Mod 19 Discussion: Taking the Lead on Literacy

In history, I would suggest including inquiry-based projects so that ELL students can become subject matter experts in a topic of interest. The idea would be to have the student select a topic of inquiry that reflects their own cultural background or connects to that background in some meaningful way.

In Math, I would suggest first surveying my ELL students for a list of problems they face in their communities and then select those problems that can be solved using math. This approach, the idea of using math to solve real-world problems faced by students presented in a cultural context, would certainly increase engagement and thus student growth.

In science, I would suggest framing a unit with the idea of merging the scientific enquiry at the core of the lesson with the cultural and linguistic experiences of ELL students. One could, for example, pull an article from Latindex, a database of major scientific articles in Spanish, and design a lesson around the scientific inquiry explored by the Spanish scientists involved.

As an ELA teacher, I like working with teachers in all of these disciplines to create integrated units of study. For example, instead of teaching literature out of context (I was going to teach Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), I thought it would be exciting to integrate the study of that novel with what was happening in science, history, and math during the time period (1800-1820) when the book was published. In science there were significant advances in the understanding of electricity and in fact the Shelley’s attended lectures on electricity in London. The application of these discoveries also required the development of a new math. And certainly there were historical implications as well. So I worked with three other teachers (science, history, and math) and we taught the time period so we could connect learning in all four disciplines.