—Zaretta Hammond (2015, p. 47)
The symptoms of a student not feeling valued vary by individual—and are often internal. That a student doesn’t feel a part of the classroom community can look to the teacher like lack of motivation or lack of initiative for learning. When a student is silent, opts to follow rather than lead, avoids challenge, or gives up quickly, there can be many reasons for such behaviors that are not about the individual student but about the climate we have created within our classroom for the student to thrive. When ELs exhibit such behaviors in an English-dominant classroom, reflect: Do my EL students feel a sense of safety and belonging in our community of scholars? Do they feel affirmation for who they are as individuals, for their unique life experiences, and for the cultural and linguistic assets they bring? What shifts will I make to ensure every EL feels a strong sense of belonging and value in my classroom learning culture?
Ways We Might Get Stuck
Valuing EL assets often means valuing what we don’t understand. This can be tough as it requires us to see beyond what we know and our own cultural sense of “normal” to value what is “normal” from others’ point of view. This requires both humility to be aware of what we don’t know and empathy to find value in how others experience and view the world. We can get stuck easily when we:
Miss Our Own Cultural Lens: We all have cultural norms and values that are shaped by and shape our reality. These are the lens through which we interpret what is right, normal, just, unjust, important, unimportant, and more. To value students’ diverse linguistic and cultural assets, we have to recognize that our lens on the world isn’t the only lens or the superior lens. It’s hard to do this especially if we have always lived and worked in an environment where our lens is the norm or our lens is given a superior status. When our cultural norms are also the norms of our environment, they are often invisible to us. We need to learn to make the invisible visible. To see beyond our lens and value different lenses our students use to see the world, we need to first become aware that we also have a cultural lens that influences what we see.
Assume One Language Diminishes Another: It feels intuitive to think that expertise in one language comes at the expense of growth in another language. Such assumptions have historically led to problematic policies such as schools forbidding ELs from using their primary language on campus and educators discouraging parents from using their home language with their kids. Research proves these assumptions wrong. In Promoting Academic Achievement Among English Learners: A Guide to the Research, authors Goldenberg and Coleman (2010) assert “the best scientific studies we have—those that control for extraneous variables and provide the most confidence in their conclusions—show that in fact using students’ primary language (L1) promotes their achievement in English (their L2)” (p. 25). Flip to pages 23–26 for strategies to value and build on students’ home language skills as assets for their learning.
Rely on Assumptions: Our brains are wired to make assumptions. We all have implicit, unintentional biases that help us efficiently organize new information. Implicit biases about different cultural groups, ethnic groups, or language groups can lead us to make assumptions about our students that are wrong. Biases, implicit or explicit, can lead us to see other cultures or languages as inferior to our own.
Actions to Live the Mindset
1. Pronounce Students’ Names Correctly
One easy and essential way to value students’ diverse backgrounds is to pronounce students’ names the same way their families pronounce their names. This is critically important as our names are our identities. We create a disconnect between home and school when we mispronounce a student’s name. For example, a student I worked with as a reading specialist was named Abel (pronounced “ah-BELL” in Spanish, by his family and community). I met him via a family reading club, so I learned his name from his mom. In his classroom, when I called him Abel, he looked mortified. He corrected me to say Abel (ˈābəl) the way his English teachers had called him since the first day of kindergarten. At school, he felt ashamed by the sound of his own name.
This is a disconnect we can prevent easily by making it a norm for every teacher at every level to learn how students pronounce their names. When a name comes from a language you don’t speak, pronouncing the name correctly may take several tries. Instead of changing the name to what you can say easily, dare to listen, try, fail, listen, try, and fail as many times as it takes to get it right. In addition to learning names, you model the linguistic risk taking that is essential for learning a new language.
Start the year with a project for all students to research the story of their names. Have students interview family members to learn: Where did the name come from? What does it mean? Have students discuss and/or write to share their name stories along with the pronunciation (and/or nicknames) they want you and peers to use.
2. Make Connections to Students’ Life Experiences, Culture, and Values
Get to know what your students love and value within and beyond school. Use a getting-to-know-you survey, peer discussions, and/or informal interviews to get to know all students in your class. Open-ended questions such as the following are great for getting insight into students’ interests and values:
What do you like to do for fun outside of school?
What do you do with your family?
If you could only save one item from your home, what would it be? Why? (For a rich getting-to-know-you project, have students bring in an item or photo of an item and tell the story of why it matters.)
Imagine you accomplish something amazing (e.g., win a competition or create something incredible). Would you prefer to accomplish this by yourself or with a team? Why?
Ask questions and watch your students to learn how they experience and understand the world. What motivates them? What makes them proud? What makes them uncomfortable or angry? What makes them comfortable? What brings them joy? These universal questions apply to all students, not just ELs, and open possibilities to learn more deeply how students think about themselves and their experiences in and beyond school.
Seek to understand culture beyond heroes and holidays. To understand and build on cultural differences, look beyond surface aspects of culture (e.g., celebrations, music, and food) that are easy to see, to understand what Hammond (2015) calls shallow culture and deep culture. Shallow culture includes our unspoken rules of what feels “normal” in our communication styles and relationships (e.g., concepts of time, notions of personal space, and ways of handling emotion). Deep culture includes our unconscious beliefs and values such as our notions of fairness or preferences for cooperation or competition (Hammond, 2015). To understand and value the shallow and deep culture of others, it helps to first reflect on what our own culture may be.
The unspoken aspects of our own culture are often invisible to us, especially when we share the same culture as our environment. I’ve learned the most about my own culture when I’ve been in cross-cultural situations that challenge my own sense of “normal.” For example, I didn’t think much about personal space as an aspect of culture until I lived in China for a year and noticed how incredibly uncomfortable I felt in bus lines. Waiting to board a bus, I feel like the strangers around me were incredibly rude to crowd me, press up against me, and even step in front of me to jockey for position to board the bus. Based on my cultural norm, the lack of personal space people gave me felt “rude,” but there was no rude or malicious intent. People of all ages were just doing what people did to get on the bus, not just with me but also with everyone. What was comfortable for people used to the culture wasn’t comfortable to me based on my own cultural background. I did learn over time to adapt so I could flow onto buses with the crowd—but I never did feel fully comfortable until I boarded and reestablished the amount of personal space that felt right to me.
The following are examples of unspoken aspects of culture with some reflection questions you can