Narrative
Last year I gained insight into how to use literature to inspire students to make connections to their experiences and identities. I saw how literature that mirrors students' lives is transformative and can empower them to create a unique piece of writing that reflects their cultural knowledge and understanding of current events and the world around them.
This experience can be told through the story of one my students. Manira was always prepared, never absent, highly motivated, and extremely focused on her studies - she was a teacher's dream. One day in class, we read and discussed the poem "The Journey That We Are" by Luis Ambroggio. (1) That evening, the students were assigned to reread the poem and write a connection to the poem. Manira came to school the next day with a thoughtfully written response to the poem. She had related it to her own experience of crossing the border with her mom and dad. In her response, she described what her mom had told her. She described how a man had to carry her on his shoulders because she was too young to walk for so long. She said that they did not know this man - he was a stranger. Later in the school day, Manira came up to me and talked more about her experience. She shared how she missed her family in Mexico and was sad that she can't ever go back to see her grandparents. Her written response and what we talked about later gave me insight into who she was - a perseverant and determined young girl.
Over the weekend ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers conducted raids (Operation "Return to Sender" - the same events occurred all across the United States in several cities) in Santa Fe and swept through the apartment complex near the school, where most of my students live. Manira didn't come to school for a week. Her parents were afraid to go to work, leave the house or send their kids to school. When she returned to school, I could tell this really upset her, like many of the other students.
A few weeks later, I directed the students to write a story about their first grade reading buddies (a collaborative project between two bilingual classes to increase literacy skills in both languages, enjoyment in reading, cooperative learning and sense of community in the school). They were directed to creatively imagine and write of their reading buddy as a superhero who does a good deed for others. Prior to the assignment, I read the picture book Super Cilantro Girl/La superniña del cilantro by Juan Felipe Herrera. The main character is Esmeralda Sinfronteras, who is transformed into a superhero (and the color green of cilantro) and flies off to rescue her mother, who had gone to visit Mexico and is not being permitted to return to the United States. Manira's story quickly arrived on my desk. She had crafted a story that transformed her reading buddy into a heroine who could fly and carry families back and forth from Mexico to the U.S. She had adapted her story to fit with what she identified in her life. She had found her voice and responded to the needs of her family and community. How clever!
This unit also originates with my life's journey to uncover my identity as a Latina, an immigrant, and a person who is bilingual, biliterate and bicultural. My students and I have a common shared experience of immigrating to the United States. As a young child brought to a Midwestern state by my Ecuadorian parents, I would have benefited greatly from reading and interacting with bilingual children's literature. Literature that reflected the Latino experience was not a part of my educational experience. I felt invisible in the classroom at every level in my education. As I began my professional endeavors, I increasingly sought to uncover the many layers of my overlapping cultural and linguistic identities. Even though my identifications with language, family and Latinos were powerfully present, I was not clear how they related to my sense of place as an immigrant. Was I more a child of this country who spoke English and loved to eat pizza, or was I more connected to my distant ancestral patria, the homeland of my parents? Or was I somewhere in between, holding identities that were without a distinct separation?
Personal, educational and professional experiences related to Latinos were significant in forming my identity as a Latina. The multicultural literature and art I was exposed to later in life resonated with my experiences growing up in the United States. Finally, I had discovered authors and artists who recreated worlds, conjured images and used a language that mirrored what was familiar to me! As my identity solidified, my desire to empower other Latinas/os increased. It became apparent that if I wanted to empower others, I would need to position myself in the arena of education - where life-changing experiences take root in the individual. This quest is what propelled me to live in the Southwest and become a teacher at the elementary school level. These powerful forces inspired me to be an agent of social justice - an educator of immigrant Latinos and to teach in bilingual education. I am confident that my strength as a teacher derives fully from my self-awareness of who I am. I am empowered to use my "voice" to teach.
My school is one of the largest public neighborhood elementary schools, located on the south side in Santa Fe with close to 550 students in grades kindergarten through sixth. My school was built five years ago to accommodate this fast-growing sector of the community, mainly of recent immigrants and new residents. According to the 2000 U.S. Census Data for Santa Fe, Latinos comprise almost half (47%) of the city's general population (62,203). (2) Close to 90 percent of the school population is Latino and over 80 percent of the students are from low income families. Typically, at least three-fourths of the students in my classroom are recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America. The remaining represents immigrant families who have lived in the United States for a longer period of time and who may have been born in the United States. Spanish is the native language spoken in the homes of my students. Their range of language proficiency and skills in English and Spanish is extremely wide. Roughly one third of the students are monolingual Spanish speaking, and another one third are fluent English and Spanish speakers but have limited ability to read or write in either language. From a language development perspective, this range of language skills presents an incredible instructional challenge. Vilma Ortiz cites in the article "Language Background and Literacy among Hispanic Young Adults" that among Hispanics, the foreign-born generally have a much lower level of literacy than do native-born Hispanics. (3) This dynamic is overwhelmingly present in my classroom and presents a huge obstacle in the teaching-learning process. As I consider the content area standards I am required to teach, and the proficiency levels students are expected to demonstrate when they participate in the standards-based testing in the spring, I am overwhelmed. How do I attend to the tasks of raising their literacy levels coupled with the academic, cultural/social, and emotional needs of my students?
This integrated unit of study in social studies and language arts is my response to the above questions. In this curricular unit plan I hope to address the academic and language development needs of Latino immigrant students, while affirming who they are and what they bring to school - their cultural, linguistic, family and personal values and identities. How I view their personal, cultural, linguistic and educational fronteras - borderlands is reflected in my selection of instructional materials and the planning of a culturally inclusive curriculum in language arts and social studies.
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