Category Archives: Full Mtg/Update

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World Language 2/15

Submitted by: Adele Pelz

We began the meeting by talking about the Summer Curriculum Working Committee and encouraging members to apply for this meaningful initiative and how it would build on our departmental work along with the questions we have been addressing about what equity and inclusion mean for our subject area and what they look like in our practice.

Building off of our discussion, we decided to begin to draft a list of guiding principles that we see driving our curricula in an effort to dismantle any areas of bias in our classes and create meaningful change in content and teaching.
In addition, at our next meeting we will be working on a template to document any examples of projects, texts, and resources that were launched this year.
This document along with the guiding principles should inform the work of the committee and will inform our end of year presentations.
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World Language 1/11/22

Submitted by: Adele Pelz

This meeting was mostly devoted to the one topic that was on everybody’s mind which was and continues to be Covid along with all of its limitations and effects on:

– our individual teaching practice
-our students attendance, performance and mental health in class
-our curriculum and program
-our thirst for socialization and contact
-our fears and frustrations
The meeting was sparsely attended due to illness and absence.
Looking ahead to continuing our discussion on equity and inclusion, our department is looking into attending virtually the Global Language Conference which usually takes place at Mohonk in the Spring.
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Oct 12 World Language

Submitted by: Adele de biasi Pelz

We began our meeting by using the first guiding question as a point of departure:

What do equity and inclusion mean for  World Language and how do they look in our classrooms?

We then looked at and read through the seven Learning for justice principles of equity and Inclusion and applied them to our individual and collective teaching practices discussing a range of topics that included:
– Student identities
– Teaching styles
–  Skills mastery and explicit lessons illustrating prejudice, discrimination,and social justice,.
     (These lessons are sometimes constrained by the skill level of the students in the target
    language, but not impossible and certainly a challenge we need to confront.
   ie. At the M.S., mandarin students created projects around the prevention of
   Chinese hate crimes for Senior citizens.)
– Materials
– Assumptions
In closing, the department was pleased to have been given specific resources for World Language teaching and for our next meeting will have read the two abstracts provided and be ready and prepared to discuss them.

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World Language Department

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

5/26

We used this meeting to summarize and reflect on the curricular changes and additions to our program to better include a broader range of diverse authors and topics that reflect anti-racism, equity and a wider array of countries, cultures, people and families around the world.
Some examples:
L.S. : – Creating families “different” from your own
          – Poetry by pablo Neruda
M.S. : – Researching countries that reflect the personal history of or connection with the students.
H.S. : –  In Spanish and French, researching, creating websites, writing blog posts and reading stories and texts about hispanic and francophone speaking nations, people and culture.
           –  In Mandarin, comparing Chinese and American school systems and learning about and exploring the geography, history, and hardships of life in the provinces.
6/2
At this end of year meeting we reflected on and discussed the questions provided to us to further support the DEIJ work along with our department.
1. Some positive movement for us would be expanding our curriculum to include issues of diversity, responding to the needs and identities of our students, and creating safe spaces for our students.
– Gender equity : We will continue to examine with each other and our students any biases in language, gender, pronouns, accent, vocabulary, speech and expression.
– Inclusion : We will continue to give our students a voice in choosing what it is they would personally like to pursue, study and explore, albeit that those choices do not always align with our goals for anti-racism. And we will attempt to create a safe space for our students of color to share their voices with confidence, support and respect.
– Survey : At the beginning of the year, we will give the students an opportunity to share information about themselves, their background, the languages they speak at home, how they identify, what they hope to achieve, and why they chose to study the language of choice.
2. An ongoing challenge is always contact time, which  requires prioritizing and flexibility. However, it is often  native speakers who do not get enough contact time and are also students of color.
-We need to address ways in which we can educate and raise the awareness and accountability of our white students in ways that will move them towards making more informed curricular choices and being better listeners and agents of transformative change.
– We need to keep these discussions going, they have only just begun.
– We need to keep evaluating our content, assessing our practice, and searching for ongoing sources, materials, and P.D.that represent diversity. With so many expectations put on educators, it is critical to know and discuss as a faculty the needs of the students.
3. Our department can be supported by recognizing that World Language is by definition a model for diversity. To study language and culture is to understand the existence of people authentically in the surroundings in which they live. We cannot be fair to people from other cultures and countries who live in the US when we put labels on them. In our classes it is more important to represent the culture of the language we teach.
4. We are dedicated to bringing people together through globalization and multiculturalism. Learning a language other than your own is becoming culturally competent and can open doors without which you would not have access and this needs to be acknowledged.
In conclusion, our goal and challenge is to highlight the diversity within the countries about which we are teaching. At the same time, we live in a society that tends to label, group and all too often separate rather than include. So trying to bring our students to a place of understanding through a cultural lens is our World Language mission.

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World Language Dept. mtg. 3/3/21

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

The World Language department used this time to begin creating a document of questions and ideas around cultivating meaningful information about our students to better serve their needs, interests, struggles and well being.

Ultimately this would take the form of a survey for both incoming and current students by giving them prompts to indicate and reflect on a wide range of issues:
-their interest in and exposure to the  language
-their reasons for studying the language and their goals
-their language spoken at home
-their cultural background and identity
-their previous knowledge of the language
-their preferred learning style
-their interest in specific topics, projects, current events, people and places they would like to explore and learn about.
We will continue our discussion and work in our next meeting.

 

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World Language Dept. mtg. 2/24/21

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

At this meeting we revisited the CRE documents shared at the beginning of the year and reaffirmed our commitment to revising some of our end of trimester projects to include more writers of colors along with texts and themes reflecting issues of equity and anti-bias.
Responding to the question of how we as teachers present our content to our students and more importantly do so without making assumptions about the students we are serving and how they internalize the implicit underpinnings of the material brought about some relevant discussion and ideas about the social emotional well being of our students of color:
      • how we can better support and reassure the students of color who are at home during the pandemic
       • how we can create an atmosphere of trust and a safe space for our kids of color
       • how we can teach our students about white privilege without instilling a feeling of guilt, but rather help them navigate with compassion and use their agency to effect change.
In an effort to include our students in their own learning process and at our next meeting we would like to create a document which prompts the students to identify areas they would like to explore, skills they would like to learn and topics they would like to study. This will vary across the three divisions.
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World Language Dept. mtg. 11/11

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

As a department we talked about centering our existing focus on diversity and inclusion by bringing into focus with greater clarity our students of color and native speakers, the roles they play, and the potential they hold in our classes.

We are committed to making a small change in some area of our practice albeit, curriculum content, pedagogy, by reinventing a project, assignment, or even the way we structure a class and empower the students to engage.

We began our meeting by reviewing our notes from last meeting and raising the question of our native speakers and the role they play in our classes. We debated the merits of using them as leaders and how this more often than not oculd have an adverse affect on their own identity and relationships with their peers. As teachers with whom our native speakers can convese and identify, we have the responsibiity to help them feel confident and proud of their bilingualism.

With the end of the trimester soon upon us, we discussed our end of trimeter projects and agreed to have those projects reflect some issue of social justice, or area of equity and inclusion, either through current events, research, oral presenetions, or group discussions.

In our next meeting, we will discuss the topic of “gender” in teaching a langauge and  how we are addressing it with our students who are often confused and ourtraged by it. And in the upper grades we will work to expand our reading list to include a wider range of author, more representative of our studens and world.

It is our hope that through these changes at first, we will bring about significant change by bringing to the fore issues of equity across the languages, cultures and student that we teach.
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World Language Dept. mtg. 10/21

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

Our department centered its conversation around some of the questions shared by the DEI Committee, recognizing that the World Language Department’s mission is by definition to include and reflect people, language, cultural diversity, and issues of immigration, social justice and human rights from a broad range of nations where the languages are spoken.

We described and shared the materials we are currently using to teach and reflect the cultural differences and contrasts in our respective languages and countries. The discussion ranged from the celebration of festivals and holidays in the lower school to a much deeper dive into the social, political, and racial issues reflected in the middle and high school  programs. We established from the start that one of our goals is to continue our move away from Eurocentric culture and to bring to the fore underrepresented people, cultures, and the inequity and bias reflected in our world today, taking every opportunity to remind our students of their privilege and their responsibility to engage, participate and effect the much needed change the world is poised to make.
Unable to separate our curriculum from the population and faces we are teaching, we recognize the integral perspective of our native and bilingual students, who are often hesitant to share their voices. We talked about how we are currently serving them and how we can involve them better by putting them in leadership roles and building their confidence and comfort in sharing their ethnic identities in an environment of whiteness.
Our department believes that respect for people, language, and cultural difference is at the center of the conversation on how to deconstruct bias. Exposing our students to the customs and people of varied cultures while acknowledging stereotypes and misperceptions can lead to greater cultural awareness, understanding and compassion.
Moving forward, we agreed to be more observant, sensitive, and open to trying something new in our classes, or doing something we already do differently. Learning a language is a life skill, so we will do it together, by being  open with our students, teaching them to ask for help and seeing vulnerability as a doorway to equality.
To be continued…..
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World Language 4/28

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

This was the first time our full school department met together after moving to online teaching. We used the time to catch up, discuss our challenges, and share best practices, websites, and resources.

It was anecdotal and uplifting and most of us left feeling better about our experiences and how we could incorporate new ideas into our practice.