Philosophy of Bilingual/Multicultural/ESL Education
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My overall philosophy of education involves providing students with the tools to empower themselves and allow them to take charge of their lives. When teaching and working with linguistic minority students this mission takes on more importance since these students do not have the cultural capital and dominant discourse that is possessed by, and familiar to, middle class Americans to help them readily access the academic curriculum and succeed inside and outside of school. If linguistic minority students are apprenticed into attaining numerous discourses and developing critical literacy skills, they will be better equipped to change the conditions that they may find themselves and their families living in. With this in mind, I will approach my teaching considering how I can make the curriculum more accessible and relevant to the lives of my students and not merely teach the dominant ideology that permeates the institutions of this country so that they, too, can access the public arena as they see fit.
As a future teacher of English Language Learners, I think it will be crucial to teach various Discourses to my students. Language has many uses and purposes that should be explored rather than reduced to merely a focus on the technical rules of the language. I think it will be of the utmost importance to provide lessons and opportunities for students to explore their identity and develop their own voice in their educational endeavors. Building connections from prior experiences and knowledge from their first language as an additive approach, as opposed to a subtractive one, to enhance confidence and self-worth is the way language should be approached. I fully believe in the maintenance of native languages and therefore hope that this can be encouraged in the educational setting I find myself working in.
In her powerful piece, How To Tame A Wild Tongue which addresses language, power, and degradation issues, Gloria Anzaldua eloquently verbalizes that, “ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity-I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (207). In this powerful work she relays experiences of being told to speak ‘American’ or go back to Mexico. This brings home the point that if we continue to degrade and invalidate people’s first (native) language we are degrading them as individuals. If we continue to send messages to our students that their native languages are inappropriate we are not doing them a service to their overall identity development.
A Freirian Approach
As Paolo Freire so insightfully defines: to teach is “to create possibilities for the construction and production of knowledge” (Freire, 1998, 49) not to merely transfer knowledge into students’ heads. The act of learning should be viewed as an active and individualized effort. Freire believes that the teacher and learner come into a sort of partnership where they co-construct knowledge through dialogue and discussion. Through this interaction, themes surface which should be further explored and expanded upon to teach content and language. Each participant is affected by the process and changed in the process. In my teaching, I hope to use a Freirian approach in developing curriculum and carrying out class discussions and to remember to release some of the teacher control and teacher- centered methods that I have experienced in the past.
I want to cultivate an environment of progress and change in the classroom so that students can sense that the skills they are learning can be used as they see fit in their lives. And I also want to invoke the notion of conscientizacao within myself and my students so that we can ask questions of reality/society and to seek answers for these questions that we have, thereby becoming more active and powerful in our own lives. I believe that taking a more critical approach to education as a whole can help develop the skills which can empower and improve the lives of linguistic minority students.