Description of a Talk By Cristina Igoa on

Pedagogical Practice with Immigrant Children: A Method for Teachers

Our challenge as teachers of immigrant children is to know how to reach them as they wrestle with their individual histories, their new lives, and their continued connections to their homelands. In this talk, Cristina Igoa discusses her unique pedagogical practice to foster learning and empowerment in these children.

Background. Born in the Philippines, Dr. Igoa was five years old when her family left the islands two months before the end of World War II. Dr. Igoa’s work with immigrant children draws on her own experience of dislocation from one country to another during wartime, as well as on her careful in-classroom inquiry into the real needs of the children. Her work began more than 25 years ago, when she designed a classroom known as the “Center” for 20 immigrant children, where she worked closely with the children to develop their literacy skills in English and their writing ability, using art and storytelling as motivations. One of the techniques she developed was the filmstrip, a combination of written story and illustration by the child. Later, as part of her doctoral dissertation at the University of San Francisco, she reacquainted herself with some of her former students, now on the verge of� adulthood, to confirm her previous interpretations and to view the filmstrips with them, awakening their own recollections and discovering their new interpretations of their childhood learning experiences. Dr. Igoa then went back into public schools and immersed herself in a Shelter English classroom of immigrant children, who collectively spoke eight different languages in the classroom and who could not successfully compete academically with native English speakers.

Immigrant children’s experience of war-time and fragmented formal schooling. Immigrant children are more than “language minority” children. They are children who have been uprooted from their own cultural environments and who need to be guided not to fling themselves overboard in their encounter with a new, seemingly more powerful culture and a new language. Teachers need to help them open up to the new while they retain the old. In this way, teachers help immigrant children be productive and contribute to worldwide civilization.

The experience of having been uprooted and transplanted in a strange culture can have especially powerful effects on younger children. Dr. Igoa’s own history as an immigrant child has allowed her to understand these effects on early childhood. In her talk, she will discuss how teachers can respond, with specific teaching methods, to the children’s experience of cultural differences, the loss of signs of the familiar, the effects of war on their lives, and their fragmented education received by as many as 75 percent of immigrant children. She will also address how to tailor her methodology to primary school-age and younger students.

Inquiry and reflection: being a teacher-researcher. A cornerstone of Dr. Igoa’s approach is to be a teacher-researcher, and to realize that there is no single formula to reaching each student. In this role, the teacher first finds out who her students are, where they are from, how much education they have had, and how the teacher can move them forward. This process begins by listening to the stories of the individual children and helping them document their experiences in filmstrips, tapes, videotapes, journals, drawings, compositions, and reports. “Some of the children are silent, unable or unwilling to communicate in English,” Dr. Igoa writes. “Our task is to work with that silence. As you gather the children’s creations, they will teach you how to read them.” The compelling stories produced by the children convey intriguing messages that teachers can interpret as the children slowly, carefully, begin to reveal themselves within the classroom. “With every group of students who enter my classroom each year, I start all over,” Dr. Igoa writes. “We paint a new picture and write a new story-the picture and story of our class-as we interact, learn, and grow together.”

Teachers then can use the children’s work to help them respond favorably to school and to bridge their former worlds and their present one. Dr. Igoa will discuss how teachers can prepare an academic plan for each child to bridge the gaps in their education, as well as how teachers can-without exhausting themselves-continue to play a strong nurturing role by fostering a sense of responsibility for learning and empowerment in each child.

A threefold model of Cultural/Academic/Psychological (CAP) interventions. Dr. Igoa will outline her philosophy of threefold cultural/academic/psychological (CAP) intervention with immigrant children. The goal of CAP intervention is to facilitate in the child: 1) maintenance of authenticity and connection to his or her native culture, 2) academic achievement, and 3) sense of feeling fully alive at school. This approach gives rise to a supportive and cooperative environment for both students and teachers.

�Dr. Igoa will also discuss three key insights underlying her approach to teaching immigrant children: 1) the importance of having a best friend; 2) the fact that moving from class to class detracts from the learning process; and 3) the power of myths and fairy tales in the learning process. In addition, she will teach teachers how to use these specific techniques:

� Dialogic intervention

� Allowing the expression of grief as part of acculturation

� Building a nest in the classroom for all the students

� Making each child’s desk a home

� Having children create their own homework notebooks

� Encouraging peer bonding, study groups, and the buddy system

� Validating the child’s culture, including religion

� Fostering the child’s taking responsibility for learning

� Helping students build home libraries

� Making a home-school connection, including visits to homes

Applying the model. Dr. Igoa has used this model in two completely different school settings: the Center (an ideal situation both academically and financially to set up a classroom specifically for the children), and a Sheltered English classroom (where she had to work within the institutional and logistical constraints found in many school systems). The program Dr. Igoa will outline can work alongside existing educational programs in the schools, and it can be refined to meet the needs of particular situations.

Part of the program involves the recognition that school systems need to change. Dr. Igoa’s work involves noting when rigidity and inequality within the school system affect the children-and when the children themselves complain of oppression or discrimination in the schoolyard or misunderstandings with teachers or administrators-and then teaching the children how to stand up for themselves and voice their thoughts intelligently. This corresponds with the focus in Dr. Igoa’s work on awakening the power within the children to help themselves. “When I am exhausted, I know they are leaning on me too much. When I direct the energy back on them and expect them to succeed, the children respond, develop, and are alive; and I am refreshed.”

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