So What Are The Answers?

Let me return to my inquiry questions...

My broad question is: 

• What are the most effective strategies teachers can use to create safe spaces within schools for immigrants and refugees?

My sub-questions are:

•  How can we make community education spaces comfortable for immigrant and refugee students? Does place based education help EAL learners gain valuable English skills? 
• What are the benefits of having EAL students use their native language in order to make them feel comfortable? How can we incorporate space into this strategy? 
• How can different places assist for our assessment of English benchmarks according to the Common Framework of Reference (CFR)? (The CFR and various other EAL documents can be found here).

     I believe that my completed research (through readings and community engagement) has aided in answering the above questions. It has also presented me with new questions.

I will first start by addressing my sub-questions individually...

How can we make community education spaces comfortable for immigrant and refugee students? Does place based education help EAL learners gain valuable English skills?

     I think that visiting Vincent Massey Community School helped shape my answer to this question as well as our first ELC article by Greenwood (The Nexus of Geography and Culture). At Vincent Massey that have a space dedicated to the "community" in the form of a community room, which they use for various activities. One of the great things that they do at Vincent Massey is involvement of the community, the parents, and being open to sharing culture and learning about each others cultures. This goes along the same lines of what Greenwood says in his article - our culture is placed where we are and who we interact with, culture is context. So in order to create a safe space for our newcomer students, we have to involve their culture. They have to be in a safe space where they feel like they can share their culture and learn at their own pace. In short, place based education can definitely help EAL learners gain valuable English language skills. Place can put the language in context and can help students understand the meaning of the language they are learning. There are of course logistical problems with giving EAL students these type of experiences (addressed in further questions). It is hard to develop these types of meaningful learning experiences when you are constrained to seeing your students for an hour a day and maybe even as little as two or three times a week. I can admit that I have no idea what the solution to this problem is, but I know that there has to be a better way to give our EAL students specific, language rich, place based learning experiences. Of course, within the mainstream classroom our students get practice with English and get some out of classroom experiences. I think that if there is a way to get our EAL students together with their leveled groups and have these types of engaging experiences, then we should be doing it.

 What are the benefits of having EAL students use their native language in order to make them feel comfortable? How can we incorporate space into this strategy?

     Reading our second ELC article by Cutter that was about creating a school garden had a large impact on my answer to this question, as well as the article by Cummins about rethinking monolingual instruction. In the Cummins article he discusses that all research points to the fact that using the first language to develop the second, third, fourth, etc. language has multiple benefits. The previous way of thinking of immersion (only speak English) has to give way to the method of developing first language literacy along with the development of second language literacy. The use of their first language also aids in making newcomer students feel comfortable. They don't have to feel like coming to a new place means giving everything that they know up, language can be that bridge that helps them understand and establish their lives in Canada. Place can definitely be incorporated into this strategy but again, there are certain logistical barriers that need to be overcome for this to happen.

How can different places assist for our assessment of English benchmarks according to the Common Framework of Reference?

     This was one question that I found the most difficult to find a clear answer to and I feel like a broken record saying this again BUT, place can help with the assessment of English benchmarks according to the CFR but there are barriers that need to be overcome. Within the EAL classrooms there are certain things that need to be assessed (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) and though it is completely possible to assess these goals outside the classroom, it is hard when you only have an hour with that group of students. A lot of the time the mainstream teacher isn't completely familiar with the CFR goals as well because this is the job of the EAL teacher, so they may be able to assess them when they do go outside the classroom. All teachers (mainstream and EAL alike) definitely have enough on their plate so adding the component of incorporating assessing CFR goals with place based education seems kind of unreasonable. This strategy has not been investigated in detail so the benefits are not clear but since place can give students context, I would think that using place to assess their English benchmarks would have some benefits for the students learning.

     Of course, throughout this inquiry I have been able to answer the questions that I have posed but it has also raised some new questions...

• How can we get past the constraints of the pull-out method of EAL so we can involve EAL students in place based education?
• Along the same lines, how can be get EAL students outside the classroom so they can have more meaningful assessment of their English benchmarks according to the CFR?

 And of course, I need to address my main inquiry question... I will attempt to be brief because my sub-questions aid in the answering of this question:

What are the most effective strategies teachers can use to create safe spaces within schools for immigrants and refugees?

     The answer to this question is not cut and dry because there is no "best strategy". I've said previously that there is no one size fits all and that you can't anticipate everything, so to compose a list of strategies that would work every time isn't reasonable. I have come across some strategies that may work for teachers (composed in another section) but there is no best one. As a teacher you must assess the needs of all your students (newcomers included) in order to see what strategy works. Things like, bringing the parents into the school, incorporating students culture, allowing the students to speak their native language, and getting the students and their families involved in community events are all great things that can help newcomer families feel safe within the school and surrounding area.

     Overall, I see ecological education as getting out students involved in the community, in real life experiences, and facilitating learning that will shape them to become actively engaged citizens. Ecological education has an important place in my inquiry as I think that involving EAL students in ecological education can give them the context that they need to acquire valuable language skills.