Bicultural and
trilingual education. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Cazden,
C. B. (1989). Richmond Road: A
multilingual/multicultural primary school in Auckland, New Zealand. Language
and Education, 3, 143-166. Cummins,
J. (1996). Negotiating identities: Education for empowerment in a diverse
society. Los Angeles: California Association for Bilingual Education. Elley,
W. (1992). How in the world do students read? IEA study of reading literacy.
The Hague, Netherlands: The International Association for the Evaluation of
Educational Achievement. Freeman,
R. D. (1998). Bilingual education and social change. Clevedon, England:
Multilingual Matters. Jaspaert,
K. & Lemmens, G. (1989). Linguistic evaluation of Dutch as a third language.
In M. Byram, and Leman, J. (Ed.), Bicultural and trilingual education
(pp. 30-56). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. May,
S. (1994). Making multicultural education work. Clevedon, England:
Multilingual Matters. Poplin,
M., & Weeres, J. (1992). Voices from the inside:
A report on schooling from inside the classroom. Claremont, CA: The
Institute for Education in Transformation at the Claremont Graduate School. Reid,
E., & Reich, H. (1992). Breaking the boundaries:
Migrant workers' children in the EC. Clevedon, England: Multilingual
Matters. Ruiz,
R. (1988). Orientations in language planning. In S. L. McKay & S. C. Wong
(Eds.), Language diversity: Problem
or resource? (pp. 3-25). New York: Newbury House. Skutnabb-Kangas,
T. (1999). Linguistic genocide--or worldwide diversity and human rights.
Mawah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
| ||||||||||||||||||
