“At best, an ethnography can only be partial.”
-Agar, 1980, The Professional Stranger, Ch. 3, Who are you to do this? In the fall of 2013, I became involved with a group of people interested in starting a bilingual two-way immersion program at George Washington School3. My involvement was facilitated through Dr. Nelson Flores, who had already become part of the planning team. My role in this process was to create a video for the TWI program that would make Dr. Hite, the superintended for the School District of Philadelphia, “immediately buy in to the program,” according to my notes of what Mr. Davis, the principal, had said in that first meeting. The video was to also serve as PR for the school, the TWI program, and the surrounding community. I was extremely excited at the prospect of working with this school; not only to make the video, but at the possibility of this school becoming my dissertation site.
I had been inside this school two years before, as a volunteer with Enlaces- an
after-school tutoring and homework help program for Latino students, mostly coming from Mexican families. My time volunteering only lasted a semester, when I realized the work load of graduate school was too much to sustain a regular volunteer commitment at this after-school program. I was also discouraged by the fact that Enlaces, at that time, was not necessarily open to people who wanted to do research with their students and parents. Yet, I was intrigued by this growing Mexican immigrant population, and also
3 This name, as all names of people, places and organizations, are pseudonyms - unless
realized the lack of bilingual personnel available to address this populations’ needs. The opportunity to go back to this school, and work with this community, was exciting not only because of my earlier interest during volunteering, but also, and more importantly, because of my past work as a teacher in a two-way immersion school in Boston, MA. I quickly realized that the questions that brought me to graduate school, the ones I wrote about in my personal statement, were those that I could ask in this same setting. This was an area that was changing. There were increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking
immigrant families, mostly from Mexico and increasingly from Central America. But also, it was an area undergoing the changes associated with gentrification, in that there was a growing population of new residents, who were mostly white, middle class, and highly educated. How this latter group of people were beginning to organize to support public schools, and how in particular there was strong interest for the bilingual program, reminded me of a very similar process which my school in Boston had gone through before I had become a teacher there.
When I began my teaching career as a 2nd grade dual language teacher in a Boston
Public School, it was a school and a community undergoing a transformation: the neighborhood was being gentrified, and for the first time, the school had a steady enrollment of white children of middle class and affluent backgrounds. In the two-way immersion program, the mostly white English-speaking children came from privileged backgrounds, and the Spanish-speaking children came from immigrant, low-income Latino households. While I strongly believed in the significance of having my Spanish- speaking students be considered the language experts and role models in my Spanish language classroom, I was often uncomfortable with the social inequalities between my
students’ families and how these could permeate the classroom. There were instances that solidified my commitment to these programs, such as the time when Pierce, a blond haired English-speaking boy from an affluent household, came to ask me a question, and Lalo, an outspoken bilingual Dominican boy from a low-income family, answered right away. Satisfied with the answer, Pierce went back to his table to continue his work. This was powerful to me: first, when else would the lives of these two children intersect? And second, where else would a boy like Pierce go to a boy like Lalo for the answer to a question? But there were other moments that were frustrating, such as when Pierce, and many of his white classmates, were able to go to an ‘Accelerated Learning’ program for academically advanced children to work on project based learning, while Lalo and most of his Latino classmates were not - a program, which was created as a result of the lobbying efforts of the white affluent parents, and had nebulous criteria for what it meant to be ‘academically advanced’.
While the Philadelphia and Boston context have important differences, embarking on this research project has allowed me the to delve deeply into the questions that originally motivated me to attend graduate school. As a researcher, I have been able to examine the larger social processes surrounding the creation of two-way programs in this particular urban school, along with the repercussions at the classroom level. For the past three years, I worked closely with the principal and the teachers of this new two-way immersion program, taking different roles as consultant, mentor, assistant, and
researcher. I chose to do an ethnography because it allowed me to explore the questions I was interested in, in their full complexity. In the section below, I begin with a description of the school and the surrounding neighborhood in which this study took place. I then
spend some time exploring my positionality, and discussing the implications of how others viewed me for the work presented here, which, as the quote above indicates, is at best partial. I also introduce some of the main characters of this story and talk about my relationships to them. I conclude by describing my methods of data collection and process of analysis.
Research Setting: George Washington School and its surrounding area
S: …can you tell me a little more how it's changed, the area, over the years and..?
K: Sure, you mean specially this area right around [Washington]? S: Yeah, yeah.
K: It's improved I mean there... Yeah, when I was a kid it wasn't great.
[Washington] did not have a great reputation... honest, and the area was working-class and becoming run-down working class…Right now, and now because of, sort of, the [name of main street] growth and the push out from there it's um... a lot more friendly, a lot more family-but one thing I think it's
fascinating it's definitely become more diverse... I mean when I was a kid it was very much the remnants of the old Italian families, the remnants of the old Irish families and then you just started to have Asian families moving in. Now, this area is um... there are a lot of Asian families but they're of... you know, several striving Latino communities and there was none of that when I was a kid. That just... I mean, if you think, you know, you can kind of identify a community through its food. For example, there was... I can't think of a single Latin, Mexican or anything type restaurant when I was a kid and now it's just... this community has grown and become so multicultural which is really cool.
Washington School is located in a diverse part of the city that is undergoing change. As K, a TWI parent who grew up in this part of the city describes above, this area was historically where many Italian immigrants settled in the mid-twentieth century, making this zone home to the second largest Italian community in the United States
(Singer, Vitiello, Katz, & Park, 2008). Before then, however, the area had already been home to different groups of immigrants, including Irish immigrants in the 1800’s, as well as Russian Jews, Slovaks, Greeks, Italians, and a small Lebanese community. In the last half of the 20th century however, refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam have settled in the neighborhood, as well as a growing number of Mexican immigrants (Singer et al., 2008). Yet, in the past decade or so, these same areas are now popular among (mostly white) young professionals. News stories and observations, both my own and those of my participants, indicate a growth in new and re-modeled properties in the area.
As K also mentions above, many of these ethnic immigrant communities are easily identifiable because of its food. This part of Philadelphia still has several Italian bakeries and deli’s, along with the corridor not so far from the neighborhood known as the Italian Market. Yet along with these older establishments, there are pockets of Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, and an increasing number of Mexican corner stores, bakeries, a tortillería, and several restaurants. At the same time, there are hip new restaurants, expensive coffee shops, and locally owned businesses (that sell pretty expensive things) along one of the main commercial streets in this part of town, which has also seen a resurgence and re-development.
The school itself is located in a residential area. The school building is an imposing, four-story, grey stoned structure, surrounded by black iron gates. There is a tiny plot of grass in front of the school, and bright blue entrance doors that contrast with the grey walls. The back of the school is a vast concrete space. Half of it is used as a playground, and the other half, as a faculty and staff parking lot. Next to this school is an
even larger, more imposing, concrete art-deco building, that used to be a public high school, whose closing and selling as a cost-saving measure by the School District of Philadelphia was quite controversial. The short blocks that surround the school are lined with small, two-story homes. One block away, there is a building that used to be a large and thriving Catholic school in the area. The building is well kept, with green spaces and several Catholic statues surrounding it. The block adjacent to this school has several large, newly-built, modern single family homes.
George Washington School is a public K-8 school. In school year 2013-2014, there were 564 students enrolled - in subsequent years, that number has steadily
increased, so that for the 2016-2017 school year, there are more than 700. Of the students enrolled in the year 2013-2014, 42% were officially labeled English Language Learners. There is great diversity at Washington, with many different languages spoken by families, including Mandarin, Nepali, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Spanish, and many more
cultural backgrounds. In terms of ethnicity, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website provides the following breakdown:
Table 1: Ethnic Breakdown of George Washington School
Ethnicity Percentage Asian 45 Latino 27.3 African American 13.1 White 9.6 Pacific Islander 0 American Indian 0.4 Other 4.6
The majority of the student population (89.9%) is considered economically disadvantaged.
As K mentions, the school did not have a good reputation - I found that parents, both English and Spanish speaking, along with some of the school staff, would tell me this. Several people mentioned frequent fights and conflicts with the recently closed high school students across the streets. Not only that, for many years the school was a
revolving door for school leaders. Before Mr. Davis came along, several people reported to me that there was a different principal each year. In contrast, there are staff members who have been at the school for many years. Ms. Grainger, now the Assistant Principal, has been at the school for over 20 years, as well as the ESL teacher (they are good friends), and several others.
Washington School begun a TWI program in 2014 with one kindergarten cohort of 24 students. Each subsequent year, there will be one classroom added to the program until it becomes a K-8th program. At the moment, there is a district-approved five-year plan to expand the program. Based on strong interest in the TWI program from middle class, mostly white, families moving to the area, it is likely that the student demographics will change during this time period.
Participants, Roles & Positionality
Ethnography is an ontological, embodied enterprise (Rosaldo, 1989; Warren & Hackney, 2000). In this kind of research, we are our most important research tool, and both who we are and how people perceive us shape the kind of information that is gathered, analyzed, and inscribed in the final write up. Aside from my ethnicity and bilingualism, my gender, class and educational level, in particular, were important factors in how others saw me, whom I had access to, and who felt comfortable with me. My identity as a Penn researcher and as a former two-way immersion teacher were also very important in gaining access, building rapport, and earning credibility in this setting. I developed different relationships with different participants, and my roles and
responsibilities varied in each setting. In turn, in each setting, different people perceived me in different ways. As I describe these relationships, I also introduce some of the main participants in my study.
In the classroom: Maestra Sofía
During centers one morning in March of 2015, I was working with a group of students at the ABC Center, or Centro ABC. As the children worked, chatting away in a mix of English and Spanish words and phrases, Lilly, a jovial girl from an English speaking household, asked me: “Can I get some agua, porfavor?”. Before I could reply, Michaela, a sassy child also from an English-speaking Italian American household, responded to her: “you gotta ask the real teacher” (2015.03.03_A04_CentroABC). I
how perceptive children are, even at their young age. Indeed, in the classroom, the children knew I wasn’t their “real teacher,” but nonetheless would call me “Maestra Sofía” and would greet me excitedly whenever I was there. In the classroom, I was a teacher aide/researcher. I listened (and recorded/took notes) during whole group lessons, and in general supported centers and small group or individual work. Children got used to me placing down my phone or a recorder at their tables, eventually wanting to be the focus of my recordings. By the end of the year they all vied for my attention and that of my recorders. Some children would also ask for my help often - they wanted assistance in reading and/or writing, or at times in resolving conflicts within a group. I would
accompany the class to the restroom and would usually take the group of girls or the group of boys, and I volunteered on several occasions to do a read aloud or to be responsible for the group when Ms. O had to administer reading assessments. I would also volunteer to add drawings and visuals to Ms. O's anchor charts, and at times would help her prepare materials for her lessons. On a few occasions I led small group guided reading lessons, the first of which was to model one way to approach this teaching method for Ms. O.
Ms. O - Kindergarten TWI teacher
Before becoming a Kindergarten teacher, Ms. O was a chef and owned her own restaurant. She describes her motivation for switching careers and going into teaching as wanting to do something more meaningful. Part of this, was because in school, she had her own challenges. During our interview, she shared how she hated school in part
because she was dyslexic and had problems with attention - but that at the same time, she loves children, and felt like she could transfer her skills into the classroom. That
transition proved to be to a very difficult, and often, Ms. O gives me undue credit for helping her survive her first year at Washington. She claims I was there to help her figure out what to do when she was lost, in terms of planning, of setting up centers, of
organizing a routine, of figuring out how to address parents’ concerns. While I do feel I was helpful, I often did not feel useful enough. Nonetheless, I believe that me being there, simply to listen to Ms. O, especially during the hardest and most challenging times, was comforting. And in particular, it was crucial that I understood from personal
experience what she was going through, and would often offer advice by sharing what I did in similar situations when I was a teacher. I believe having me there as a witness to the crazy responsibilities, demands and expectations during her first year was validating. It didn’t take long for Ms. O and I to become good friends, which we continue to be. It also happened that we were neighbors, so at times I would visit her at home, or would accompany her on walks with her dog. I share a connection to Venezuela, her home country, since my brother-in-law is also Venezuelan. We both come from highly educated homes and share the experiences of having had a somewhat similar level of class
privilege while growing up. I have met her family and friends, and even stayed with her while traveling through Spain in the summer.
Ms. A - 1st Grade TWI teacher
With Ms. A, I have also developed a caring, friendly relationship. Because Ms. A is a seasoned teacher, she needed less pedagogical support from me, but similarly
appreciated my presence in the classroom. Ms. A taught in Chile, her home country, for about 8 years before moving to the United States. While she was very strong in her classroom management and pedagogy, she felt more insecure about her mastery of English and during her time at Washington, was preparing to re-take the state licensing exams to become a certified teacher. Because she was new to the district school system, having come from a charter school, she was also getting used to the policies, standards, and requirements of how the district works. The beginning of the school year was a struggle because of this, along with a lack of curricular materials in Spanish, and because of the shuffling that occurred in the student population of the TWI program, which I address in Chapter 5. In her classroom, I was able to focus on data collection and