For four years I worked with the immigrant population at a charter school in Washington, DC that served the most vulnerable among that group.   Reading (Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds, I was reminded of many of the struggles our immigrant families dealt with and also brought with them to school every day. Many students I worked with were hesitant to access services because they thought that either their immigration status would be revealed and ICE would be informed or that using government services would negatively affect future petitions for residency based on myths that exist within the immigrant community.

The most important things I learned working in that school was how to make immigrant families (or any family) feel comfortable in the school environment.  I had not heard of the term “bridging” before, but it was a practice that was integrated into our school philosophy.  My director made it clear, first through our mission statement that our families are not just people receiving services, rather they are important members of our community and interaction is as beneficial to our school as as it is to the participants.  This idea was made clear due to the fact that almost all staff were bilingual in Spanish-English, Amharic-English, French-English or Bengali-English (amongst others).  We hired current or former students whenever possible: meaning that staff were diverse and mirrored the population that we served.  Also, we had a student council made up of our adult students that was an important body within the school.  Additionally, several adult students with higher English levels sat on our board of directors.  All of these actions created an environment of inclusion, where immigrant students felt as though they had power over their own education.  I was taught to really listen to the needs of the individual and to do whatever in my power to help students, whether it was school-related or not.  What I am getting at, is there are ways to engage immigrant communities in the American school system, in fact, respectful integration is already taking place in some schools, although it does requires a change in mentality that many schools are not willing or aware enough to make.

“While religious communities may understand belonging as communion or taking part in a covenant, teachers in public schools need only recognize the spiritual significance of feeling invited, included, and embraced in a group dedicated to one’s own learning.” – Eric Toshalis “A Question of ‘Faith'” (p. 192)

Truthfully, I was not on board with this article until he made this claim. This sentence made me finally comprehend what he was recommending by considering faith in the classroom. 

immigrant families play an active and deliberate role in creating distance between the worlds of home and school because of their ambivalent feelings about U.S. culture and their fears of “losing their children” to Americanization.
Bridging can feel threatening to immigrant parents, however. Recently arrived immigrant parents have reported retaining aspects of the home culture as a protective mechanism, perceiving a correlation between loss of home culture and negative social and educational outcomes for youth (Bulcroft, Carmody, & Bulcroft, 1996; Driscoll, Russell, & Crockett, 2008; Varela et al., 2004).
—-Doucet 2011, Reconstructing home and school

I would like to choose these sentences because it was a real coincident that, during my observation this morning in an ESL class in P.S 42, the teacher told me exactly the same when asked about possible causes that leads to students’ low English proficiency level. The class I observed this morning has 21 ESL students who have already been in the US for more than 3 years, and mostly their English proficiency level is above intermediate. When I helped them with their class work, they showed relatively good English ability for communication and class interaction. After class, I interviewed some ESL teachers about factors that restrain the speed of students picking up English, and they addressed some factors that I have never thought about.

It is commonly acknowledged that because of cultural factors, Asian students tend to be shy and quite in class. But Ms. Wong from P.S.42 told me that this cultural issue is so minor that most ESL teachers almost ignore it. Students don’t talk because they have no “resources” to talk. For example, when Ms. Wong mentioned a spider in class, she wanted students to share what they knew about spider. Most students keep silent, not because they don’t know what “spider” is, but because their parents never provide any chances for them to get to know or even see spiders in the outside world. They seldom go to Botanic Garden or notice a little insects in parks because most of the time after school, they are picked up by grandparents and took home to watch iPad or TV as long as they don’t make any trouble to adults. Ms. Wong mentioned that parents could be a keep factor to hold kids back from the US society. Sometimes, when parents are busy with work, they have very little time to take kids out or communicate with them, which makes it difficult for kids to gather life experience as resources to initiate conversation with others.

Ms. Wong also mentioned that some parents are kind of scared to see their kids fully immerse into American culture because it makes them feel that their kids are emotionally away from them. Some immigrant parents hope their kids to keep their mother culture while being able to blend in the American society. It is ideal but quite unrealistic. I have been living in the US for 5 years, and I have a relatively higher adaptation ability when facing new environment, so now I think I could get used to American culture pretty well. The problem is, it makes me scared sometimes because I don’t know where I belong to. I believe the same feeling would happened to immigrant kids, when they find the mother culture and American culture both exist in their bodies and they don’t emerge very well with each other.

Another reason for parents to become such a big issue is that it panics the parents when kids talked about new experience or use vocabulary that parents don’t know because parents would feel they are losing authority over their kids. That’s why kids don’t have much chances to show their ability in front of immigrant parents.