Class taught by Krista Shaffer

The first task at hand in this class was to decide upon a theme that we wanted to pursue as a group. Through class discussion about our life maps or pictoral representations of our lives, we learned more about each other. I wrote on index cards common key words that had come up in the student presentations of their life maps, such as immigration, separation, language, school, independence, and freedom. The class then decided that the issue they wanted to pursue was language since they were all learning English as speakers of other languages.

Through discussion of our life experiences and through reading poems and a short story about speaking more than one language, we explored how it feels to speak, read and write a native language; how it feels to speak, read and write a non-native language, and how it feels to move between languages. Based on the class discussion, students cut out pictures and placed them under the headings of native language or non-native language or moving in between languages. Students also wrote captions by the pictures and how the pictures portrayed specific feelings. The collage created a visual representation of those feelings.

We then set the collage aside as we explored the following questions related to language: What does it mean to be bilingual? What do you thing about bilingual education in American schools? What do you think about the initiative that would end bilingual education in California schools? How is language related to power? Is it necessary to have the ability to speak, read and write English fluently in order to be treated equally in the U.S.? Is it the only factor that determines whether someone is treated equally?

We looked into these questions by defining what bilingual meant to each of us and by writing about our experiences. We read an article about bilingual education, mapped out what the initiative to end bilingual education proposed, and came up with our own suggestions for educating children who speak more than one language. We looked into language’s relationship to power by discussing, acting out and writing about a life experience of one student who had trouble advocating for her rights as a tenant in part because of her lack of confidence in speaking English.

After these discussions, we returned to the collage and talked about what we wanted to add to it to make it more complete. Students wanted to revise the sentences they had written explaining the pictures they had chosen, so we did revisions of these sentences as a group. We then decided to write paragraphs that described each area of the collage— what it’s like to communicate in a native language, non-native language and to travel inbetween. We wrote these paragraphs as a group, drawing on ideas that we had discussed over the course of the session.

The collage began as a way to visually represent our feelings about communicating. It emerged into a representation of our exploration of what it means to be bilingual and how language has the potential to make us feel empowered and disempowered.

Language & Power | Power & Equality in Society | Reading Lists