Discussion Post #1

I'm not sure that I was personally in a position to have an experience of being drawn to take this course, since it is a requirement for my secondary certification path. That being said, I am certainly eager to take it and probably would have done so anyway, even if I was not certifying. I am particularly interested in understanding recent pedagogical evolutions in the field of multilingual education. I took an education course when I studied abroad last semester on “education for diversity and equality,” and one of our weekly modules focused on multilingual learners and, in particular, translanguaging practices. I was quite intrigued by the standpoint that translanguaging offers and how it allows teachers to view students as holding one integrated language repertoire from which they may draw on. I also enjoyed thinking about translanguaging in relation to Vygotsky’s concept of the zones of proximal development and how educators can structure translanguaging rings to help guide students between what they can do independently and what, for the moment, feels out of reach. I also hope to learn more about how multilingual students can be supported in early childhood education contexts, as I work at a preschool and have found the task of supporting EMLLs at that age to be equally challenging and fascinating. Ultimately, I hope to exit this course with concrete ideas and strategies ready to implement in my future HS English classroom to support EMLLs and non-EMLLs alike.

I am interested in pursing a career as a language educator. I'm not yet sure if I want to teach English or a different language, so a part of what I hope to get from this course is more clarity regarding that decision. I have been a student in a wide variety of language classes and currently teach Hebrew as a TA and tutor. I have drawn upon my own experiences as a student to come up with lesson plans and tools to help students, and have found that I really love teaching a language, but I have not yet gotten a lot of formal support or training in best practices. Additionally, I grew up bilingual, speaking Hebrew and home and English outside of the home, and have a variety of experiences of multilingualism that I am curious to explore in the academic setting. Both from personal experience and from engaging with other people who speak multiple languages, I know that access to varied language systems is a gift and boon, providing new ways of thinking, new connections with people, and new skills. I want a more organized framework to support future students in a celebration of this multilingualism and multiculturalism.

Hi, I’m iywren (he/they), and I actually recently switched to the Education major as a senior, so this is one of the classes I need to take to fulfill my requirements, but I am also interested in the class and content for a number of reasons. I aspire to be an educator that centers equity, inclusion, and access in my teaching pedagogy and practice, so learning about the experiences of students from a variety of backgrounds and how they are viewed and treated in different school systems is central to my development as a professional. Also, I am potentially pursuing teaching residency opportunities in the Philly area post-graduation and want to familiarize myself with the landscape and current state of policy, resources, structures that exist for EMLLs in this region. I am very interested in the internship component of this class as a way to get more experience in educational settings, particularly the classroom, and also feel out what kinds of schools and classrooms I want to work in. Primarily, I hope to ask questions and begin learning some actionable steps, practices, or frameworks to support EMLLs and students more broadly in my future career.

I have always been interested in the intersection of language and education. Seeing the ways in which language could connect people in my life was always something I valued. I think this belief in language has only grown in the past year with the opportunity to take a brand new language abroad and connect with people in an exciting way I would never have imagined. However, in the context of traditional education the stigma around language has always been evident to me. Two years ago in the class Reconceptualizing Power in Education I studied multilingual learners and policy. Since then, I have been fascinated by the unique connection language can provide in a community sense and then separation and isolation often associated with it in schools. I think it would be interesting to explore policies versus practice of teaching multilingual learners because I find there can be a large disconnect between these processes. Also, the hierarchy of language and how some languages are more valued than others intrigues me. Are there different stereotypes and expectations surrounding students who speak different languages, though they are all EMLs? Having spent a lot of time studying stereotyping in psychology this is a topic that really jumps out to me.

Part of what drew me to this course is simply that I don't have a lot of knowledge about or practice in being an educator in a multilingual environment. I have strong memories of the "English as a Second Language" program that existed at my elementary school and how watching my peers go through that program shaped my understanding of what EMLL programs perhaps shouldn't entail, but I haven't really developed keen understandings of what empowering and effective strategies for EMLL education actually should look like. In that vein, however, I am committed to the notion that classrooms and schools (as well as other educational environments) are at their core a sort of community: a community in and of themselves, a community within their broader educational placements or systems, and a segment of the geographical and pedagogical communities that surround them. I believe that it is the role of educators (as well as the broader public... but that's a larger matter) to ensure that their educational communities are as accessible, empowering, and caring as possible for all those who enter. It's impossible to achieve something like that without addressing and prioritizing the experiences of EMLLs, and I'm really excited to be entering a class and placement experience in which this topic is at the forefront. I hope that we explore how EMLL support differs depending on the age of the student in question; the language(s) they speak (are EMLL programs designed to help everyone involved learn English together, or are there/should there be certain strategies tailored to the student depending on what other language(s) they speak? is that degree of individualization even possible to implement in public schools and larger systems?); and how do dual-language schools (and other such programs) play into the EMLL teaching and learning pedagogy? Those are just some of the questions I hope to explore throughout this course, and I'm drawn to them by my interest in understanding the broad dynamics of EMLL education, as well as my goals to grow as an educator myself, both now and for my future practices.

Like a few of our other classmates, I am also taking this class as a requirement for certification. But I am interested in formally learning more about EMLLs! I am the mom of two young kids and when they started school, we were living in Boston. Volunteering with their public elementary school greatly altered my views around education and equity. Of the students in their public school, 40% were designated as EMLL, 30% had disabilities, 91% were children of color and 61% of the students were designated as low income. This was also a full inclusion school. A true full inclusion classroom is a class where any child no matter their needs can be educated alongside their peers. There are no separate classes for kids with disabilities or for EMLLs and no pull-out services. Because of the number of EMLLs and children with special needs in the school, many of the teachers ended up being triple certified as gen ed teachers, special ed teachers and MLL teachers. When visiting the kids' classes to read books and do art projects, I was impressed (and distressed) by the many hats that the teachers wore and worried that the classrooms needed more support. I also served on the school's governing board and became familiar with how EMLL students -- and families -- were viewed by the school district (BPS). During that time, BPS was re-vamping their special education and EMLL programs (part of a larger project they called it the "Green New Deal" and let me tell you, green meant $). It was proposed that special education students and EMLL students be lumped together on the same track (even with the same IEP form) and bilingual schools and inclusion schools were threatened with closures. It made zero sense to me and the other special ed parents, to the EMLL parents and to the teachers. Of course it's all much more complex than this explanation, but my experience navigating it all and advocating alongside families of EMLL students has made me much more interested in learning more about the history of EMLLs in public education as well as best practices as an educator in terms of teaching EMLLs and being culturally responsive to students and families.

Hi! I was brought into this class as a requirement for the teacher certification pathway, and I am excited to understand more deeply how to support and nurture EMLLs in a classroom environment. While my personal schooling has been monolingual in English, my elementary school also ran a full Spanish immersion program, so I was surrounded by multilingual education from a young age. I am hoping to explore the different strategies for supporting multilingual learners throughout this class, and the nuanced benefits and drawbacks to those. Also, much of my personal experience working with children, and as such EMLLs, comes from my jobs at a summer camp and a children's theater. Therefore, I want to understand how to begin to think about nuturing EMLLs in formal school settings, as well as taking and adapting that pedagogy for less structured educational environments, which may not have as concrete of resources and policies for EMLLs. I am also looking to understand the way that EMLLs are treated and understood in respect to STEM, and how to think about that at as prospective educator of mathematics specifically.

I have strong interests in higher education teaching and learning, and I chose EDUC 275 because the course asks us to think deeply about our understanding of learners. I like to think about what it means to take differences into account while avoiding reducing a person to those differences. I believe labels and specific learning needs are important, but they only help us define a fraction of who a student is and what they are capable of.

I want to focus on how educators can respond to difference and view learners as complete humans. How do we recognize and serve the needs of a learner without developing an identity or label of that learner? I want to analyze teaching and learning as a process that appreciates the multiple layers of a person as opposed to a singular identity. More broadly and in the future, I seek to provide teaching and learning opportunities for a student to be in the midst of growth. I want to teaching to happen while appreciating a student's multidimensional and sometimes contradictory nature and giving them the space to continue to grow.

Unlike a lot of my peers in this course, I am not an Education Major/Minor or taking this course to fulfill a requirement. I heard about this course from one of my friends who recommended it after I expressed interest in Education Policy after taking POLS H228:Urban Policy and doing research on underfunded public schools. I learned that EMLLs tend to be placed in underfunded and overcrowded public schools with teacher shortages. I want to keep researching that and expand my knowledge on education policy/practices in general, as I am thinking about doing one of my field essays on education policy in New York City.

Additionally, what kept me coming back to course was the topic of how language shapes people's lives and learning. I grew up speaking two languages (Spanish and English), and although that was never a major obstacle in school for me, I knew a lot of classmates who grew up speaking/learning their native language and then having a hard time adjusting to English. I guess I'm really curious about how schools support EMLLs. What type of EMLL programs/approaches are out there, and what has been successful? As someone who went to school in New York City and also had a lot of EMLLs admitted at the end of my senior year, I'm also curious about how schools/EMLLs themselves wish to approach education.

Like some of my classmates, I took this class as a requirement for my certification path. My first language is English, but I grew up learning and speaking Chinese at home. Based on the description of the course, I am excited to learn about students who also grew up in a bilingual (or multilingual) household and what their experience was like learning English as their second language. I'm also interested in learning about the policies surrounding EMMLs in the U.S and how it has affected students past and present. Additionally, I am thinking of maybe becoming an ESL teacher in the future. Some questions I have is how does a teacher go about teaching a class of students who come from different language and cultural backgrounds? What do the programs in schools look like, and how effective are they?

Like a few others in this class, I am required to take this course as part of the secondary teaching certification track. That being said, this is also the requirement course I was both the most excited and most nervous for. I felt that every other course, I had some sort of personal experience that related to the content of the course. I am not a multilingual student, nor did I go to any schools where the majority of students were. I only speak one language, English, and that was always the language used during my education. This lack of personal connection is what makes the course scary, because it feels like I do not have the same "in" to this class as I have had with others. But through that acknowledgement of my fear and my positionality, I have found an excitement for the course because I know I NEED to learn about multilingual learning to be a better educator. I have questions on just about everything, from legal labeling and accommodations to the social stress that may come with being a multilingual learner, but my biggest question is what can I do as a teacher everyday to support and uplift multilingual learners, specifically from a asset-based pedagogy. How can I ensure the comfort and safety of my students so they can have a free space to learn? I am really intrigued about the curriculum portion of this class, because while I do think theory is helpful, it ultimately means nothing if it is not applied.

I was drawn to this course because I want to learn more about how access is created in the classroom for diverse sets of learners, including EMLLs and students who have more complex relationships with and identities in relation to language. Though I’m not sure how educational environments specifically fit into what I want to pursue in the future, I’m super interested in questions of access and how inclusion can be brought to the forefront of communities on small and larger, more systemic, scales. Initially, when considering the field of education and starting to take education courses, I’m honestly not sure if this course would’ve been one I was drawn towards because of how unfamiliar I am with the world of multilingual education. As a student who has always been monolingual and educated in monolingual settings, which often denigrated multilingual educational spaces, or at least did not represent them in visions of success, I felt slightly scared and unsure about my place in such a class I have no personal connection to. However, after taking a couple of other education classes, I have come to realize that this fear and ignorance of EMLL education is only more reason to take this class, learn from the first-hand experiences I haven’t had the chance to know, and analyze my positionality and experiences speaking only English throughout my education. In this class, I’m hoping to explore questions of how EMLLs experience the current education systems, and how individual educators can best support them, recognize and affirm their identities, build classrooms and curriculum centered around their lived experiences, and work for wider networks to do the same. I’m especially curious to explore the intersections of multilingual education and “special” or neurodivergent education, which I’m interested in working further with in the future as another identity-based facet of education that seems also so strongly disenfranchised and entwined with deficit-based frameworks. How do these and other aspects of identity work together to determine access and experience, with language and communication as integral modes of access? And how can we, as adults in educational environments, work to foster access and belonging across multilingual identities within inherently imperfect and hierarchical systems?

Although I am also just using this course to fulfill my education major requirements, I do feel I was drawn to the subject of multilingual learners. Multilingual education has been a continuous subject of thought and discussion in my personal life. My dad is a linguist and English professor and my mom is an English writing professor who works with EMLLs as they begin college. My mom is also an immigrant and learned English as a third language herself. I've sat through many dinner table conversations about the challenges and changes surrounding multilingual education. I am very curious to compare what I learn while studying the topic in a classroom setting to what I've absorbed from my parents. I hope to build on my knowledge enough to develop my own opinions and feel confident in supporting EMLLs in my future work. My parents raised me bilingual and with the perspective that multilingualism is deeply important and worthy of attention and inclusion. Still, they also value full language immersion and are critical of the lack of intensity in the language classrooms of most American schools. I'm curious about what perspectives may be shared in this course about the balance between immersion and honoring multilingual/multicultural backgrounds. My parents have also struggled with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. I hope to learn more about how other educators of EMLLs are managing the use of AI for grammar/spell check and translation. Finally, I am most curious to learn about multilingual centered teaching practices for early reading and writing. Learning reading and writing in English and Romanian at the same time was a challenging experience in my early elementary years and I hope to support learners with similar literacy challenges in the future.

Multilingual learning is something very near and dear to my heart. I grew up speaking only one language, but I was always aware that my grandfather didn’t. My great-grandparents immigrated from Quebec as part of the early 20th century diaspora, in which many Quebecois families came south in search of work and assimilated to the dominant English-speaking culture. My grandfather grew up speaking French at home and English everywhere else, and transitioned to speaking primarily English in adulthood. He did not pass down the language to my father, likely due to societal pressure to assimilate. Like my father, I started taking French in high school, but unlike my father, I was hell-bent on becoming fluent. I wanted to regain the linguistic heritage we’d lost in assimilation, and so at the ripe age of sixteen, I shipped myself off to a tiny village in the French countryside for a semester. Despite the fact that I was not the only French learner in attendance at our village high school, I received no language help, despite being held to the same expectations as my French-speaking peers. The cultural and psychological effect was like nothing I’d ever experienced before: for the first time in my life, I was at the bottom of the class — and I had no energy to change that. Exhaustion, depression, and constant feelings of inadequacy became the name of the game. Even upon returning to America, and going back to French immersion programs with a better understanding of the language, I still deal with the psychological repercussions of that experience. Last semester, I worked with FACTS charter school in downtown Philadelphia, and got to see how other school systems purposefully care for their multilingual students. That experience was absolutely amazing. As a teacher, and former emergent multilingual learner, I want to support my multilingual students as much as I can. Throughout this course, I would love to explore different methods through which to honor students’ multilingual identities while also setting them up for success in their target language.

I am currently on the certification track so I can become a drama teacher after I graduate. Even though this course is a requirement to be certified at Bryn Mawr, it also interests me deeply. I've always felt incredibly frustrated by teachers that are inattentive to the needs of their students. As a child, my teachers frequently ignored my needs as a student and I struggled greatly as a result. My teachers in middle school and high school were significantly more interested in understanding what made the classroom environment work for their students, and this drive and attention is what inspired me to want to teach in the first place. Since the primary focus of this course is to understand how to make the classroom environment more inclusive and to properly attend to the needs of students, I hope to exit the course with a better understanding of how to replicate the teachers who made such a positive impact on me throughout my life.

Hi! I am a senior at BMC, double majoring in Education and Religion. I have tried to take this class before, and this is the first time it has worked out with my schedule! I believe I shared this story in Geographies of School and Learning, but in high school, I was a part of our Spanish Honor Society. One of the activities we would do was teaching short Spanish lessons at a local elementary school. We had a lot of fun organizing creative ways to share Spanish with young students, and it was really cool to see how engaged and excited the students were to learn. One day I worked with a first-grade classroom where one of the students only spoke Spanish (I'll call him Student A). As my classmate and I were going through the lessons we had prepared, the other students in the class were so excited to share what they were learning with Student A. We adjusted the lesson so that we were all sitting in a circle, my classmate and I helped them talk about their favorite colors, animals, and games in Spanish. We even ended up learning how to talk about how many siblings we had and if we had any pets. The students were so excited to share with each other, and mostly with Student A. We helped the students understand what Student A was saying when he spoke to his classmates. Several students were thrilled to learn that they shared a favorite color with Student A or that he had two pet dogs. I could tell both Student A and his classmates were having a great time talking and learning about each other. It was such a fun lesson to teach; I had a great time with each classroom I worked with that year, but no one was as excited to participate as that first grade classroom. The first grade teacher thanked us at the end of class and told me that she had never seen Student A so happy in the classroom. I can't imagine being a first grader in a new school, where your classmates and teachers could not talk to you. It was so nice to help this student feel less lonely in school, even if just for one lesson. I had gone back and forth for a while about whether I wanted to be a teacher, and this was the first time I considered teaching multilingual learners. Last semester in my Individual Inquiry Project, I looked into EML trends in Philadelphia and explored different visual aids that could support EMLs in a traditional English-only classroom. This semester, I hope to learn more about the first-hand perspectives of EMLs in the classroom.

I am an Education major, specializing in Elementary Education. I was drawn to this course because of my experiences in a placement at Davenport Elementary School last year. It was clear that, in the first grade classroom I was placed in, the language barrier between the students and the teacher was one of the largest obstacles to learning, and the children who spoke English at home were able to understand the instruction and coursework much more consistently than the children who were first exposed to the language in school the year before. As someone who plans to become a kindergarten teacher, I know that the children entering my classroom will have varied experiences and linguistic backgrounds, and, for many of them, my class may be their first experience learning to speak and understand English. When I teach, I want to be able to teach to the strengths and the needs of the students who are in my classroom, and this includes understanding how to best support my multilingual students. I hope that, this semester, we can discuss concrete strategies and best practices for teaching younger multilingual learners, as well as how to run a classroom that includes both monolingual and multilingual students.

As an Education major, I was drawn to this course because of my own experience as a multilingual learner and because I am interested in understanding how language shapes students’ experiences in educational spaces. Growing up speaking Spanish and Guarani and later learning English and Italian, I have experienced how different languages influence the way I receive information and interact with others. I hope to explore questions about how schools in the U.S. support multilingual learners and how educators can create classrooms where students’ languages and cultural backgrounds are seen as strengths rather than barriers. I am especially interested in how language, identity, and belonging intersect in the classroom. These questions come from my intention to learn how to support students in embracing their language(s), informed by my own experiences with multilingualism.

I was drawn to this course because I am interested in learning more about how to better support EMLLs and I would like to pursue a career as a foreign language teacher, likely for German language. I have spent time working with students in the context of learning foreign languages and have found it rewarding to see students grow their understanding and expression of themselves in another language. I worked at a German Saturday school with an immersion program for preschoolers and also helped out in an elementary level course for 4th to 6th graders as well. I also spent a summer at an English cram school in Ningbo, China where I was working with mostly high school students to prepare for English proficiency exams. Due to age, the learning culture or environment, and purpose for learning another language, I found the approach for guiding learning in a new language was different in each of those contexts. I am curious to learn more about EMLLs in a US context, what EMLL programs look like, and about the different approaches or strategies that could be helpful in different contexts such as age, environment, the student's other language(s), and purpose for learning English.