My earliest memory of our afterschool program in our
micro-urban community is the spring of 2011.
I had deposited my dissertation in the previous year, and was warming to
the idea of a complicated and long-term project. I was talking to a friend from Korea who
studies educational policy and curricula, himself a graduate student at the
time, on the playground of our elementary school during its annual spring
carnival. We were helping to set up an
outdoor arcade of games – ring toss, a mini-basketball hoop, lots of bean bags
and targets for them – and talking the confident, easy talk of researchers who
have turned the corner, receiving that critical mass of approval from their
advisors that makes you pretty sure you’ve got yourself a viable idea.
His work was on Asian students at Illinois. Mine was on literature in the nineteenth
century. He’s Korean. I’m from Indiana. His kids were born in Korea and New
York. Mine were born in Illinois. We shared these facts and looked around at
our elementary school’s carnival – a stubbornly diverse place, our elementary
school -- and I began to think that this scene looked like what I realize now
was a childhood fantasy. Our elementary
school is a place in a Midwest town much like the one I grew up in, but with
the lucky and rare difference of being a place where the world has come to
learn.
African-American, white, Latino/a, Korean, Korean American,
Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Egyptian; Chicago, central Illinois,
Dominican Republic, New York, Mexico, Belize, Democratic Republic of the Congo;
Spanish, French, Korean, dialects inflected with race and region: all these
ways (that I could see then) to identify, talk, and locate are part of our
elementary school’s family’s lives. The
school’s ESL program is expanding exponentially, and it boasts a majority population
of African-American students in a school district that underserves the town’s
African-Americans. But the school is
failing, and I had the impression then and know today that these potential
strengths are thought of as problems by many of our elementary’s administrators,
teachers, and families.
I must say, that, at the time, I had focused my intellectual
energy on language – defined in the way a university would describe foreign
language – as the common link between all these groups. A big mistake, as it turns out, but, then, I
was thinking big. I’ll say also that the
many people I work with likely have different memories of our afterschool
program’s origins.
They’re right!
That spring, in 2011, having finished an arduous and
successful research project, surveying the scene at our elementary as families
flowed into the playground to play and eat, I was like the happy Whitman, wasn’t
I? Or, more pessimistically, like
Conrad’s sepulchral empire-builders, thinking that what saved it was the
idea? Perhaps I remember the spring
Carnival as the starting place for our afterschool program because of its
unpredictability and delight, not the rationalized discourse between my friend
and I that aimed at harnessing the potential of our elementary towards ends I
could envision.
Look at them play!
Look at them run and eat and ask their parents for more cotton
candy! What a school this is!
As my friend and I discussed the condition of ESL students
at schools – both university and elementary – I began to understand in a new
way that the promise of a second-language was unfulfilled at American
schools. I believed that I could help
fulfil that promise by working with our elementary to bring its diverse
students together. I was right in
principle, and very wrong about the particulars, which I and a team of
brilliant, warm-hearted, and tireless people have been working out for the past
three years.
No comments:
Post a Comment