Leveraging Students' Translanguaging Practices to Strengthen the School Community

• In Event: 28.059 - Humanizing Schools for Multilingual Learners in the "Post-Truth" Era

Abstract

Purpose: This presentation will focus on the work of a public high school (grades 9–12) in the Bronx, NYC. The school has close to 500 students, primarily Latinx (60%) and Black (33%). Fifteen percent of students have been identified as ELLs, 10% are “newcomers” or students with interrupted formal education (SIFE), and 90% qualify for free/reduced-price meals. The school was selected to participate in New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (NYSIEB), working toward improving the education of emergent bilingual students across NY state.
Method: During school visits, researchers from (CUNY–NYSIEB) interviewed school staff and conducted classroom observations. Through the data analysis process, researchers identified specific practices that the school used to support emergent bilinguals and to foster as humanizing space.
Results: Data analysis yielded three primary findings.
1. School structures such as distributed leadership; flexible programing in which the school shapes the programs that they offer from year to year, depending on the needs of the incoming students; and collaborative team teaching in which the ENL and bilingual teachers co-teach within subject-area classes with large numbers of emergent bilinguals. This model also includes specific supports for the social–emotional and linguistic needs of newcomers, emergent bilingual speakers, and SIFE students.
2. Implementation of translanguaging pedagogies to advanced students’ literacy and language learning through: translanguaging documentation, translanguaging scaffolds, and translanguaging transformative spaces that involved incorporating the linguistic and cultural practices of students’ families and communities into the school space. This project extended learning beyond the classroom with students using their knowledge of members of the community to choose an interviewee and their full linguistic repertoire to conduct interviews and write about them.
3. Using students’ linguistic and cultural resources to support newcomers through buddy systems and student mentors. For example, The ENL team pairs emergent bilinguals to become mentors for newcomer students who speak their home language. Among other things, the mentors share their work with the new students as peer-led exemplars. They talk through their work samples with their mentees to show what the target looks like. The mentors help “demystify” the academic process, which is particularly important for students who have interrupted formal education.
Although graduation rates and test results don’t tell the full story of a school, 90.6% of students graduate in 4 years (compared to 72.6% citywide). For emergent bilinguals, 58.3% graduate in 4 years (compared to 30.8% citywide) (NYC DOE, Graduation Results, Cohorts 2001–2012).
Implications/Significance: Some of the implications of this work are that in order create humanizing spaces for emergent bilinguals, schools need to transform the formal structures within the school, providing a framework for incorporating translanguaging pedagogies in the classroom, and creating structures in which students can support one another, recognizing them as agents who have important contributions to make to the school community.

Author

• Ivana Espinet, City College of New York - CUNY