How to close opportunity gaps for our Plurilingual Scholars
TeachFX hosted Dr. Renae Bryant, the Director of English Learner & Multilingual Services at Anaheim Union High School District, for a fireside chat with education leaders from around the country on October 14th, 2021.
We’ve summarized notes from the chat for educators like you:
Prop 227 mandated that all instruction is taught in English, in 2016 Prop 58 removed that mandate. How have we evolved since - where are we today?
Most people feel positive about where we are now. Prop 227 came about and we had to sit down with parents to sign waivers. Brave districts kept their dual language immersion programs going.
So it was almost 20 years of parents having to sign waivers to have dual language immersion and really having to work hard in our communities to help our parents understand that dual language immersion is the best option for their students and not English only. It took a lot of work, and I want to thank some of the advocates who really rallied around to make sure that when the opportunity came up to start advocating 2014 2015 for this proposition in 2016.
We've come a really long way, and now we see all these dual language immersion programs coming up to secondary. I'm really proud of all of us, all of us who have been here for a long time advocating and rallying around plurilingualism and language as an asset.
We notice that you use the word Plurilingualism. Can you share how we have transitioned from bilingual or multilingual to plurilingual?
We’ve gone from English Language Learner to English Learner to Bilingual and Multilingual Learner to now Plurilingual Learners. What separates multilingual from plurilingual is that plurilingual honors translanguaging -- the fact that we go in and out of languages all day long in both thinking and speaking. It recognizes context and culture, so she is excited about this more asset-based term.
How do we create opportunities in our schools to live out that asset-based mindset when it comes to plurilingualism? Can you share some action steps and some things you’re doing at Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD)?
We enshrined goals into our LCAP. We can all have a voice in system creation. AUSHD worked with Californians Together. We discovered that plurilingual students weren’t getting access to world language.
We created a site EL task force looking at recommendations and how to make them real at the site to make them come alive. We created belief modules to build the capacity of admin around plurilingualism and made tool kits for the EL road map.
We conducted shadow walks of EL students. Shadowing lives up to research that scholars only talk about 6 minutes throughout the day they aren't having enough time to think, digest, collaborate, etc.,
We started using TeachFX to capture teacher talk compared to student talk and it transcribes the class of conversations.
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Want to be invited to future fireside chats with education leaders like Dr. Renae Bryant? Email me at resego@teachfx.com to be added to the events list.
