In this column, employees of Glendale College with different roles engage in dialogue about their departments/divisions, as well as thoughts about a more student-centered campus. Partners are given the same three questions to ask one another, and the option of additional questions and/or taking a selfie together. If you are interested in participating in this dialogue, please feel free to email Sandy Somo or Julie Gamberg (ssomo@glendale.edu; jgamberg@glendale.edu)
Joining us for this issue are Paul Vera and Aarin Edwards
Warning: Zoom hands may appear larger than actual size
I have been at GCC since 2001. I teach English as a Second Language (mostly the intermediate and advanced writing and reading classes) in the Credit ESL Division. I also chair the Governance Review Committee and am on the Ancillary Stipend Funds Committee. I am looking forward to representing my Division at C&I next year.
Reduced immigration patterns and COVID-19 have shrunk our division, so the Credit ESL Division is in the middle of an extreme makeover. When I got here 20 years ago, our classes focused on academic-sounding English that used strict formats like the 5-paragraph essay and sophisticated-sounding grammar and punctuation structures, like future perfect progressive ("I will have been sleeping for 4 hours by the time you get home tonight"). But we have realized two things. One, our content instructors, those who teach the courses our ESL students will take, like geography and biology, give out assignments and ask questions that cannot be answered in a 5-paragraph essay. Two, when is an ESL student ever going to use a verb tense like future perfect progressive at Glendale College? "Hey, professor, by the time you get to your office, I will have been waiting at your office door for five minutes"?
On top of this, textbooks are not just too expensive for our population and oftentimes irrelevant to their specific experiences and concerns, so we are now focusing our curriculum on language skills much more useful for college writing and the GCC campus experience. We have asked content instructors from disciplines like geography, organic chemistry and psychology to give us samples of the writing assignments (like short-answer paragraphs and lab reports) and of the kind of student writing they want to see. With these samples, we can design lessons and assignments for classes that lead them to vocational certificates and transfer.
The challenge is that this takes a lot of time, and more and more of our Credit ESL professors are retiring. But old folks like me are still around.
ESL experiences some of this disempowerment, Aarin, especially those GCC students that speak a first language other than English and come from a different academic culture.
Some of our Credit ESL students have earned a PhD in their country but have never written an essay (because only children write essays). In their classrooms, rhetorical persuasion is not only (or not always) based in logic: Possibly repeating an idea emphasizes its importance, or hyperbole and praise enhance a writer's focus on the importance of a topic. An ESL student may produce a paragraph without a topic sentence in order to take the professor on an academic journey in which several seemingly unrelated ideas are connected to the professor's question – can the professor connect the dots and find the way to the main point?
And the way that students interact with their teachers/professors in other countries is not always the same. Silence from students in a classroom may be a sign of reverence, not confirmation that they have no questions or aren’t still confused. Sharing a personal experience may be seen as an invasion of one's privacy, so to ask an ESL student to stand up in front of a classroom and talk about themselves may force that student to simply make up something (with juicy details) to get the assignment done. Finally, an ESL student may not understand why they are writing an 800-word essay on freedom of speech; maybe eating a meal or living without bombs falling on your house is more important than personal freedom.
In our GCC classrooms we need to hold ESL students to our standards but also provide samples of what we want to see. And like any college students, ESL students may need to be told more than once. Because of the language obstacles, ESL students may not know about (or be afraid to seek out) GCC services: GCC professors, please show them where to go or who to ask and encourage them to get help.
Bonus Questions
The trick to a good ESL student club, I guess like any club, is to continually provide a relevant reason to attend club meetings. The club purpose should be practical, task-based and quickly applicable to their GCC experience. For example, a club meeting in the first week should focus on writing an email message to a content (not ESL) professor and/or on rehearsing a visit to that professor’s Office Hours: Introduce themselves, say hello, tell their professor that they’re eager and ready to work.
Later meetings should focus on asking questions during class, dealing with dismissive native-English speakers during small group work, asking classmates questions during the break, and sharing notes with other students. They can collectively problem-solve for an ESL student’s specific issue, like failing a class: What should I do? Who do I speak to? How do I approach a professor about this? If ESL students learn to GET OUT THERE in the first week, by later in the semester, they have gained some confidence to tackle (or help ESL students tackle) more challenging communication exchanges. In an ESL club like this, they can play with and rehearse language in safe setting.
I've been at GCC since 2008 and I'm the Director of the CalWORKs Parents Program, which is the program on campus that serves parenting students who are receiving public assistance. Over time it became clear to me that many of the barriers our GCC CalWORKs students face are the result of policies and laws created on the county, state, and national level, so I've become more involved in those arenas too. I've been President of the California Community Colleges CalWORKs Association since July 2020 and it's been incredibly rewarding to work with students to create change in the racist, misogynistic, and classist welfare and higher education systems across the state.
CalWORKs has experienced a revolutionary transformation in the last two years. As a program, we have stepped into our power. We did this by discovering that the best way to gain power is to give power away. So we no longer run a program for CalWORKs students. Instead, today we run a program with our CalWORKs students. CalWORKs Peer Mentors, who are paid as student workers, are now involved in every aspect of our program's design, administration, and evaluation, and we have adopted the disability community's motto of "nothing about us without us."
Our entire team in CalWORKs was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement to examine our program and to identify the unequal power dynamics at play in our program and at GCC. By putting CalWORKs students in positions of power, chairing steering committees, facilitating meetings, and peer mentoring, we have truly placed students at the center of what we do. We also practice Human-Centered Design as tool for constantly redesigning our program with students at the center.
I think people at GCC may have come to think of me as a voice on campus for feminism. I am a feminist, but for me, speaking out publicly about the structural misogyny I see at GCC was triggered by the change our whole team made in our CalWORKs Program. It wasn't until I tried to close CalWORKs students' achievement gaps alongside CalWORKs students, that I really started to more deeply understand all the ways our college's structure was not designed for women, for parenting students, for low-income students, first-generation students, and English language learners. Once those inequities' impact on our CalWORKs students became clear to me, it was impossible not to start talking about them publicly.
I really love everything Paul wrote above. Because most of our CalWORKs students begin in noncredit ESL, then move to credit ESL, and then to degree and transfer programs, I've also observed the way our traditional academic assumptions negatively impact our students, making them feel othered and "less than." I also regularly hear from our ESL students about the racist, ageist, and nativist aggressions at play among students during group work. It would make such an important impact for our CalWORKs and ESL students if group work always included an aspect of teaching students to understand their roles in groups and of how to check one's own prejudices and implicit biases. Students also need support to learn what to do when they experience discrimination against them while engaged in group work.
CalWORKs students have identified four ways our campus can better support CalWORKs students and all parenting students:
Bonus Questions
I think "Nothing about us without us" is exciting too! I first learned about it from one of my very favorite movies, Crip Camp. (It's on Netflix and EVERYONE should watch it.) During our meeting for this article Paul and I had a very interesting discussion about how to introduce this concept into Credit ESL, and now Paul is inviting our CalWORKs Peer Mentors to contribute ideas to a new textbook he is writing. It makes so much sense that the best people to contribute to an ESL textbook would be ESL learners. That's so "nothing about us without us!" We've also had great success in CalWORKs asking students to lead meetings by thinking of a prompt question and then facilitating a discussion about it. It might be powerful to ask students in ESL classes to design their own essay questions and get the ball rolling with a discussion that they facilitate, themselves.
As for getting GCC onboard with "nothing about us without us," our GCC ASGCC does such an amazing job creating systems where the power of governance is shared with students. To enhance the diversity of voices in student government, I think members of student government should be paid as student workers, because as long as the only students helping us govern our college are those with a lot of extra time they don't need to be paid for, we're only ever going to get certain kinds of input from students. I also think students serving on hiring and governance committees should be paid for their time, because not paying them reinforces the unequal power dynamics on those committees. College is so much more than learning academic material in class. The more we give our students the chance to step out of their comfort zones and into brave, safe spaces, the more GCC will help our students grow their own confidence and feed their souls. That's the kind of world I want to live in.
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