BEIS Newsletter - March 2015 (Plain Text Version)
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ARTICLES WAYNE WRIGHT ON THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION: AN INTERVIEW
At the May 2014 meeting of the Purdue University Board of Trustees, Wayne E. Wright was approved as the Barbara I. Cook Chair of Literacy and Language within the College of Education. Wright’s appointment was effective 18 August 2014. Prior to coming to Purdue, Dr. Wright was an associate professor in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Wright was a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 2009. From 2004–2008, he was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Prior to that, from 2003–2004, he was a faculty associate at Arizona State University East and, from 2001–2003, an adjunct professor at Mesa Community College, Northern Arizona University, and Arizona State University. His research focuses on language and educational policies, programs, and practices for language minority students. He has many years of experience teaching in bilingual and ESL classrooms with students from kindergarteners to adults. Wright is editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement and is book review editor for the International Multilingual Research Journal. He is author of Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners: Theory, Research, Policy and Practice (Caslon Publishing, 2015). He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from California State University Long Beach and his doctorate from Arizona State University. Can you tell me about how you got into the field of bilingual education and bilingualism, and how your career unfolded? How long do you have? I’ll tell you the short version. When I was 19, I went on a mission for my church to Washington, DC, and once I got there, I was assigned to work in what we call the Asian Program. And essentially, what that was is there was a large number of Southeast Asian Americans who were refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam who had resettled in the Washington, DC, area. A lot of them had joined the church, and there were a lot of needs that they had: linguistically, academically, culturally, and so on. So a lot of my mission was spent helping people adjust to the United States and I did a lot of work helping at hospitals and things like that, teaching English as a second language. So that really kind of did two things: One is help me understand the needs of newcomers and the challenges of adjusting when they are coming to a new country, and also the horrors that people could experience in other places and why that might bring them to the United States. It also gave me a little dabble in ESL teaching, because we did a little bit of that even though I had no experience or anything. I also learned the language, so Cambodian became my second language. Because I didn’t receive any formal training as it is usually common for missionaries and I was just kind of thrown into it, I got books—...and I would sit at home and I would play these tapes, and I would learn to say things like, “where are you going?” But it was a very formal variety, so the book would say, “Madam, please tell me where are you going?” I was over at someone’s house and I would say that, and they would laugh at me and say, “you sound like a book, here’s how you really say it.” So through this process of just authentic communication, I was able to pick up quite a bit of the language. I did it for 2 years; it was ‘86 to ‘88. I came home in 1988, and I didn’t know what else to do. I was in community college, and I was a business major, and then I found out from a friend of mine, he says, “Oh you know what, the schools are looking for para professionals”—we called them “college aids” back then—“and they need an aid that can speak Spanish and Cambodian.” I said, “Oh, really?” So I went to take the test, and I got approved, and I just went to my old high school, and I knocked on the ESL teacher’s door, and I said, “I heard you’re looking for college aids.” She looked at me, she says, “Yeah, but we’re only looking for people who speak Spanish or Cambodian, sorry.” I said, “Well, actually, I speak Cambodian.” She goes, “You what?” And then one of her Cambodian students was sitting near the door and she overheard me, and she ran over, she goes, “You speak Cambodian?” I said, “Baht,” which means yes, and she goes, “Wow,” and the teacher said, “you’re hired,” and that’s how I got into education. So I ended up working there, at the high school, then once word got around that there was this guy who could speak Cambodian, they moved me to an elementary school, where they actually wanted to do kind of like a pseudo bilingual program. We would pull the kids out of their regular classroom and teach social studies, and there was one teacher that was teaching social studies in Spanish, and then I would do the same thing in Cambodian with a lot of the newcomer Cambodian kids, and it was kind of just the first little experiment with bilingual education. Which grade level was that? All grades. I would pull a first-grade group, a second-grade group, all the way through the fifth grade. And I’d have them for anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. In the process of this, I was working at Thrifty’s Drugstore scooping ice cream, and I decided that I didn’t enjoy that, but I loved working in the school. So I went and changed my major to education and, of course, the teachers that I worked with were like, “Wow Wayne, you’re really good at this and you should think about changing your major to teaching,” so eventually the message got through. I changed my major to education, and then I finished my bachelor’s degree and I planned to just go right into the classroom, but then I had an opportunity to go work and teach in Cambodia for a year or so. The district said go to Cambodia, come back, we’ll have a job for you. So I went to Cambodia, was there a year and a half, and then when I came back they had a job waiting for me. They had an elementary school in Long Beach that was half Cambodian half Latino, and I became the kindergarten teacher, and the first year was more of kind of a sheltered English instruction approach, but then they decided to actually create a bilingual program modeled after one that was up the street that a lot of my colleagues had been able to start, and so we became the second school in the country really to have a Cambodian bilingual program. And which years were those? That would have been ‘93; ‘94 is when I came home, and so between ‘94 and 2000 is when I worked there. So I was there, happy, program was doing great, we were expanding it, kids were doing great. Proposition 227 happened, then the following year they took the program away. Then they started making us do these really horrible phonics lessons, and then high stakes testing was starting to take off. And I just realized that these policies were very harmful for my students and were really limiting what I could do as a teacher. During this time, I finished my teaching credentials, and I had also finished my master’s degree, and Terry Wiley was one of my professors at Cal State Long Beach, and my thesis actually looked at the policies and programs of the district for the Cambodian students. It was frustrating to be able to write this thing at the time, when all the good things that had happened were being taking away again. The bottom line is I decided I wanted to leave the classroom; I didn’t want to leave the field. Terry Wiley kept talking about how [I] should do a PhD program sometime, and so I finally said [to myself], oh maybe now is the time to do that. I actually had gone to his house and talked to him about different PhD programs, and I started applying to programs. Then I got a call from him saying, “Wayne what programs are you looking at?” And I said, “well I’m really interested in UPenn where Nancy Hornberger is, but those programs at Arizona State look really good.” He said, “I’m glad you said that, guess what?” And that’s when I found out that he had gotten a new job and he was going to be the department chair of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Arizona State University. So I went there and then, of course, I had a great opportunity to really explore language and education policy and worked with the Bilingual Research Journal during that time, helped start the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education at that time. Then my dissertation looked at some of the same issues of bilingual education and Proposition 227, or 203 and No Child Left Behind, and how all those were converging in Arizona in a way that made education worse for English language learners. From there, [I] got the job at University of Texas in San Antonio in bicultural and bilingual studies and got to work helping to train ESL and bilingual teachers. I see, I see, interesting. And so now the second question is now that we’ve contextualized your interest and your journey within the field, now the question is very broad about the purpose, scope, outcome, the process of bilingual education and bilingualism. How would you define them? Well, I really agree with Ofelia Garcia when she says that bilingual education should be the only way to educate students in the 21st century. We were talking a minute ago about how…most people in the world are bilingual or multilingual, and that’s the reality, and when you have less than 200 nation states but 6,000 languages or more than that, then I mean that’s just an actual consequence of reality. And so I’m in favor of bilingual programs and multilingual education programs that accept that reality and prepare students to work in a world that is multilingual and bilingual. But stepping back from that a little bit, the schools have done a very poor job, not just in the United States, but around the world, of educating language minority students. I think it’s a huge issue of equity and equality to ensure that all students have an equal access to education and all students have the opportunity to learn the dominant societal language; it’s going to be a key to getting to other places, while also maintaining and developing their home languages which are also a huge asset for society. I’ve always been motivated by, you know those kinds of programs. So I would like to see, as the field grows, more recognition of that. I think the United States has kind of been closed off and only looking in terms of bilingual education in the United States. And I think there are a lot of lessons that can be learned by looking globally in terms of how these issues are playing out, what they can learn from us, what we can learn from them. But I’d like to see more programs that are provided as opportunities. And I think there’s a trend now where monolingual parents of these big dominant languages, like monolingual English speaking parents in the United States, see societal advantages of their children being bilingual. So they’re actually seeking out dual language programs or other programs, and I think that’s a positive development, but I want to make sure that when we move in that direction that it’s not only serving the needs of those students and those parents but it’s an equally beneficial, mutually beneficial thing. And so yes, I want everyone to be bilingual, but I don’t want everyone to become bilingual and then still have the language minority students on the short end of the stick. We have to be very careful about how we move forward in that direction. But if you think about how the field evolved from where it started in the 70s and 80s and how far we’ve gotten up to this point…what will be your comments about the changes that happened? Yeah, well that’s a whole dissertation right there, but I mean, in general, we have the Bilingual Education Act to thank for getting the federal support for education and promoting and providing resources for districts to start bilingual education. I think that we were limited by the federal government’s involvement, because it tended to favor transitional models over…what we call the stronger models, the models that actually lead to higher levels of bilingualism and biliteracy. An effect of that might be…the growing popularity of the dual language models. But you know, in general, when we had really the heyday, when a lot [of] states were allowing bilingual education, then when we have the propositions, the 227, the 203, the question 2 really targeting some of the largest states with the largest English language learner populations, along with No Child Left Behind, that really helped [make] bilingual education kind of take a back seat. You know, it took a few steps back. Even in the states that didn’t have restrictions on bilingual education. Because of what was in No Child Left Behind and some of the other challenges that also discouraged bilingual programs, and so we really took a big hit. But I think it’s important to note that even in the states that have the laws, bilingual education didn’t get eliminated. And so a lot of people have this false notion like, “oh, well, they don’t do bilingual ed in California anymore.” Well, no, actually we do. Arizona and Massachusetts all had programs that survived. So, Jose Gonzalez actually said something interesting, he was one of the editors of the Bilingual Research Journal, and he said, in a way, maybe, what those propositions did, was like we have a forest that’s too overpopulated, [and] you have a fire to clean up the brush. Maybe that helped to get rid of some of the programs that weren’t very good or were too transitional in nature. Then, what survived were the stronger programs that were more about developing bilingualism, biliteracy, and things like that. I don’t totally agree with that a hundred percent, but I think he has a point. But what we’re seeing now is that there’s starting to be a resurgence back to people understanding like hey, maybe bilingual education is a good thing…California was the first state to create the Seal of Biliteracy, which means that we’re going to value and recognize graduates who can prove they have proficiency in two languages right on their high school diploma, and a few other states have copied that now, and even in Indiana they’re talking about it. And now there’s going to be a measure on the California ballot to basically repeal proposition 227 and, if that gets repealed, I think that’s going to help start a new wave of favoritism towards bilingual education in the United States, and so I’m excited about that. At the same time, while we’ve been struggling with fighting to defend bilingual education in the United States, the research that I’ve been doing in Cambodia, for example, has been very exciting, because there they’ve realized as we did awhile ago (but seem to forget), “Wow, this is how we can actually make education accessible to all students in the country, especially linguistic minorities, who we’ve been having a really hard time to reach.” Because we realize now that if you don’t speak the dominant language, and we send a teacher that can’t speak [the] minority language, then that’s not very effective: Kids don’t want to come to school, and then the teachers don’t want to teach them. But if we do bilingual education, that seems to solve a problem. I see that happening in other countries around the world where they’re turning to bilingual education as a solution to solving just basic access to education issues... I mentioned to you the Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) that’ll be coming out later this spring. We’re really excited about that because it outlines not only the theoretical foundations of the field, but then it has a big kind of global perspective section, where we have countries from every continent except Antarctica, authors writing about what is happening in those countries or those regions. It’s not all pretty, it’s not all, “Oh yes, we do bilingual education, everything’s fine.” They’re each addressing a lot of the challenges in terms of policy versus actual practice, but again it does show that bilingual education’s alive and well and that we’re able to have a kind of dialogue and the debates that we need about how to make it better, and more effective, and have it serve more children, and to be able to use it to reach issues of equality and equity and things like that. So that’s my hope, too, in terms of the field going forward, is that we recognize what’s happening and that as we get rid of some of these restrictions that we have, we can go on and create even better and stronger programs that serve more and more people. That answers the question? I feel like I’m rambling here. Yeah I think so, I think you even answered one of my next questions. Where do you want the field of bilingual education to go, and what aspects of your current work or past work have contributed to these goals? I guess more specifically, what are some challenges, how do you envision overcoming them, and what are some questions that you think should be answered or pondered over? Well, I think one of the challenges that I mentioned earlier, number one is just to overcome restrictions. So you’re looking at language ideologies, and those in power, if they have certain ideologies, then that’s going to form the kinds of policies they have, and so we see cases of restrictionism. We’ve seen cases where when it is allowed, it’s a very limited form. Even in Cambodia where I was documenting programs, it’s very much a transitional model, because the minister of education said, “This is great, but you can only do it for three years.” And it’s very much in their mind the whole purpose of this is to transition to the dominant language, not to maintain the native language, and, of course, those that are fighting for it don’t see it that way, but they see this as a “foot in the door” strategy, right? And so my hope for the future is that we can take weaker forms that exist, make them stronger, and create programs where they don’t exist, whether it’s going to be weak or strong, and then build them up from there. And I think that the more and more people that benefit from bilingual education…I think about the kids who are in dual language programs now who are going to have some language skills, and when they grow up, they’re not going to have the same kind of negative attitudes hopefully towards other languages that maybe their parent’s generation did, and so the more and more that grows, I think there’s going to be more openness to that. I think, too, as the demographics of the United States shifts, where, for example, and I think Texas is a good example, there was very little opposition to bilingual education in San Antonio and that’s because San Antonio is 59% Hispanic, and they’re not afraid of two languages. In fact, they’re proud that their city is bilingual and bicultural, so it’s only natural that you have bilingual and bicultural programs. So I think as the nation becomes more and more diverse and minorities become the majority, that we’re going to have an electorate that’s going to be more friendly towards bilingual education and multilingual education. And I want to make sure that we have the kind of research that’s going to guide people…to open the right kinds of models and programs and that are based in the realities of how people actually use languages in real life, their daily lives. How did your own work contribute to these goals? …I feel like a lot of my work is focused on the negative: on the bad policies, on the bad programs that have happened, and trying to warn of the repercussions of those, so that my hope is that it can be used to inform better policies and programs in the future. My own textbook, Foundations of Teaching English Language Learners (Caslon Publishing, 2015 ) isn’t necessarily a book about bilingual education, but it gets used in the types of programs like our EDCI370 here, where [the course is] designed to help prepare all teachers to work with English language learners in their class, but what I try to do in the second edition even more than the first edition is to have a bilingual thread throughout all the chapters. So that as teachers are learning about different program models, about reading instruction, writing instruction, that that’s always there…reminding them that these kids have another language and that’s a strength that can be drawn on, and that biliteracy is a good thing to develop. So I think that, too, we get more and more teachers to understand and value those things, having been added to, then they’re not going to be opposing if their school wants to start a bilingual program, but they’ll be supporters of that because that kind of a support in a school is important. So, so I hope that book is helping make a difference. And then I mentioned again the Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education, it’s really the first handbook that deals with the issues the way we did. So there was an International Handbook of Bilingual Education (Greenwood, 1988) that was published I think 20-something years ago by Christine Bratt Paulston and [it] was like our section three: Here are a bunch of countries and here’s what they’re doing with bilingual ed. But what our handbook has is [it has] the first section that lays the theoretical foundations of the field in terms of language policy, language rights, culture, second language acquisition, research, assessment, etc. So those chapters kind of help lay that foundation for the field. Then the second section looks at bilingual education in different groups and different school levels. We have a chapter on preschool, elementary, middle school, high school, higher education, but also nonformal bilingual education, and then looking at, for example, special education and gifted and talented students and deaf students, so looking at those special populations. I failed to mention we have a chapter on translanguaging by Li Wei and Ofelia García in that foundational section. And then that kind of sets the stage for these global perspective chapters where drawing on those foundational issues, drawing on those different levels, they’re able to get an expert view of what’s happening there. I’m really hoping that handbook will prove a nice tool for people to use to really understand the field and move it forward. And then, of course, the book with Colin Baker, you know to be able to take this foundational book that’s being used around the world and being able to bring it up to date with the latest theories and approaches. The book I am talking about is the Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters, 2011) by Colin Baker. So between these textbooks and this more “researchy” handbook, you know we’re putting products out there that people can turn to as resources, and hopefully that will have an influence on the field. You mentioned the fact that you are trying to have a bilingual thread in your textbook, and you said something along the lines of how important it is for ESL teachers or teachers working within the field of TESOL to be aware of bilingualism and to tap into students’ bilingual strengths. Can you now talk a little bit more broadly about the role of BEIS—the role of the Bilingual Education Interest Section within TESOL? Right. I think that’s critical, right? Because in a lot of places, sometimes people think that ESL and bilingual education are opposites, and they’re against each other. And to be blunt, if you go to NABE (National Association for Bilingual Education), it’s predominantly Latino educators and scholars, and if you go to TESOL it’s primarily White and Asian, right? And so there are some kind of racial and linguistic divides there among the field, but TESOL has always, at least at the service level, been supportive of bilingual education, and I think an interest group within TESOL is critical to be able to show that. And TESOL has come up with some statements very much in favor of linguistic diversity and bilingual education. I’d like to personally see TESOL take a stronger role, especially since NABE has had some challenges recently and their conferences are dwindling in attendees. I think they’re starting to turn around a little bit, but I think TESOL can really step up and take more of a leadership role. And I think TESOL has a better advocacy platform. I think they have more good lobbies on the legislature than necessarily NABE did. I’d like to see TESOL take more advantage of that, and hopefully, the BEIS group can be the driving interest with that and be the ones that are pushing by example to take this certain position they can stick to, and to lobby the right kinds of issues on Capitol Hill, and also to make sure that bilingual education is addressed at the conferences, so that there’s always sessions that deal with those issues. And any other final comments, questions, or recommendations? No. I just think it’s an exciting time to be in the field, and I think for the first time I’m a lot more hopeful than I was maybe 5 or 6 years ago, where I’m starting to see the tide shift a little bit even in those places where there [are] more and more restrictions. I’m starting to see those restrictions fall away; if we can get even more and more people to recognize the benefits, then I think we can have changing attitudes, which can lead to change in policies, which will lead to more effective programs that are going to be more helpful to more students. So I’m always a hopeless optimist. Okay, well thank you very much. Alsu Gilmetdinova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literacy and Language Education at Purdue University. Her interests revolve around bilingual education, language policy, and TESOL. |
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