Final Project Narrative
For this project, I chose to focus on changing the way MLLs access texts and demonstrate comprehension, inspired by my students at DelSesto Middle School, a public middle school in Providence where over 50% of students are identified as multilingual learners. When thinking about what I wanted to change, what’s not working and what issues I want to explore, I came to the conclusion that I want to incorporate English language learning into daily lessons to meet students' language needs, and to create opportunities for students to demonstrate content comprehension and acquisition in alternative methods for my multilingual learners. I started teaching at DelSesto Middle School my first year as a teacher. As a first-year teacher from my educational background, I had no experience teaching or working with MLLs. That year was my first year and first experience teaching level one and two MLLs who had just entered the country. Through teaching them, I discovered my passion, my "why:" to be a teacher and advocate for multilingual learners.
Being an advocate is a strong part of my "why" because a huge part of being an MLL teacher is being their advocate. I started taking classes in the TESOL graduate program at RIC in 2019 the same year I started teaching at DelSesto. I knew that I needed more skills and knowledge in order to appropriately meet the linguistic and social emotional needs of my language learners that were not being met in their classes at school. It also became clear during that first year that my school district's ways of assessing MLLs were not adequate nor were their language goals being met. My school's curriculum and resources were failing my students. This inspired me to develop a project based on my beliefs on how students learn.
I believe that in order for students to learn, teachers must be willing to adapt, and students can only learn from teachers who take care to cater instruction to individual needs and student interest, straying away from, or adding to the curriculum, when necessary. My second year as an ESL ELA teacher at DelSesto, I had the privilege of teaching level one and two MLL students again. Because I was willing to stray away from the curriculum because I had learned it was failing them, and I did my very best to incorporate their needs and interests in alternative ways, I was received with love and genuine efforts to learn from my students.
In this project, in order to incorporate English language learning, MLL students will be able to read texts on differentiated grade levels, and/or in their home language using the website, Newsela during daily instruction. Newsela will help improve daily instruction to meet language needs by providing accessible texts for students not yet on grade level in English. In order to demonstrate content comprehension and acquisition, MLL students will create a digital portfolio on Google Sites in which they will write blogs to show what they've learned using other digital tools like Canva and Soundtrap. Rather than using assessments that are actually testing their language literacy, through these websites, students can demonstrate what they know through inserting images, using text to speech or making a podcast in their home language.
Before designing this project, I would have identified as a technotraditionalist. Now, I see the importance of being a technoconstructivist as an MLL teacher specifically. MLL students need opportunities to use technology to demonstrate what they know. Technology is not monolingual and does not discriminate. This draws on the ideas of Sugata Mitra's TedTalk A School in the Cloud about how the traditional school system is going obsolete and how providing technology to kids, regardless of race, home language, or socioeconomic status, allows students to learn complex content independently and enthusiastically needing help only from adults in the form of encouragement. Similar to Mitra's wish that he explores in his TedTalk, my wish as a teacher is for students to be designers or organizers of their own education too and be able to use creative outlets through technology to demonstrate what they know to themselves and to their teachers beyond traditional assessment methods.
I make sure to use the digital tool, Canva in this project specifically because I witnessed level one and two MLL students use it this year in their Spanish class. Through the design features and the website's permission to be creative, students produced grade level work and were proud of that work, proud enough to show their English teacher that work from another class. I recognize that my students felt more creative because they were able to use their own language when making their project in Spanish class. This inspired me to use a podcast. Students are normally very shy to speak, especially language learners, but perhaps students would be more encouraged to speak if prompted to give a podcast in their home language, only needing to speak in front of a few group members.
Similarly, by posting blogs on Google Sites in this project, students can write in their home language to demonstrate what they’ve learned and/or insert images to further convey what they know, as well as using the speech-to-text feature to incorporate language learning by practicing speaking English. They can also use their creative outlet on Google Sites and hopefully enjoy the process of learning and showing what they've learned.
Being a teacher of Gen Z, and a believer that technology is a way for multilingual learners to demonstrate what they know, and perhaps learn a little easier, the term Digital Native does remain problematic for me as defined by Marc Prensky. In no way is technology the answer for all students, speaking to my belief that teachers must be able to adapt if a digital tool does not work for certain learners for example. As Dana Boyd argues in her chapter, Literacy: Are Today’s Youth Digital Natives, while youth today are active participants in social media and on the online universe, kids today regardless of race, country of origin, or socioeconomic status, are not inherently born with digital knowledge or skills. As Boyd argues, it’s more complicated than that.
Before taking this course, I could not have conceptualized using digital tools like Soundtrap in my classroom in order to facilitate language learning with multilingual learners. Nor could I have envisioned myself assigning blog posts to reluctant readers and writers. Incorporating these digital tools in the classroom are just two new things I have learned from taking this course. I look forward to continuing my journey from a technotraditionalist to becoming a technoconstructivist next year at DelSesto. This will involve incorporating technology into the classroom, catering instruction to meet the individual linguistic needs of my students as well as being willing to adapt when necessary, taking into consideration students' needs and interests.
Comments
Post a Comment