Teachers Talk

Soon after September 11, ESOL teachers began discussing their classroom experiences on the TESOL Adult Interest Section listserv. With permission from the writers, Field Notes is offering excerpts from this discussion.

From: Elsa Auerbach, UMass/Boston
elsa.auerbach@umb.edu
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001

I had two undergraduate classes yesterday, each of which turned out completely differently from each other and from what I expected/planned.... I need to start by saying that in both classes, there was absolute unanimity in our horror and sadness about the events of Sept. 11th. In both classes, people from all points of view were overwhelmed by the enormity and their shock, outrage, compassion, grief came out through the discussion....

The second class is for first year students; most are ESL students and all but one are women. I started by asking students whether they wanted to talk about the events of the week (rather than just digging in). Students had written poems about themselves and I had brought a poem by a Palestinian woman about how to be Palestinian in times like these. Immediately one student said she resented the way teachers were trying to connect the discussion to course material and said we should just talk about it without trying to work it into the curriculum. So I told them that I had just done that very thing in my previous class. One very outspoken bicultural Latina-North American student said she did NOT want to talk about it because she had almost gotten into a fist fight in her previous class when she raised her fears about racist attacks on Arabic-looking people and her perspective that the U.S. was sowing what it had reaped-she spoke about the experiences of U.S. involvement in Latin America. From here, the discussion took its own course with a young very quiet woman from El Salvador talking about the fear she is experiencing and her sense of loss: she came here because she thought she would be safe, and now feels there is nowhere left to be safe. She cried and several other women also began crying and spoke of similar feelings. There was quite a back-and-forth between women from Eritrea and Haiti talking about what the U.S. had done in their countries and women from Vietnam who saw this as the land of freedom.

All the while, the Muslim women said nothing. One is 'invisibly' Muslim (blond, from Turkey) and the other who had been wearing a head scarf in earlier classes, came to class without the covering. At a few points, I asked them and others if they wanted to say anything. They said no. A self-identified "American Jewish" woman voiced her concern about the government using this as a way toward more violence. At the end, a young "American" woman thanked the group, saying she had never had a chance to hear how people who aren't American are thinking about these events. The `outspoken' woman said she was glad we had discussed it because it was a different experience from her previous one. After class, I asked the Muslim woman if she had left off the head covering because of the events of the week. She said yes. I asked her why she hadn't participated in class to share what she is experiencing and, interestingly, she said she had wanted to, but her parents told her not to talk about this in any way.

What do I see in this? I think there are a few points that stand out for me:

1. NOT jumping into the conversation, but rather asking people whether they would like to talk about these events was useful. It ended up leading into a discussion, but I don't think people thought I was forcing them to talk about it. (In fact one student said this -- that in another class, the teacher didn't give them a choice.)

2. Abandoning my own plan for how to get into the discussion was important -- that is, NOT orchestrating the discussion. I told them how I was thinking about this and what I had planned, sharing my thinking, and sharing my own uncertainties.

3. Trusting that they could bring a full range of perspectives to the discussion, that I didn't need to assume I was the only one who had a critical analysis was important.

4. Not being "goal-oriented" -- that is, not trying to work the discussion around to one perspective or unanimity or 'good feeling' was important; being comfortable with not resolving or clarifying things. I would be interested in whatever others see in what I've described and in hearing about how they've proceeded.

From: Abigail Tom, Durham Technical Community College, Durham, NC
abtom@mindspring.com
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001

I am appalled by Tommy's story about the teacher who wouldn't discuss the events with his/her students. I feel very strongly that when this and other terrible events occur, we must give our students an opportunity to talk about them. A few years ago there was a shooting near where our classes meet; another time there was a suicide at a middle school which the children of some of my students attended. All of these events are extremely distressing to our students, as they are to us. To imply that they aren't is in some way to deny the humanity of our students. I teach high beginners. On Wednesday I asked them to tell what happened. As they did so, I wrote on the board what they had said. In this way, the events were written in English which was comprehensible to them. They said this helped them later understand the language of the TV reports. In my intermediate conversation class, I asked them before class to write any comments or questions they had about the events. They wrote various things. Then I asked if they wanted to say more. Some did. I left a lot of "wait time" to be sure that everyone who wanted to could talk, but didn't force anyone. I feel that both of these strategies give students a chance to talk about what happened and to share their thoughts about it. To do less is a great disservice to our students.

From: Nancy Quinn, City Colleges of Chicago
trying4@hotmail.com
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001

I teach low-beginning, with a four-hour class that started at 12:30 on Tuesday. Walking into the classroom, I still didn't know what I was going to do. We have people from every part of the world in every class, and I was especially concerned that the Muslim students feel comfortable, but I really was pretty confident that part would be okay, based on past experiences during the Gulf War, etc. I just didn't know how to approach it, since we couldn't have a "discussion." I ended up going over the facts of what happened and the related vocabulary with the class, and asked them to tell me if there were words they had heard on TV, but didn't understand. I let them know that I knew that many of them had had terrible things happen in their countries, too. (One Somali student has no hands -- only a kind of hook). I also let them know that I know there are reasons why some people hate our country. We spent quite a bit of time on it, and then it seemed okay to move on to "regular class."

In the following days (we meet four days, four hours each day) we did a quick update, and then moved on. It seems to be an okay approach for this group. We'll see how things develop.