Maria Careirra: Reilience and Cultural Linguistic Diversity

Maria Carreira offered some really engaging perspectives on how to serve the needs of students in middle/high school education by creating a flexible and safe learning environment; a lot of her talk was rooted in observing/engaging with the personal stories of heritage-language-speaking students, and seeing what we can glean from these experiences. It was especially inspiring to hear about students practicing resilience in the face of adversity, and continuing to maintain and practice their language and culture. This resilience is an important feature of heritage-language speaking experiences that needs to be encouraged. However, I do agree with a point that Zachary made in his comment, namely that we did not get a chance to read about case studies that involved well-intentioned parties; phrases spoken by well-meaning students or people of authority (teachers, parents, administrators, etc), even if meant as words of encouragement, CAN instead become discouraging, and may unintentionally separate the heritage language speaker from the other students. It can indeed be unfair, and can be a more ambiguous situation to which the heritage language speaker must figure out a response.

This example is a little off-topic (because my mom is not a student), but it's how I connect with this feeling; I was at a Costco with my mom a few months ago. She struck up casual conversation with a stranger waiting in line; he asked 1) where are you from? 2) no, where are you from? (because of my mom's Russian accent- this happens often). My mom explained that she was from Ukraine. Before parting/exiting the line, he said "Well then, welcome!" He may have been well-intentioned, but my mom has proudly identified herself as an American for over 25 years! The way I interpreted it, saying "welcome" just made my mother a stranger in her own home, and somehow implied that she wasn't "as American" as everybody else. It undid all of the incredibly hard work my family did to be able to master the English language and communicate effectively in the United States, something they wanted to do, and felt they needed to do. We thought his comment was VERY strange, but we were surprised and did not have time to respond. I do not know how a heritage-language-speaking student in ELL courses would respond to a similar comment, but I think feelings could easily go both ways. In this way, I do want to push the notion of resilience and see what happens in more ambiguous, "middle-ground" situations such as this one.