Beyond critical bitching: Small but critical steps

Every February, I fall into a slump with most of my other education colleagues, yet somehow it takes me off guard every time. This winter has been rough both personally and professionally, as it has for many people in this third COVID year, and between illnesses, surgeries, subbing, and the sluggish weather, it’s easier to slip into what I’ve come to call “critical complaining” or, more accurately, “critical bitching” rather than critical action. I’ve noticed myself lapsing into a “woe is the state of schooling both near and afar” pattern, rather than trying to take action, and now I’m going to my write myself into a new sort of forward motion.

Here’s pattern I’ve recognized in my own personal and professional lives.

Step 1: Acknowledge suffering. Commence critical bitching

Last week I spoke with a student who arrived in this the U.S. in September. She wants to be a doctor. And her ELL teacher and I were talking about how in the world that can happen, given the constraints of our school system? She is smart and capable, yes, but she is a junior in high school with very limited English skills, and as my colleagues said, “This system is not here for her.”

We lamented the systemic constraints that keep her segregated in classes with other newecomers, unable to develop academic peer relationships and practice her language skills with native speakers. We held this systemic failing up to the light and wrang our hands at the fact that is harming some of our most vulnerable students, but at every turn, we couldn’t figure out a fix that would put this student on the path to achieving her goals.

We whined. Complained. Bitched. Bitterly. About the system and about our own failings.

Step 2. Seek and sow the seeds of action.

But. Also. Even in that first conversation that was primarily about complaining and bitterness, exhaustion and disillusionment, there were a few seeds of potential action. That day, we talked about an article I read in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy about using dialogic journals with newcomer adolescent language learners. Linares (2018) studied the writing that adolescent English language learners composed in Ms. Rosewell’s class (a pseudonym). Ms. Rosewell wanted to give her students an opportunity to write for personal, authentic purposes, and so she introduced dialogic journals to her students. She gave students journals, introduced a prompt, brainstormed potential vocabulary and language structures, and did a “think aloud” to model writing a journal entry. Then she encourage students to write in English, their home languages, and to draw to express their ideas about the prompt.

This research article was the seed to action, and though in our first conversation we focused mostly on complaining about systemic injustices, we didn’t forget that seed.

Step 3. Plan and act.

So the seed was planted in our first bitch-session, and in our next couple conversations, we fleshed out the idea and made a plan for how to use Rosewell’s idea in my colleague beginner-level ELL classroom, where the future-doctor who inspired our discussions was a student. Our initial plan was to introduce emotion words as our key vocabulary, and then to follow her approach to modeling and scaffolding the journalling process. We started with places that they feel positive and negative emotions, and we brainstormed a list of 10 emotion words to teach, before inviting them to write about places where they feel these emotions.

This is humanizing work because it focused on their emotions and their lived experience—something newcomer language learners don’t always get because their langauge learning focuses on concrete vocabulary and functional language structures that help them operate in the practical world. The dialogue journals allowed them to focus on their feelings and helped them begin to develop vocabulary to express the depth and maturity of their feelings.

This is critical work because we saw it as a first step in providing more open-ended, rigorous language experiences for students in a newcomer language course that tends to focus more on concrete tasks like learning verb tenses, vocabulary, prepositions, and pronunciation rules. Those language skills and concepts are necessary, yes, but many motivated, capable students are constrainted if all students in the class are held to the same closed opportunities to fill in blanks, define words, and write highly scaffolded paragraphs. This journal gave students an opportunity to elaborate that wasn’t currently available in many course assignments.

Step 4. Reflect and Repeat

So what began as critical bitching has progressed slowly into critical, humanizing action. We haven’t solved the systemic failings that keep our multilingual students in siloed courses, away from immersive experiences learning English. We haven’t found a clear-cut way to help a newly arrived 19-year-old pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. But we’re taking steps. Small steps. And as unsatisfying as they may feel when we let our eyes zoom out to the bigger picture and all the compounding problems, we also know that our small steps with dialogue journals do mean something to those students—and to us, as we keep moving forward.

Taking small actions lead to more small action. My colleague and I have also talked about how we might combine it with the work on facilitating academic peer relationships to support their learning. We want to help students develop partners in their language and partners who do not speak their language, and we could maybe use the dialogue journals as a place to write and respond to each other. I’ve also started to think about how we could recruit fluent English speakers to be writing and conversation partners to help bring our multilingual newcomer students into richer social and linguistic relationships.

Sometimes focusing on small steps feels like consolation or rationalization in the face of the larger, unsolveable systemic barriers. But right now, I’m content to report on and reflect on these small steps—and to start again tomorrow.