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Christian Valle, Dale Junior High School
Christian Valle, Dale Junior High School
As a middle school history teacher at Dale Junior High School, Christian focuses on nourishing a positive and inclusive classroom where all students feel welcome. He believes in encouraging students to consider different perspectives and works to make history accessible to students to help them connect the content with their own backgrounds. Christian strives to develop students' critical thinking skills as they engage in literacy-rich learning and classroom discourse, research contemporary and culturally relevant topics, and build content-specific knowledge and literacy.
The Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine
When teaching about the Monroe Doctrine, Christian looks for ways to support middle school students in understanding not only its historical import, but also its contemporary relevance. He began by discussing the geopolitical impacts of colonialism, focusing on a ripped from the headlines conflict by showing a video of El Salvador's suspension of civil rights and mass incarceration; this both increased the sense of imperative around teaching history, but also provided opportunities for Christian's Latinx students to share their own experiences and insight regarding the conflict. Throughout, Christian invited students to share examples of how European colonization impacted their home countries and cultures, as well as other impacts of colonization with and beyond Latin American. Christian modeled translanguaging by providing multilingual classroom resources and using mutliple languages when discussing and annotating texts. When one of Christian's monolingual (English-only) students expressed frustration with not being able to easily interpret a multilingual text, Christian supported her in using literacy strategies to unpack complex texts, and then guided her in thinking about how her plurilingual peers have to deal with the challenge of dissecting texts in languages they do not fully understand every single day. Thus, his pedagogy itself became an opportunity to model responses to linguistic colonization, and help all students understand how scaffolds can promote equity.
Below, you will find the activities Christian engaged students in throughout this lesson. Complex approaches to languaging are at the forefront of all his assignments and activities, as well as in students' work.
Guided Reading: The Monroe Doctrine
Guided Reading: The Monroe Doctrine
After students considered and discussed the lingering impacts of colonialism in the present, Christian introduced the Monroe Doctrine to them by using a guided reading. Copies of this reading were provided in multiple languages and, students actively engaged in translanguaging throughout as they read and annotated the reading. Including translated documents also built a sense of comunidad and confianza within the classroom, and provided an accesible avenue for students to build their historical comprehension and analytical skills.
Copies of the guided reading and accompanying questions in both English and Spanish are included to the right.
Monroe Doctrine Website Docs.pdfThe Monroe Doctrine Guided Reading
The Monroe Doctrine Guided Reading
(In English and Spanish)
(In English and Spanish)
Activity Stations
Activity Stations
Once students developed a background understanding of the Monroe Doctrine, Christian split them into small groups to partake in a DBQ-style stations activity. Students read a short reading about the impact of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, analyzed two political cartoons, and responded to questions about each station on an accompanying handout. Each station included resources in multiple languages, and Christian encouraged students to leverage their full linguistic repertoires as they read, discussed, and wrote their responses to each question.
Below are copies of the stations and questions in English, Spanish, and Arabic.
Student Work
Student Work
Christian saw the impact of his approach to languaging through the depth and rigor of students' analysis. The following student work samples illustrate how students were able to utilize their full linguistic repertoire in order to complete the assignment. Each example demonstrates students' creative and complex approaches to languaging, as well as their deepening historical thinking and analysis skills. Overall, Christian found that having access to documents in multiple languages created opportunities for students to collaborate across linguistic barriers, and also supported plurilingual students in stretching their languaging and fully demonstrating their learning.
Student A
Student A
Student A.pdfStudent B
Student B
Student B.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?
"My advice would be to be vulnerable and show students that were all learning and expanding our languaging. Additionally, it’s important to know that we’re all doing the best that we can, and even if we feel we can do more, we can always pick up where we’ve left off."
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