ELL News Headlines

This week's Question of the Week from Larry Ferlazzo is: "How can teachers best work with classified staff who are not necessarily in the classroom — secretaries, custodians, groundskeepers, etc.?"

Over 20,000 of you expressed your appreciation for the hard work and determination of your fellow educators. Here are a few highlights.

Through interview activities, English language learner (ELL) students can connect their own cultural knowledge and identity with their academic journey and find more opportunities for visibility and voice, while building their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills.

‘Good Trouble’ is a resounding rebuttal of the model minority myth — not because Jordan is a “bad kid,” as his father regrets having said during the Big Fight, but because he’s wayward and loving, sweet and frustrating, and sure, a bit of a troublemaker. 

Howard Bell, CEO of ABL, writes, "In high school, I was the only student of color in all but one of my advanced classes. Except for my time on the basketball team and some joyful moments in study hall, I didn’t see my friends from the neighborhood at school. I created a term to describe this experience:'academically alone.'"

As the battle against book banning attempts continues across the country, School Library Journal and Penguin Random House have partnered with PEN America, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Council of Teachers of English, FReadom, and Library Journal to create a poster that promotes free expression and supports the fight against censorship.“Open Books, Open Doors,” with original artwork by award-winning illustrator Rafael López, features a child stepping into a larger-than-life book that transports them into a beautiful new world.

Welcome to one of the more hope-filled, albeit cautious, Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Months in recent history. Plenty remains unsettled, challenging, and tragic, but a glass-half-full outlook extols the news that the world is finally, excitedly opening up from the last two-plus years of pandemic isolation. For the APA community, that reemergence comes with vigilance following the alarming surge in anti-Asian hate crimes. As antidotes to and balms against racism and phobias, stories can help soothe, support, and strengthen.

Growing up in Los Angeles as the daughter of Mexican immigrants, Liz Contreras used English and Spanish, but she also expressed herself with Nahuatl, an Indigenous language spoken in central Mexico since the seventh century. She just didn’t know it. "My family is from a small pueblo in the south of Mexico," said Contreras, a master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "I grew up learning Spanish with Nahuatl incorporated into our Spanish here and there, except that I thought I was just learning Spanish."

A classroom full of toys, puzzles, costumes, books, flags from around the world and energized children is a place Clementine Gasimba gravitates toward. What makes this particular preschool classroom unique is the children — among them, they speak up to 10 different languages. Knowing half a dozen languages herself, Gasimba can speak and relate to many of the children, but still has a few she teaches who she doesn’t share a common language with. Gasimba is one of several teachers at The Little Village, an early childhood center part of an organization called The Village Institute. The Village Institute aims to serve refugee families from a holistic approach, providing housing, language resources, childcare, job readiness, and mental health services, all under one roof.  That includes a pipeline where refugee women, including Gasimba and Harriet Kwitegetse, can go through education and certification courses to help advance their careers. In this case, the training put Gasimba and Kwitegetse directly back into serving other refugee families by leading a preschool class. 

As North Carolina’s demographics continue to diversify, the state’s community colleges are also becoming more diverse. Colleges are finding ways to encourage enrollment among students from different backgrounds and represent their heritage, customs, and native languages in classrooms.