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Daphne J. True, Kennedy High School
Daphne J. True, Kennedy High School
Daphne is an English teacher at Kennedy High school and from the moment students enter Daphne True's classroom, they see evidence of her commitment to nourishing a rich, plurilingual classroom community. Daphne's walls are a multimedia gallery of student-created plurilingual artifacts, and her instruction models linguistic creativity and experimentation as she invites students to "brave up" as stretch their approach to languaging within and beyond the classroom.
Embracing a Plurilingual Community
As an ELD teacher, Daphne focuses on nurturing authentic languaging among the emergent plurilingual students in her classroom. She relies upon a wide array of scaffolds to support students in increasing the complexity of their languaging, challenging them to "teach her" new ways to communicate. The following "class dictionary" and co-writing activities illustrate some of the ways Daphne engages students in co-creating classroom discourse and developing metalinguistic awareness. As students collaborated to teach each other about their languages, they examined unique and common features across English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and Khmer.
Unit: Introduction to Student Civic Engagement and Action
Unit: Introduction to Student Civic Engagement and Action
Daphne believes in challenging deficit-oriented mindsets that position newcomer and emergent plurilingual students as ill prepared to engage in cognitively and linguistically complex analysis. Instead, she focuses on inviting students to draw upon their wealth of cultural and linguistic resources as they investigate ideas of local and global relevance, and propose solutions to pressing community problems. In her unit on Civic Learning and Action, for example, she uses a diverse array of plurilingual texts, graphic organizers, and linguistic scaffolds to support students in researching and communicating their ideas about community issues. At the end of the unit, Daphne challenges students to use their full linguistic repertoire to prepare a short "soapbox speech" raising awareness about their chosen issue.
Unit Activities and Assignments
Unit Activities and Assignments
What is Civics? Jamboard Activity
What is Civics? Jamboard Activity
In this Jamboard activity, Daphne sought to tap into students' prior knowledge around civic engagement. Each Jamboard slide included a different prompt in the languages represented by students in the classroom. As Daphne gave directions, she stretched herself and translanguaged across two named languages -Spanish and English. Students were encouraged to respond in any language they chose. However, during this activity, Daphne saw that many students had used Google Translate to translate their thoughts into English. As a result, Daphne realized that she would have to be more explicit and intentional about inviting students to utilize their full linguistic repertoires in all assignments they worked on.
Frayer Model
Frayer Model
Rather than simply learning to translate between English and other languages, Daphne wants her students to focus on developing a deeper and more comprehensive linguistic repertoire overall. One way she does this is through low and no-tech activities that require students to think critically about how to express and communicate their understanding. For example, when she noticed students had relatively shallow definitions of civic action, she walked students through a plurilingual Freyer Model where they used their full linguistic repertoire to provide a definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples of key unit concepts. Activities like these create opportunities for students to translanguage and experiment with ways of representing their ideas, and also offer Daphne better insight into their conceptual and linguistic understandings.
Frayer Model Civic Action.pdf
Lluvia de ideas
Lluvia de ideas
As she continued to intentionally encourage students to use their full linguistic repertoires, Daphne scaffolded an activity she referred to as a collaborative lluvia de ideas ('rainfall of ideas' ). Students began by writing their ideas down in the language(s) of their choosing, and shared it out loud during a whole-class discussion. The ability to use their full linguistic repertories provided students the opportunity to explore increasingly complex ideas, and co-construct meaning across linguistic barriers.
Pre-Investigation
Pre-Investigation
After the lluvia de ideas activity, students investigated potential topics of interest using procon.org. As they read about issues of interest, they took notes on their pre-investigation handout in their chosen language(s), ensuring that students could represent their nuanced analysis of familiar and new concepts. Daphne found that students were reflective about their language choices, and how they varied based on task and purpose; for example, one student told her that "when she is trying to practice her English, she code switches, but when she wants to take notes for her own learning or personal reference, she writes in her native language."
Pre-Investigation_ Procon.org.pdfWhat advice do you have for teachers of newcomer and emergent plurilingual students?
What advice do you have for teachers of newcomer and emergent plurilingual students?
"Be brave! Model the vulnerability and language moves you want your kids to make in the classroom....I have been inspired to continue to stretch my own repertorio lingüístico in order to better represent the languages of all students in the classroom. One area I have especially grown in is making efforts to expand my language repertoire beyond English and Spanish to be more inclusive of all my students' languages. Things as simple as having the directions of an assignment or our daily agenda translated in Arabic, Hindi, or Khmer and allowing students to read and share their heritage languages with us provides space and opportunity for discussion and celebration of our linguistic diversity.
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