ESL at Bethune Academy includes cultural competency within our curriculum for its students. This means that while students have help with the English language, they also have the power to demonstrate their own, families and respective communities’ knowledge. For example, the subject of history in our regular classrooms disconnects our students. This is often times where students devalue their family’s history. Therefore, ESL incorporates different activities that meet their classroom’s requirements, yet encourage and empower students to demonstrate that history comes from the students’ stories and their families.
“I am”
Annually, Ms. Xiong organizes a yearbook of students with their autobiography. Students can share their experiences to create better understandings about other communities than their own. Exploring and embracing diversity promotes unity across differences.
Community Advocacy for Student Empowerment
If students and their parents advocate for alternative history, ESL can arrange a curriculum. Family’s input on our children’s education is crucial in a school environment that may not consider our students’ experiences as valid. The greatest advocacy from families is the conversations that parents have with the ESL instructors and students. Some parents have addressed the need for educating a certain history for their children. In addition, some students have expressed their experiences that have influenced the need for curriculum that is culturally relevant.
Because Bethune’s largest ESL ethnic community was Hmong since the 1990s, it has implemented a lesson on the CIA recruitment of Hmong in Laos, known as the Secret War for the unit on the Vietnam War. Researchers and success stories have shown that this empowers students into building more confidence, reciprocating in their academic studies.
How do we find information about our cultures?
Your culture is right in your hands. It is living your life, yet taking in how your elders got to places that now you have grown up in. The lives of the people who support you are apart of your culture.
Multiculturalism: Sharing and Telling Our Stories
If you do not tell your stories, someone else will.” – Fong Tran, Spoken Word Artist
Click on the pictures to learn about their stories…
Kao Kalia Yang
Yuri Kochiyama
Abiodun Oyewole
Angela Davis
Naw Zipporah Sein