Karen Andrews, our guest blogger this week, is a first-year master’s thesis student in Education and Society, Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill. In her old life she worked for 18 years as an English as a Second Language (ESL), English Literacy Development (ELD), and Special Education teacher for Grades 7 and 8 in Ottawa. She is pretty much unlearning everything she thought she knew. 

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“M” was in Grade 7 (Secondary 1 in Quebec) and had already lived in Canada for over three years when I became her ESL support teacher many years ago. M’s previous ESL support teacher had worked with her on her reading since she arrived at our school. She had resettled in Canada from Kenya, where she and her family, originally from Somalia, lived in one of the vast refugee camps. M was considered an English Literacy Development student—that’s “ELD”—instead of an English as a second language student—ESL—because she did not read or write in her mother tongue and had missed so many years of school.

M was still having difficulty decoding simple words in English. According to a “benchmarking” reading assessment, she was reading at a late kindergarten/early grade 1 level. M and I worked together on her reading skills for a few months, and even though she was highly motivated, her progress was slow. There were even questions with her teachers about whether there may be more underlying “issues.” For every step forward, there seemed to be a step back. M also had a lot of conflict with her peers—she got into many fights. The students were afraid of her and went to great lengths not to annoy her. 

One day M was in an uncharacteristically good, quiet mood. She told me that her friend had gotten herself into a bad situation with a boy. M was worried, but she was also frustrated that she had not been able to help her earlier. She told me about how she had tried to help by warning her to “stay away from those boys,” and according to M, this friend would not listen to her advice. 

M began to talk about how important it was to stay focused on school and your family. She discussed her friend in such a caring and empathic way. Her entire demeanour changed from a young adolescent into a much older, wiser woman. As I listened, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. At one point, M looked down at a book on the table. One of the teachers had asked me to look at this book, as she was going to use it with her Grade 8 class. “Can I read this?!” M asked me.

“Um…” I began.

And M began to read. “The desert, I remember. The shrieking hyenas, I remember. But beyond that, I cannot separate what I remember from what I have heard in stories” (Asgedom, 2002, p. 1).

I listened, stunned, as M read fluently from Mawi Asgedom’s memoir, Of beetles and angels: A boy’s remarkable journey from a refugee camp to Harvard.

She continued. “I remember playing soccer with rocks, and a strange man telling me and my brother Tewolde that we had to go on a trip, and Tewolde refusing to go. The man took out a piece of gum, and Tewolde happily traded his homeland.” (Asgedom, 2002, p.1)

M looked up at me, and I can only imagine my expression. I’ve never had a poker face. “Wow!” was all I could say. She stared at me staring at her, and then something changed. She looked down at the pages, but she began to stumble on the words, and then, they were gone to her. It was as if she couldn’t access them anymore. 

How could I explain this to myself? How could M not sound out simple (boring) words, but be able to fluently read from a lengthy, complex (exciting and culturally relevant) passage? Had she accessed a confident older part of herself while talking about her friend, unlocking something, and allowing her to masterfully read the words? When she saw my face, was she reminded of her vulnerability, making her feel judged, locking up what had been opened so briefly?

I wish I could have worked more with M and learned from this extraordinary young woman, but she moved away with her family just days later. And I knew after that that I really knew pretty much nothing for sure about what we called “ESL/ELD/reading instruction.”

References

Asgedom, M. (2002). Of beetles and angels: A boy’s extraordinary journey from a refugee camp to Harvard. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Asgedom, M. (2002). [Book cover for Of beetles and angels: A boy’s extraordinary journey from a refugee camp to Harvard]. Retrieved March 4, 2020, from https://www.amazon.ca/Beetles-Angels-Remarkable-Journey-Refugee/dp/0316826200