SRIS Newsletter - February 2013 (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
LEADERSHIP UPDATES
•  LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
•  REVIVING AGAINST ALL ODDS-A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
•  LOOKING BACK - A LETTER TO SRIS MEMBERS
ARTICLES
•  IN THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, MARYLAND VOTERS SAID IT MATTERS
•  LAU V. NICHOLS
•  PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP IN HAITI
•  TEACH THEM MORE
•  OPENING THE DOOR AND WALKING THROUGH TOGETHER: HOW STUDENTS HELPED ME EXPAND MY OWN UNDERSTANDING OF RESPECT
•  THE POWER OF MY FIRST TESOL CONVENTION EXPERIENCE
•  IN MEMORY OF PROFESSOR CHARLES HANCOCK (1940-2012)
SR ENCORE
•  ILGBTF FORUM NEWS
•  PEACEFUL IDEAS FOR YOUR STUDENTS
•  SRIS PRESENTATIONS AT TESOL 2013 IN DALLAS
ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY
•  INTEREST INTERSECTION MEETINGS AT TESOL 2013 IN DALLAS
•  HISTORY OF SRIS: GETTING STARTED IN SOCIAL REPONSIBILITY IN EGYPT
•  SRIS LOSES THOMAS JOSEPH SCHROEDER

TEACH THEM MORE

Jacqueline Leigh, Sentinel English Language Institute, Freetown, Sierra Leone

Where I live in West Africa, education over the past decades has taken a wallop from war and the worldwide economic downturn. Because writing is rarely taught now, I train and mentor teachers who are used to rote instruction to run out-of-school process writing workshops for at-risk junior secondary school students, all of whom are English language learners. I am very committed to teaching ESL and writing through process writing workshops, but I also have been teaching for many years in West Africa, and Lisa D. Delpit's writing speaks to me.

Jacqueline Leigh and students at Kabala Junior Secondary School in the Northern Province, Sierra Leone

To begin with, I have adapted for my own use her "Ten Factors Essential for Success in Urban Poor Classrooms" (handed out during her talk at the Coalition of Essential Schools 1999 Fall Forum in Atlanta). Here is the version that I work through with my teachers, trying to elicit from them that socially responsible teachers

• do not teach less content to poor children; they study their brilliance and teach more;
• demand critical thinking in everything they do in the classroom;
• provide all children with “basic skills,” the conventions and strategies that are essential to success in school;
• challenge prejudicial views of the competence and worthiness of the children and their families, and support students when they do the same;
• recognize and build on strengths in every child;
• help students link familiar metaphors and experiences from their own worlds to new school knowledge;
• bring their sense of family and caring into their teaching;
• assess student needs and then address them with diverse strategies;
• show that they honour and respect every child’s home and ancestral culture(s);
• help the children connect to community—to something greater than themselves.

Because schools here are highly Western-biased and many of the children live away from their parents so they can go to school, students suffer a cultural disjoint. As we read Delpit’s (1995) Other People's Children, we realize a very important point regarding teaching children using modern TESL paradigms in socially responsible ways. Delpit points out that whole-language strategies work well for the native-speaking population they were drawn on, but the poor and culturally disenfranchised need the workshops and something more. In West Africa I had been adapting our ESL writing workshops to provide the something more and knew immediately that she would mean using explicit instruction.

Delpit (1995) encourages using explicit instruction to make sure the basic skills are taught, but she presents two caveats:

1. Don’t go back to the old belief that when you teach children, you are writing on an empty slate. The teacher is not the only expert in the classroom. To deny that students have their own expert knowledge is to disempower them. Find out what is written on that slate already.
2. “Merely adopting direct instruction is not the answer. Actual writing for real audiences and real purposes is a vital element in helping students to understand that they have an important voice in their own learning processes.” (pp. 32–33)

I wonder if in sharing this “what works” experience in this newsletter I will raise readers' hackles. I have received hostile feedback in the past trying to explain this success to U.S. teachers because, as you can see, it depends on identifying a population you are teaching, or a segment of the population, as poor and disenfranchised. All I can say is, if children from my classes pop up as refugees in your classroom in the United States, I hope you will recognize their need, see their brilliance, and teach them more.

Reference

Delpit, L. (1995). Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: New Press.

Jacqueline Leigh teaches ESL and process writing at all age levels through the public charity Sentinel English Language Institute (http://www.seli.co, http://sentinel-eli.blogspot.com). She has lived in Sierra Leone with her husband, a consulting civil engineer, since the 1970's.