Transnational Literacies
Comments(1) Jimenez et. al. (2009) opened their article, Transnational and community literacies for teachers, with the story of students and teachers who had frequent misunderstandings in class. When the students were asked why they were so frustrated, they mentioned that the class was boring and they felt their teacher didn’t care about their lives. It is incredibly sad that students feel this way, but it seems to happen often whether there is a language barrier or not. What I really appreciate about this article is that the authors carried out their research with this fact in mind. This project involved risk on the part of the authors because it took them out of their comfort zones and into a world they were potentially unfamiliar with. It was also a big project to take students into those communities, and introduce a multimodality aspect to the assignment. However, I think these risks are what we need to keep in mind when we are teaching so that we can help students feel comfortable in our classrooms. Whether it is keeping up to date with media, taking our classes into local communities, or bringing attention to injustices against our ELL students, we need to be mindful of how we can care for our students, as well as teach them. This course has proven that this is especially important for student who are learning English and need all the support they can get. It may mean a bigger time commitment for us but it is definitely worth it to make students feel safe and supported in our classrooms!
I agreed with you. You mentioned that according to “Jimenez et. al. (2009) opened their article, Transnational and community literacies for teachers, with the story of students and teachers who had frequent misunderstandings in class. When the students were asked why they were so frustrated, they mentioned that the class was boring and they felt their teacher didn’t care about their lives.” During my short term practicum experience I witnessed two kinds of ELL teachers. The one that truly cares for their students and the one that simply goes there and go back home later. Nonetheless, for the boring aspect, one may argue that it is the students fault for making the class boring (students have the control to make anything boring “fun” and interesting if one wishes to) or that the teaching is simply boring. However, for the teacher didn’t care about their lives (their students) may also be argued two ways. One, the teacher simply does not care about their students. Two, the teacher does care about their students. However, a lot of ELL students (especially new immigrants and international students) have different cultural values, languages barrier and different ways of looking at situations. For example, a student may look down at a teacher while speaking to the teacher. The teacher may think this particular student simply have no respect for the teacher and in return may question the student as to why you are looking down while you are speaking to me. The teacher may ask himself/herself this: “What did I do to you this time to lose your respect this time?” Thus, in actuality this student is simply showing respect to the teacher because of his/her up bring/cultural norm.