“She asked us to work harder to build positive relationships with immigrant students in our classes, and to take time to listen to their stories and learn about what they have experienced. If we can bring a bilingual approach that taps into students’ home language and culture, we as teachers, school leaders, counselors, and school social work staff can more effectively partner with our students’ families to bridge the gap between school and family and community.”

– Goodman, It’s Not About Grit, chapter 3 p.79

I feel so happy to be teaching ENL in a time where translanguaging is embraced. Specifically at the middle school level that I’m working with in Spanish Harlem, these students have a lot of knowledge in their home/first language and even more extensive knowledge in the fields and subjects that interest them the most. For the “All About Me” activities we worked on as a class, I allowed them to “code switch” a bit and include some of their answers their first languages. Since the goal of that specific activity was to get them to focus on personal and possessive pronouns, answering “my favorite sport is arco y flecha” did not interfere with the language objective or learning target of the class.

Giving the students the space to talk about where they’re from, where I can find it on a map, their favorite food from home, or the many other parts of them that they can now bring into the classroom makes them more excited and motivated to be in their in the first place and is what this chapter touches upon. Connecting with our students and empowering them are products of the type of communication we have with them. If we welcome their knowledge, their differences, their backgrounds and work with them (not against them), we can build a better classroom environment for them. I know I still have a lot to learn about being an ENL teacher but learning alongside my students and simultaneously learning from them makes the experience uniquely enriching for all of us.

As an emotional response to this chapter and it’s stories, I created a playlist on Spotify. This is just a small compilation of tracks that I felt inclined to include but even the diversity in artists and array of years in which the songs were released says a lot about the importance of this topic. The songs talk about human rights regarding immigrants, stories of people emigrating, how immigration affects those left behind, the resilience of immigrants, the politics behind views on immigration, cultural preservation post-immigration, and more.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e7B7KA30ouPBt4vXli0HsVFc5e7W9eE2grQoQ8lH_5c/edit?usp=sharing

This is a link to a sort of “annotated song list” explaining the topic of each song and a translated quote since not all of the songs are in English.