“The child, unhampered, does not waste time.”
― Caroline Pratt
With a desire to work with talented CLD students within the United States, my teaching and learning experiences have allowed me to develop a more progressive pedagogical outlook in which I guide my students to focus more on impactful lifelong skills than on the memorization of content. I currently am teaching at an international two-way bilingual immersion school in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The implementation of submersion education and structured immersion programs have lead to the retention of CLD students by providing them limited support and resources within the United States. In addition, these models do not allow the students to fully culturally integrate with one another by sharing background knowledge and applying them to their studies. My dream would be for the U.S to transition into normalizing multilingualism, and promoting positive language policies and linguistic tolerance. With an overall goal of acculturation, the United States can leave behind its “sink or swim” ELL practices and allow all students to develop strong self-esteem and a sense of identity.
Through my experiences, I fall into the category of being a sequential bilingual. I acquired my L2 in Spanish much after my L1 (English) between the ages of 18-24. My biggest takeaway and philosophy of teaching is that everyone deserves the right to an access of quality education and to be treated as an equal. For me, this generally is obtained by creating a classroom ambiance that is based on trust and understanding. Thus, in terms of my personal philosophy, I would like to consider myself an instructor who utilizes the reconceptualist approach within my class. According to Glatthorn et al., "Reconceptualists are individuals who view education more as an existential experience. They emphasize subjectivity, existential experience, and the art of interpretation in order to reveal the class conflict and unequal power relationships existing in the larger society (pg. 72)." Therefore, one could say that I am focused on change and reform in order to achieve equity in education based off of each students unique needs and abilities to learn.
Unfortunately, politics play a major role in the education system of the United States. I believe that socio-economic factors play a major role in which students obtain a quality education. In a country that claims to have "no official language" and to be a “melting pot,” one would expect us to have some of the best linguistically diverse acceptance and educational statistics in the world. However, one must understand that this country was also founded on racial injustice, in which having lighter skin/ speaking English made (makes) you a superior individual/ student. History indicates that restricting language and cultural rights can be divisive and can lead to segregationist tendencies in a society. But we have done just that, we force immigrants to conform to our standards, or they are presumed inferior or “uneducated.” This is a main reason in which I have found myself a believe in the effectiveness and importance of the reconceptualist approach. I strive for classroom equity in which everyone's backgrounds such as race, sex, learning disabilities, languages, and cultures are vital to their learning process. The United States must do better.
References:Glatthorn, A.A.; Boschee, F. Whitehead, B.M., and Boschee, B.F. (2019). Curriculum Leadership: Strategies for Development and Implementation. (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
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