Habla Con Ellos—Talk to Them: Latinas/Os, Achievement, and the Middle Grades

Abstract

Moving bilingual children beyond subordinated categories toward full engagement in relevant and authentic learning that embraces their communities.Our faculty in the Education Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte often spends time discussing issues we see within our middle grades program, including with our undergraduate teacher candidates in clinical and student teaching settings, with practicing teachers in initial licensure programs, and those learning their way into an M.Ed. in Middle Grades Education. It was at one such meeting that we found ourselves returning to the concern of our content area teachers not feeling knowledgeable about working with Latino newcomers. We were talking our way around the edges of the topic, hoping for solid language that would give clear voice to this issue, when Jeanneine shared this story:I'd never encountered a child who truly couldn't speak a single word of my own language. Yet there they were, two gorgeous Latina girls sitting quietly in the very back of the room, hands folded, staring at the tree outside the window, surely bored half to death, understanding absolutely nothing. The teacher wasn't helping much either because, just like me, she didn't know what to do or even where to begin. She didn't speak their language, and they didn't speak hers. Much to my dismay she made a beeline straight for me after class, and I was pretty sure it wasn't to discuss the student teacher I'd come to observe next block. Instead, just as I feared, it was to eagerly ask for my advice on how to work with those two girls. My conversation on the topic was short, with that five minutes pretty much covering everything I knew. That day lefta real mark on me. That image, though 20 years old, is still so vivid in my head that I can recall the yellow shirt one of the girls was wearing. Like I said, it lefta mark on me because it forced me to confront something that was a dangerous void in my teacher life, and I realized I'd better figure it out fast. I'm worried that our program still isn't where it should be in this area, and especially given our growing Charlotte Latina population.Jeanneine later shared that things got better for the two Latina girls with the arrival that semester of an English as a second language educator. This teacher helped them on their way to learning a new culture, navigating a new school, and, even more important, becoming a part of the school community through both curricular and extracurricular activities. In time, the language became easier for them, too, opening not only academic doors but social windows, which are critically important to young adolescents (Strahan, L'Esperance, & Van Hoose, 2009; Stevenson, 1998).Twenty years later, thousands of young adolescents now come into our middle grades classrooms from a rich array of countries, some with a strong working knowledge of English, some with emerging proficiency in their new language, and some with nothing at all in terms of mainstream communication skills-many, like those two young girls, are of Latino heritage.Culture plays a critical role in the most effective middle schools (NMSA, 2010), and we consider transnational children of immigration to be a great wealth, a rich blessing. We work tirelessly to equip today's middle grades teachers to serve this group of children better than we did 20 years ago. As teacher educators within The University of North Carolina Charlotte's large, urban college of education, we now regularly receive requests for assistance from middle and high school teachers and administrators who are interested in establishing a better school environment for their increasingly diverse adolescent populations. In central Piedmont, a large and growing number of Latino families accounts for much of that diversity.As of 2007, Latinos comprised 15% of the total U.S. population, with approximately one-third selfidentifying as Mexican in origin. …