“Adelita continues that being from an immigrant family makes her ‘proud of being different from everybody else,’ but that she needs people from her school and community to support her in being different and to appreciate the strengths and contributions her family makes to the schools and town in which they now live.”

“Elisabeta powerfully ends her poster with the idea that ‘I love when people tell me I am a good person.'”

As I read this article and contemplated the students’ responses, I noticed a trend: there seems to be a need for outside validation. The students repeatedly demonstrate that they know they are good people and that they come from good families, even if they are frequently misunderstood or discriminated against. Continue reading They Know They’re Great, But They Still Need Support →

“Through their work together, project participants continually referred to the importance of the project as a vital way of them connecting to one another, supporting one another, and finding possible ways to address problems and discrimination they continued to face in school and society” (Roxas, Gabriel & Becker, 2017, p. 24).

The aspect of this project that resonates with me the most is the newcomers’ ability to integrate into the community and, at the same time, the community’s opportunity to meet and interact with each other, especially those that are new. I think a lot of people, i.e. educators, administration, parents, student, local community members, etc., struggle with the idea of “community”, and what does that even mean? How do you achieve it, and not only for just a moment, but long-lasting connections for the betterment of the greater whole? Continue reading What does it mean to build community anyway? →

Khurami, a 7th grader from Yemen, explains how he experiences discrimination through his experiences of being an Arabic speaker. He states, “I want them [his peers in school] to know about us when they talk about us in English, because we are not talking English, and they laugh about us. I want them to not laugh because we are new here, because we just came into the country. Because if they go to my country, they’re gonna be the same.” Khurami here shares how he feels excluded from conversations at school because of his beginning level of English and how other students talk about and laugh about him and some of his peers in the ESL classes because their use of English is not as strong as that of the native English speakers. He feels quite deeply the laughter and scorn of other students in school and wishes that it would stop. Khurami thoughtfully points out if these same native English language speakers came to his country of Yemen to learn Arabic, they would be in the exact same situation he is currently in of learning a new language and they would face similar difficulties in learning a new language (Becker, Gabriel, and Roxas, 2017).

Continue reading MVP#2 Help me to learn English but…don’t laugh at me please →

“Photovoice is a participatory action-based research process that allows its
participants to tell their own stories through photo exhibitions, public presentations, and
school displays […] Photovoice allows members of marginalized communities to
share their experiences with others and empowers them to become positive change
agents within their communities.” (Roxas et al. 2017 p5)

The first time I heard about Participatory Action Research was around this time last year. I was working on a project with a friend of mine, also in education, which we would present later on in the semester. Reading this article made me realize that I didn’t really understand what PAR was when he was explaining it to me then (or after, either).

Continue reading PAR & Descriptive Review →