INTRODUCTION
On January 20, 2017, 19 preservice teachers—all graduate students in New York University (NYU)’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development—and I returned to New York City (NYC) from an annual study abroad program that I created and led in the Dominican Republic (DR) during the January intersession. The paradox of the day was not lost on us, as we were just returning from spending 3 weeks in the DR learning about, and immersing ourselves in, the culture and language of the country from which many students in NYC public schools hail, even as our newly inaugurated president was touting “America first” to the country and world. It is important that we confront this cognitive dissonance in the 21st century—the fact, and frequent celebration of, an increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse population and, by extension, student body, even as many fear and try to retreat from it. Teacher education programs are an appropriate place to constructively confront this tension because teachers are on the front lines of engaging cultural and linguistic difference in our schools today. They are, by default, cultural and linguistic brokers. This article thus describes the conception, goals, design, and evaluation of the aforementioned study abroad program as one approach to addressing cultural and linguistic diversity in teacher education.
The Demographic Imperative
According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2012), immigration to the United States has increased significantly since 2000, with the Latino population from the Caribbean and Central and South America leading the way. This national demographic shift has translated into a marked increase in English language learners (ELLs) in public schools across the country. At roughly 4.4 million (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016), ELLs are the fastest growing segment of the K–12 student population and are predicted to represent 25% of all public school students by 2025. In NYC in particular, the most culturally and linguistically diverse city in the country, more than 3 million of its 8.4 million residents are foreign born, the largest group of approximately 380,000, or 12.4%, hailing from the DR. This is directly reflected in NYC classrooms, where Dominicans are the largest Spanish-speaking population. Therefore, most NYC teachers, regardless of their subject area, are likely to have Dominican children in their classrooms. For this reason, teachers in NYC need a more in-depth understanding of Dominican culture to better serve this population. King and Bigelow (this volume) support this argument by noting that preservice teachers’ learning experiences are more meaningful when they are closely aligned with these teachers’ likely future teaching experiences. Moreover, this program in the DR disrupts the overwhelming tendency for students to study abroad in Western European countries like the UK, Italy, Spain, and France, the top destinations for most American students (Open Doors, Reference Doors2017), and, in so doing, expands cross-border educational experiences beyond Eurocentric frames.
Teacher Education Curricula
I believe bolder steps need to be taken to enrich teacher education curricula, which must go beyond including cultural diversity issues in course readings or merely training teachers to celebrate the cultural diversity and experiences of their students. We can enhance teacher education curricula by providing real opportunities for pre- and inservice teachers and their professors to experience “otherness,” that is, to engage linguistic and cultural differences firsthand by temporarily living and learning in the countries of their students’ origin and to use that experience to inform their teaching and engage their students’ learning. Thus, I led the first group of mostly master's level TESOL and/or foreign language preservice teachers from NYU's Steinhardt School (“Steinhardt”) on a 3-week study abroad program to the DR in 2010, and the program has run uninterrupted annually in January ever since.
The program, entitled Culture and Language Learning in Real Time (CLLRT), was conceived and developed as a collaborative learning experience between Steinhardt and Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM), the leading Catholic University in the DR, located in Santiago, the second largest city. The conceptual framework for the program is situated within four interrelated areas of research—second language acquisition (SLA), study abroad as a component of SLA, culturally responsive pedagogy, and intercultural competence.
Second Language Acquisition and Study Abroad
Krashen (Reference Krashen1982) proposed the well-known, somewhat controversial, distinction between language acquisition (learning language by immersion in naturalistic settings) and language learning (formal study of language in a classroom) to explain differential outcomes in SLA. In fact, many studies in SLA have examined language learning from the learner's perspective, but few have looked at the extent to which having teachers engage in language immersion raises their sensitivity to their own students’ language learning process, and how that might inform their teaching of such students. A noteworthy exception is Borg's (Reference Borg2003) tripartite model of teacher cognition, in which Borg persuasively showed that teachers’ prior learning experience, teacher education, and classroom practice can inform their cognition about teaching and learning. In this regard, Borg reviewed studies that demonstrated that prior language learning experience has a strong influence on a teacher's language teaching.
One way for teachers to engage in language immersion is through study abroad programs, which often include specific learning objectives such as developing competence in a foreign language; understanding how cultures and societies are formed, sustained, and evolve; and developing empathy for the values and perspectives of cultures other than one's own. CLLRT encompasses all of these objectives, including a required language learning component.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Critical Teacher Education, and Intercultural Competence
CLLRT is also informed by the work of researchers who have argued that culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) should be a focal point of teacher education curricula if we are to adequately prepare teachers for the growing diversity in the student population in the 21st century. Gay (Reference Gay2000) defined CRP as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these students” (p. 29). Such pedagogy requires as a starting point certain dispositions toward learners (e.g., empathy, openness, and curiosity).
CRP also requires a more critical approach to teacher education, which, as Hawkins and Norton (Reference Hawkins and Norton2009) argued, would challenge teachers to explicitly study “the production and reproduction of power relationships in institutions (such as schools) and society” (p. 32). This includes how particular groups of students come to be understood as mainstream, while culturally and linguistically diverse others are marginalized. An important component of critical teacher education, relevant to the present study abroad program, is what García (Reference García, Cenoz, Gorter and May2017) called “critical multilingual language awareness” (CMLA), which not only fosters teachers’ sensitivity to language, but also “develops in all teachers a critical understanding of how language use in society has been naturalized,” especially by schools reproducing “dominant ideologies of monolingualism” (p. 268). García envisioned teachers’ enacting CMLA by having their students “engage in developing a consciousness of language as social practice and a voicing of their own multilingual experiences” (pp. 268–269). In this regard, the present study abroad program's immersing teachers in Dominican Spanish disrupts the naturalized understanding of Spanish as only or primarily Castilian. It also paves the way for teachers to constructively engage in their classrooms the Dominican Spanish/English translanguaging practices of their Dominican immigrant students who live transnational lives between the DR and NYC, thereby disrupting perceived homogeneous linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Furthermore, engaging students’ prior knowledge, linguistic, and cultural experiences requires intercultural competence, that is, having or seeking in-depth knowledge of students’ cultures and languages, and interacting and communicating with students in ways that are contextually appropriate and effective (Lustig & Koester, Reference Lustig and Koester2010). These issues are all addressed in the graduate course that is part of CLLRT.
Program Design
CLLRT is a two-part theoretical and experiential learning experience. Students take a three-credit Steinhardt graduate course entitled “Intercultural Perspectives in Multicultural Education,” taught by me at PUCMM. Topics include cultural norms, values, and practices; intercultural competence; cross-cultural communication in and beyond the classroom, including the role of race/ethnicity, class, and gender; verbal and nonverbal communication; language and power; and CRP. Prior to departure in early January, students must attend two predeparture orientations to obtain background information on PUCMM, discuss program goals, and review the course syllabus. Students are also required to read and respond to predeparture readings on the differences in values, beliefs, and practices across cultures, and the history and current state of the DR to provide some context. Schmidt-Rinehart and Knight (Reference Schmidt-Rinehart and Knight2004) noted the importance of providing pretrip knowledge to study abroad participants on the history, culture, and customs of the country to be visited in order to facilitate the adjustment process.
Spanish class
In addition to taking the Steinhardt graduate course, students simultaneously learn Spanish through an immersion model by taking a one-credit undergraduate level Spanish class offered by PUCMM faculty. All students admitted to the program are required to take the Spanish class regardless of whether or not they know Spanish. The goal for taking the Spanish class is not to become fluent in Spanish (as this is highly unlikely in 3 weeks), but, rather, for these prospective teachers to experience what it feels like to be a beginning language learner and hopefully develop empathy for the language learning challenges of ELLs who are new to the United States and must learn English for schooling and survival. Students take a Spanish placement test upon arrival in the DR, and based on their test results, they are assigned to one of two levels of the Spanish class: beginner or intermediate/advanced. This process of diagnostic language testing mirrors what newcomer ELLs are required to do in English in NYC public schools, so participants are immediately able to experience what their future students must feel like when faced with a test in English. The Spanish class also provides models of foreign language teaching for prospective language teachers, so they are able to observe best practices as well as challenges in language teaching, while experiencing the various stages of language learning under immersion conditions.
Homestay
The most important experiential component of the program is the homestay. The students and I stay with Dominican host families for the entire duration of the program, which provides an authentic setting for language and cultural immersion. Studies of study abroad homestay (Diao et al., Reference Diao, Freed and Smith2011; Di Silvio, Donovan, & Malone, Reference Di Silvio, Donovan and Malone2014; Schmidt-Rinehart & Knight, Reference Schmidt-Rinehart and Knight2004) pointed out students’ contradictory feelings and perceptions about their homestay experiences, but they concluded that the majority of students feel that, on balance, homestay contributes positively to their language and culture learning, and the students would recommend homestays.
Tours
We also go on several educational tours and cultural activities across the island, all arranged by PUCMM's Office of International Students. We visit two very differentially resourced Dominican public schools, observe language and other classes in session, and have a debriefing session with teachers to get a better understanding of the Dominican education system. We also visit museums, an orphanage, a binational market at the border with Haiti, and the Colonial Zone in Santo Domingo, among other places. Collectively, the experience of being in Dominican classrooms in different types of schools; the knowledge of Dominican history, culture, and art gained from visits to various museums; and the exposure to poverty and structural inequalities at the orphanage and binational market are designed to help paint a rich and nuanced understanding of the intersection of cultural norms, values, practices, social stratification, and power. Specifically, the exposure to the Dominican education system, including conversations with current Dominican teachers (albeit brief) facilitates the intercultural development of preservice teachers. This exposure provides a space for these teachers to think about their future students’ prior educational experiences more critically, how to harness that knowledge to interact with them more empathetically, and how to instruct and assess them more equitably when they inhabit new identities as immigrant children in classrooms.
Evaluation of the Program
The program is evaluated through a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures including (a) the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), (b) A qualitative evaluation form, and (c) the regular Steinhardt course evaluation form. The IDI is a 50-item survey instrument used to measure cultural orientations and intercultural competence (Hammer, Reference Hammer, Fowler and Mumford1999). Students complete the same survey pre- and postprogram, and then paired sample t tests are calculated to assess changes in their intercultural dispositions. I developed the second measure, the qualitative evaluation form, for this program. It asks students to comment on the Spanish class, my graduate course, living with a host family, the various educational tours that we do, their overall experience in the DR, and how they would connect it to their teaching. The Steinhardt course evaluation form is used by all Steinhardt students.
For the purposes of this article, I report on the evaluations from the January 2017 cohort of students only. Of the 19 students in the cohort, 17 responded to the IDI survey and completed the qualitative evaluation and Steinhardt course evaluation forms. While the t test analysis did not show statistical significance between pre- and postprogram IDI scores (likely due to small sample size and only a 3-week stay in the DR), qualitative analysis of the program was overwhelmingly positive.
The qualitative evaluation form asks students to rank their opinions on several aspects of the program, on a scale consisting of excellent, very good, good, average, below average, and poor. Students ranked the homestay as the best part of their experience, emphasizing that it provided authentic engagement with Dominican culture and language simultaneously. Of the 17 respondents, 13 rated their host family experience as excellent, two rated it good, and two rated it average. Specifically, many stated that they “gained a deeper understanding of Dominican cultural values, norms, beliefs, and practices”—those subjective aspects of culture that are subtle, deeply embedded, and often the most difficult aspect of teachers’ intercultural work. All students noted that the visit to two public schools enhanced their understanding of the educational experiences of Dominican children, which can help them to be more adequately prepared to build on their future students’ strengths and address the challenges they face in NYC schools.
With respect to the Spanish class, among the 17 respondents, eight rated the class as excellent, five rated it very good, one rated it good, and three rated it average. Students noted that the Spanish class provided models of language teaching, as well as showed them the pros and cons of an immersion model. The class also complemented the language and culture learning in their host families, as the course content focused on Dominican culture, as well as colloquial and standard Spanish. Students were thus exposed to varieties of Dominican Spanish, thereby developing their sociolinguistic competence, and countering the tendency in foreign language pedagogy to teach and discuss only the standardized variety of the language. This is a good example of García's (Reference García, Cenoz, Gorter and May2017) critical language awareness.
For those who didn't know Spanish prior to the program, they stated that they immediately felt empathy for their beginner ELLs who experience the frustration of not understanding the language of classroom instruction, thereby feeling excluded from learning and participation; however, they also stressed that they are acutely aware of the difference between their voluntary short-term stay in the DR and the permanent residence of immigrant children who are brought to the United States not by their own choice and who must learn English for schooling and living in the United States. Finally, students reported that this experience made them more willing and able to negotiate the uncomfortable moments of engaging students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
CONCLUSION
Studying abroad is one approach to helping teachers better engage with our culturally diverse students today. There are obviously many other approaches that can be equally constructive. As 21st-century migration patterns continue to change, and students bring new and different cultures, languages, and funds of knowledge to our schools, teacher education programs would do well to adjust their dispositions, curricula, and practices to a more critical approach in order to engage our students in academically enriching and culturally responsive ways.
