Michael: This is
Sherita: Write.
Chris: Think.
Genevieve: Teach.
Michael: A podcast brought to you by the Writing Across the Curriculum, a program in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University.
Tamara: I want to communicate to the students that their cultural backgrounds, where they came from and their life experiences, are relevant. I think as study abroad students, sometimes they may not have the opportunity to share from their own experience or to have their identities be really validated in the classroom – either from the ways other people communicate or just maybe internally they don’t see really how they can make those bridges between their home country and where they are studying now. So I try to really bring in cross-cultural topics where they have the opportunity to share from their own experience and their own expertise.
Min-Seok: Welcome to Write. Think. Teach. I’m Min-Seok Choi
Michael: And I’m Michael Blancato.
Min-Seok: As instructors, we might recognize that our students bring richly diverse experiences with language and culture to our classrooms, but we might be less sure how we can sustain and promote those linguistic practices and cultural traditions. That’s the topic we will cover in this episode of Write. Think. Teach. To help us understand the importance of culturally sustaining pedagogy and put it into practice, we are going to hear from Tamara Roose.
Michael: Tamara is a second-year PhD student in the Foreign, Second, and Multilingual Education Program in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State where she teaches ESL composition courses to international students. Tamara is also the recipient of the 2018 Writing Across the Curriculum Outstanding Writing Instruction Award for her work in helping students see their cultural experiences as assets to their writing education. Min-Seok and I are lucky to have her as a colleague on the WAC team this year, so we sat down to talk with her about how she actively engages with students’ diverse experiences and encourages other students to do so as well.
Min-Seok: Tamara’s passion for supporting the cultural backgrounds of her students grows out of her own diverse experiences in TESOL and teaching English for academic purposes. Among other reasons, she has concentrated on writing because she believes writing as a tool provides a unique space for students to make their own voices heard.
Tamara: I started out as an English major in my undergraduate studies and then when I had the opportunity to get to know international students on campus and became really involved in the International Center, I discovered that I had a love for working with other cultures and I found it really fulfilling to have even a very small role in being able to support them to reach their different academic goals. So that’s why I decided to pursue a Master’s in TESOL, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. In that way I felt that I could use English as a way to help students towards their own academic or personal goals. So I’ve taught academic English at the university level for about ten years – first in Southern California, and then in South Korea for a few years, and then now here at Ohio State. And although I’ve taught different skill courses, I’ve mostly focused on composition and really enjoy teaching in the composition classroom because I feel like it’s a very unique space where all students have a voice. I get to hear all students voices in their writing and they often surprise me. Whereas in a speaking classroom, you usually only get to hear a few students’ voices maybe on a more superficial level than in their writing where they are often more transparent.
Michael: Culturally sustaining pedagogy, an approach to teaching that encourages instructors to affirm and support students’ unique backgrounds as they pursue learning goals, has received recognition for its capacity to address discrimination in classrooms. Tamara explains what drew her to applying culturally sustaining pedagogy in her ESL composition courses.
Tamara: Culturally sustaining pedagogy comes from the work of [Django] Paris and [H. Samy] Alim. They reconstructed the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy that [Gloria] Ladson-Billings suggested and extended it by saying we need to transform our school practices to really proactively sustain our students’ language and cultural identities and that oftentimes our students’ home culture and the school culture has a gap. In that gap, students might lose opportunities to really thrive in the education system. So I’ve, over the course of the last three semesters, tried to bring in some of the key principles from culturally sustaining pedagogy to transform the way that I approach the course.
Min-Seok: To better serve her students, Tamara applies some of the principles of culturally sustaining pedagogy to transform her approach to teaching ESL composition courses.
Tamara: So I intentionally wanted to apply two principles from culturally sustaining pedagogy, which are the ideas of critical listening and teacher reflexivity as methods for me to intentionally listen and learn from my students – to give them spaces to share from their own experiences and for me to reflect critically on my own biases or assumptions and ways that I might need to change the way I approach things and give space for students’ voices to challenge my own presumptions.
And also, I’ve really been wrestling with how to help students to see that their experiences and expertise are relevant to the classroom and relevant to the classroom discussion because I think that when they don’t see the relevance or when they don’t feel like they have the space or opportunity to share, then I think the entire class misses out on learning opportunities, that domestic students also don’t get to learn from this great opportunity to be exposed to different ways of viewing the world and different experiences of life.
Michael: One of the ways Tamara practiced critical listening was through weekly journaling assignments. The Writing Across the Curriculum Award Committee was impressed by how these assignments enabled students to share their experiences and encouraged Tamara to check her biases.
Tamara: I had the students do weekly journals on various prompts related to their experience as international students. And I also responded to these same prompts prior to reading their responses. I responded by anticipating what they might say. I wanted to use this as an intentional way to check my own biases, to see where was I understanding my students well and where was a maybe generalizing them or misunderstanding their culture. So this was a really powerful exercise, as students built on their writing skills, but also had the opportunity to share from their experiences. They shared at the end of the semester that they really enjoyed having a place to share their stories. They really enjoyed having someone who wanted to listen.
Min-Seok: Tamara describes a few of the prompts she used for this journaling assignment and the culture that these assignments created in her classroom.
Tamara: Some of them were very basic: why did you choose to study abroad, describe how your living situation differs here than in your home country, how the eating habits differ here from in your home country, how the teaching practices or the way classmates interact differ. We did one prompt where they chose photos, they could choose any three photos that they felt reflected their identity, and they shared about why they chose those photos. It was actually really interesting because many chose a picture from the past with their family or high school friends at graduation and then they chose one at Ohio State. And what was really interesting is that they often not just shared about who was in the picture, but they shared about who took the picture. Which is something that I found insightful. It mattered to them who took the picture. And oftentimes it was a significant person in their life. They mentioned that it was a parent or a close friend who had taken the picture. So these are just different ways that they broaden their identity.
Michael: Tamara’s journaling assignment illustrates the individual student benefits associated with culturally sustaining pedagogy, but there are larger classroom implications for these teaching practices as well.
Tamara: Actually, I would say more than what I learned from the journaling was how we grew as a class. It really helped build rapport. It developed a community. I think it was not so much necessarily the product of these journals, although the students did say that they grew in their writing skills, which I’m glad because then it was also serving the purposes of the course. But we grew as a community. The trust and rapport that we built changed the way that we interacted on a weekly basis and changed the way that they shared ideas in the class. And what we had done in the online journaling trickled over to the classroom dynamics and so I think that was powerful in and of itself.
Min-Seok: Thanks to Tamara for sharing her award-winning work with us. We heard today how her approach to culturally sustaining pedagogy helps her students learn to write and use writing to learn. If you are a graduate student at Ohio State who also uses writing in your teaching to promote student learning, we encourage you to apply for the 2019 Writing Across the Curriculum Outstanding Writing Instruction Award. To learn more about the award and how to apply, visit go.osu.edu/cfpwacaward.
Michael: That’s all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Write. Think. Teach.
References
Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: aka the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85-100.