Naoko Akai-Dennis, PhD

Assistant Professor, English Department
Facilitator, One Book Program
Bunker Hill Community College

Jennifer Burke Grehan

Professor, English Department &
English Language Learning Department
Bunker Hill Community College

Ashley Paul

Professor, English Department
Bunker Hill Community College

Jennifer Valdez

Professor & Chair, English Language Learning Department
Bunker Hill Community College

ABSTRACT

The authors of this article co-teach two learning communities that bridge the traditional disciplinary divide between English language learning and English composition. Our pedagogies for these learning community clusters, as they are known at Bunker Hill Community College, draw upon tenets of critical race theory such as co-disciplinarity and valuing students’ experiential knowledge, community cultural wealth, and linguistic diversity. Following an exploration of our theoretical framework, each co-teaching pair offers an overview of the relevant assignments and assessments in their respective cluster.     

Introduction

As we move into the 21st century with an increasing transnational flow of ideas, commodities, art and culture, most of us do not dwell in monoculture.  It is almost impossible to associate a culture with a location, or a nation, or a group of people.  We are all hybrids of diverse cultures.  However, those multilayered cultures that English language learners (ELLs) bring to the classroom have not been appreciated, nor sometimes even valued.  We all are creations of cultures interwoven within ourselves and affordances of cultural wealth and experiential knowledge.  We, the four authors of this article, start with and always return to this shared belief.   We co-teach in pairs two different sections of a 9-credit Integrated English Language Learning Level 3/College Writing 1 learning community cluster at Bunker Hill Community College. We have designed and taught these interdisciplinary clusters within the wider context of Bunker Hill’s English Language Learning Program reform.

In designing these cluster courses supporting ELLs in their first college writing course, we are able to address the common goals of a very diverse group of students. Everyone in our classes wants to master English, leave ELL courses behind them, and embark on their personal, academic, and career journeys. There are many cultures, religions, and backgrounds in our courses, but the common goals create a strong community of learners. The commonalities far outshine the differences. The differences offer opportunities to learn from each other whereas the commonalities are the fuel that move these courses and students closer to their goals.

This community of learners understands quickly that they are part of an even bigger community as they are supported by their professors, success coaches, and many different campus support networks. These cluster courses allow students to attempt their first college writing course with a support system that they can access throughout their time in our two year institution, that models how to find and utilize support beyond these courses, and that prepares them for the next steps in their journey by arming them with higher order thinking skills and study strategies.

Along with this community building within the classroom and beyond, our co-disciplinary pedagogy is grounded in some tenets of critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Martinez, 2020).  First, CRT, which “investigates and transforms the relationship among race ideas, racism, and power” (Kubota & Lin, 2006, p. 482), allows us to dismantle the hierarchy that has been formulated within education and beyond based on how much students “sound White” (Young 2014; Kwon 2017) and write in standardized White English.  Some scholars in TESOL argue, and we concur, that “(Non)native English speakers’’ have been racialized and discriminated against and therefore demand that we more actively provide ELLs with access to the social ladder that they are cut off from (Kubota & Lin, 2006; Lippi 2012 ; Liggett, 2013; Shapiro, 2014).   In the logical extension of this tenet, CRT equips us with the idea that we can identify and complicate “master narratives” that are told about our students of color and racialized non-native English speakers (Yosso, 2005; Martinez, 2020; Kubota & Lin, 2006; Liggett, 2013).  Through their coursework, our students often produce “counter narratives” that reflect the CRT methodology of counterstories, in which “voices spoken over and buried by racist methods and methodologies become the voices of authority in the researching and relating of their own experiences” (Martinez, 2020, p. 21).

One of the lesser known tenets of CRT,  bridging the disciplinary divide, also theoretically supports what we have strived to do in these clusters.  According to Martinez (2020), interdisciplinarity started when the prominent scholars in the legal field, such as Delgado, Bell, and Williams,  performed legal storytelling, initiating Critical Legal Studies, a harbinger of CRT.  CRT advocates for interdisciplinarity as a way to challenge the essentialized identities of institutionally compartmentalized disciplines.  Although as Matsuda argues we do not think that the two disciplines should be merged, CRT conceptually allows us to bridge the disciplinary divide to provide a pathway to the marginalized ELLs.

Our co-disciplinary pedagogy is grounded in critical race theory, making difference in culture, race, and nation of origin resources, assets, not deficits, through culturally responsive assignments and assessments so that we are no longer “reify[ing] White, monolingual, US-born students as the norm” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 387).  Grounding our curriculum with CRT has created strong students, authors, and members of the community college, hence creating social change and strengthening the college community.  We will be exhibiting this process through discussions and examples of our learning community cluster courses.   

CO-DISCIPLINARY PEDAGOGY

Laying out the history of how the two disciplinary divisions, the teaching of ESL and the teaching of English, have been institutionalized and have constructed their disciplinary identities, Matsuda points out that the disciplinary divisions have affected English language learners for decades.  In looking to establish the professional status of ESL teachers, the teaching of ESL is considered to center on “language as science” while the teaching of English centers on “language as an art” (Slager, 1956, as cited in Matsuda, 1999, p. 711).  This “disciplinary division of labor'' (Matsuda, 1999, p. 700) has constructed the idea that second language learners should take writing courses with so-called native English speakers only after they overcome language issues by learning languages as science.  However, a number of institutions and writing instructors have seen that this is not always the case. 

Collaboration between the two disciplines “...lead to more opportunities for ELL and non-Ell students to draw on their collective “funds of knowledge” across the curriculum (Shapiro, 2014, p. 401). However, “this collaboration is often prevented by a ‘disciplinary division of labor’ because the groups often remain segregated” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 402). Bunker Hill Community College, through the restructuring of the ELL department, is bringing these groups--the English Department and the ELL Department--together through this work.

It is important for us to work together across both disciplines because, more than likely, the professionalism in composition studies might not include an “analytical knowledge” of language as its counterpart in the discipline of TESOL. Also, professors in the English department are not likely to have expertise about the way multilinguals’ primary or dominant language “interferes with their learning of the new language” (Matsuda, 1999, p. 711). Therefore, having these clustered courses that include both ELL and English faculty, we bridge the gap between the two disciplines which greatly benefits our students.

In addition, we do not hold the assumption that in order for multilinguals to be able to write in the standardized White English, they need to tackle a linguistic component prior to taking credit-bearing writing courses. In fact, “Being placed in mainstream English classes was a marker of achievement and greatly improved their likelihood” of success...and “the mainstream English classroom is seen by many ELLs as a site of power--a place that offers linguistic, social and cultural capital. Being placed in ELL-only English classes may be interpreted, therefore, as a withholding of that capital” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 401). We do not wish to withhold capital from our students, so being in this English class with the same curriculum as any College Writing class, but with the added benefit of a professor who is also adept in language acquisition, proves beneficial for both student and teacher. Additionally, after the ELL program reform, cluster students can now earn General Education credit for the ELL credits of the cluster. This focus on meaningful content and credit toward graduation counters the typical “gate-keeping and tracking function that ESL has as an institutional label” (Kubota & Lin, 2006, p. 479). The community and embedded support within the cluster provide a foundation for students to continue building linguistic, social, and cultural capital as they pursue their academic goals.

 So, we do not believe that lack of language skills or knowledge, such as around syntax and semantics, signals a deficiency that needs to be filled in. As Shapiro (2014) notes, “We are not here to ‘fix’ our students' linguistic limitations, rather…we want to “build their linguistic repertoires” (p. 387).  Instead of seeing their linguistic resources as interference, we believe that their resources and cultural wealth are assets that they can bring in not only in their writing but also in the classroom community.  Offering students the opportunity to look at existing systems, social problems, and controversial topics that affect everyone in the room is one way to break down the walls between students and the barriers they face. Speaking or writing freely about their feelings, experiences, and obstacles can be emancipating for students. Realizing that through education they can create and defend strong views on subjects that have held them back in the past is like offering them wings to take off into their academic journeys. We start this process off by working on low stakes in-class writing and at-home reflections. In reflections students can write without fear of consequence for grammatical  and punctuation errors. Overtime, and through scaffolded lessons, students learn that strong editors are strong writers.

We also believe that when the topics and materials are relevant to ELLs’ cultures, languages, and values, then they will have a lot to say about them. As a classroom teacher of college writing courses, one of the first things to do is to find one overarching theme, which the students in this writing course clustered with ELL courses will grapple with from different angles in different rhetorical forms throughout the semester.  And the theme has to do with some aspects of their life that have been inevitably culturally shaped.  The overarching theme has to be something that can direct them to look into what constitutes who they are culturally and to recognize how their culture, belief, value systems, etc, make them unique.  Therefore, both of the classes that we are discussing in this article have themes attached to them--one is Connecting Cultures and the other is Identity.

With a theme in place, we are able to attack planning our courses through backwards design. Together, we decide what we want our students to produce each semester and then we are able to plan the strategies we will use to get the students to where we want them to be. We choose course materials, readings, and design our three big writing assignments. Then, the class has a little breathing room to become its own community. We plan our assignments based on student-need, results of prior lessons, student feedback, and constant co-teacher communication. Based on these factors, our courses become stronger each time they are taught as we add to our curriculum to see what works and what doesn’t,and have time to plan and prepare effectively. This is necessary to “create an English curriculum that is inclusive, equitable, and effective for all students” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 402). Furthermore, our goal is not linguistic remediation, but rather the learning of college-level content. We do not want to deny our students access to “more comprehensive and challenging literacy curriculum” because we do not want them to “stagnate academically and linguistically” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 387).