Asian American / Asian Students: Aspects of Social Interaction – Workshop 2-B

Thomas Tam: …community college, who’s going to be talking to us about Children, Order, the Racial Disorder: Implications for Educators. And if you would like to add some more introduction to yourself, please do so. Okay, sure.

Maria Kromidas: Hi, everyone, I’m Maria Kromidas. As stated, I’m an instructor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and I’m also a PhD candidate at teacher’s college, Columbia University, in the program of anthropology and education. So, as will be clear, I’m interested in anthropological issues, but always from the applied perspective, and I hope that we will get into some discussions.

My presentation is based on ethnographic research in a 4^th grade classroom, East New York, Brooklyn, six months after September 11^th, 2001. My initial aim was to capture how students understood the tragedy and the war on terrorism, and how they themselves used the discourse of freedom and nation that were popularly deployed in the media in the aftermath of September 11^th and continuing on in the so called war on terrorism, and of course now the war on Iraq.

My initial aims were pushed aside in my very first conversations with the students, when I asked them, so, what’s going on in the world right now? The response I received immediately pointed to the importance that race, specifically the racialization of the imputed enemy had in this classroom, as well as beyond this individual classroom. What became more important, however, was that this racialized discourse, arguably a national phenomenon, is not just about some abstract enemy out there, but that very much reverberated in the social interactions that students experienced in their daily lives. I will talk about these shifts that were evident in the classroom in terms of the punctuating events of September 11^th, my response to what I saw, and I will end with what I hope will be the opening of a dialogue, meaning I know that there are no hard and fast answers to the dilemmas that my ethnographic research uncovered. I thus offer my remarks in this regard.

First off, I will quickly describe the school and the surrounding neighborhood to point out some of the relevant characteristics that truly played a role in the ways that racializing forces impinged on the social relations in the classroom. Public School 99, which is a pseudonym, and anthropologists, and you all understand that, well, Public School 99 in many ways fits the description of our failing inner city schools. It is identified as a high-need school with most students scoring far below the achievement goals set out by state and federal standards on standardized exams. Approximately 85% of the students are eligible for free lunch, commonly interpreted as the poverty level index of the students’ families, and almost 100% minority. A breakdown of the student population in the traditional racial-ethnic categories employed by the school is as follows: 28% Black, 46% Hispanic, 25% Asian, and 1% White. Of course, these traditional categories don’t capture the diversity within these categories, their spatial organization within the neighborhood, nor their specific historical trajectories concerning immigration. As pertains to the last category, 12% of the students have immigrated within the last three years.

Three of the top five sending countries to New York City in the 1990’s, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guyana, as well as two new large groups, Nigeria and Bangladesh, are well represented in the school. Indeed, the 25% Asian that I mentioned is mostly from Bangladesh.

Okay, so the classroom in which I conducted fieldwork was considered the lowest performing of the seven 4^th grade classrooms in the school, and was thus set up as a reading intervention class. So it had a higher percentage of recent immigrants, as such. My previous experience as a teacher in this school for three years allowed me a comparison, allowed me to compare shifts in the students’ social interaction and their use of racial discourse before and after the rupturing point of September 11^th.

As mentioned, it was the first day in the classroom that other impractices were evident. It was clear that the children’s talk about the enemy was infused with racialized statements. Beyond statements such as, “We’re fighting those ugly people”, I find the following examples to be extremely revealing.

After I brought the class together from their small discussion groups, one student, Sheri, reported on their conversation as follows; she said: “We were talking about who started it first. And if they kill a lot of people, we gotta go to war right then.” I asked her, “Who are they?” She responded, “The Indians!” I answered, “The Indians?” And she said, “I don’t know, that’s what I call them.” And some other student piped in, “The Pakistans!” I responded, “The Pakistans?” And another student piped in, “The Afghanistans!” “The Afghanistans?” I again responded. And one student finally said, “the terrorists.”

Later on that same afternoon, the following conversation took place. Sheri again: “I feel sorry for the Afghanistan people.” And another student piped in, “Why do you feel sorry after what they did?” And Shari announced, “Because they’re gonna die”, which most of the class broke up with laughter. Another student piped in, “I feel happy”, again students laughing, “No, no, no, because they want to kill our people, they’re going to die too, they want to have a party when we die, so we should celebrate.” “If they die, it will be better for us,” another student piped in. I said, “Who are they?” She said, “the Arabic people.”

Although I repeatedly tried to clarify for the students that the only acceptable reference to “they” or “them” was terrorists, many of them continued to use the wrong signifier, as Latisha did later that afternoon. She said, “The Indians, I call them Indians.” “Who?” I asked. “The people that was in the airplane. They said God told them to do this.” So on and so forth, until the teacher interrupted her.

Thus, within one afternoon, this classroom had referred to the enemy, or they, as Indians, Pakistanis, Afghanis, Palestinians. I strongly would argue that comment about the people celebrating in the street was referring to that video clip that was constantly aired in the media. So, Palestinians and eventually all Arabic people. I argue that the students labeling should be considered a racialization, a lumping together of unrelated peoples by virtue of their skin color, a racialization that was woven with, not surprisingly, xenophobia.

Others may dismiss this racial lumping as a result of the students’ immaturity or ignorance of these matters; that is just, children’s babble. I find this point, I can dismiss these points on two matters. First, that it is not unlike the sort of racial and xenophobic lumping and labeling, discrimination, and violence that is occurring nationally, and secondly that this kind of talk made sense in the classroom. Indeed it made so much sense that it elicited laughter from many of the students, as in the second example that I showed. So much sense that the students became exasperated with me when I kept asking them to clarify who “they” were, as in the first example. As an anthropologist I am not interested in what any of these students knew or believed in their heads to be the proper identification of terrorist. Of course, the case could be made that Latisha did in fact know that the terrorists were not Indians, but rather they effectively employed, manipulated, and played with an emerging and available racial construct. However much some students were playing, laughing, and having fun, for our purposes it’s crucial to point out that not all were playing, not all were having fun, and not all were laughing, for “they” were not just out there, “they” were also in the classroom.

It was during a multicultural lesson about the diversity of people with Professor [inaudible] that two Bengali girls approached to tell me that some students were, quote, “making fun of my country”. Although I found out later that this had been occurring for some time, it is instructive to note that the underlying tensions resurfaced in the context of a multicultural lesson, for I was making available to the students a form of difference multiculturalism, as it’s called in the literature. This is the most popular form of multicultural discourse employed by schools. However, it’s been argued that this kind of discourse redefines cultural differences and actually has a divisive effect on students’ friendship networks. The actual statement that was directed at the girls was, “your family sleeps in bushes”. However, the girls correctly noted that this was a remark not directed at their individual families, but rather to their families’ background or some imagined aspect of it. I would agree with the girls’ perception of this remark for two reasons: the context in which it was made, during a formal lesson about Muslim people, and the students to whom these remarks were directed. This derogatory remark was picked up by many students in the class, and even students that were from Bangladesh or Guyana, whether they were Muslim or not. The non-Muslim Guyanese were proclaiming loudly that they were not Muslim, nor that they were from Bangladesh, and to make their case, began using it to refer to others to whom they felt applied more appropriately, the Bengali Muslims. Other students continued to make fun of them as if this was the case. Anupa, a non-Muslim Guyanese student, later complained to me, “They always think I’m from their country and I always tell them I’m not.” The question that then arises is, what is the import of the country that Anupa is from? What is the function of a statement as, “You sleep in bushes”? Quite simply, statements such as these function as forms of exclusion. They indicate to the recipient that she or he is somehow unlike the rest of the group. “You sleep in bushes”, or “You are from Bangladesh” takes on a level of significance that the statement “You are from Ecuador” does not, regardless of where the individual is from. It is an accusation of not only being somehow unlike the group, but not worthy of participation in the group’s activities.

For instance, during a group science project that I was observing, the students in [Chechim]’s group were complaining that they did not want to work with him because he doesn’t speak English, he speaks Bengali. This would not be such an interesting point if English was not his native and only language. Indeed he did have a Guyanese accent, but the Jamaican accent of a classmate did not arouse such exclusionary tactics. Thus, being from Bangladesh, speaking Bengali, or looking as if you do became the new marker of not belonging in this classroom. What must be emphasized, the singling out of South Asian and Muslim students is in many ways new, and the indicative flux must in many ways be accounted for in terms of ongoing processes before September 11^th, and the rupturing point of September 11^th itself. Before the tragedy, Bengali and South Asian diasporic students’ presence can be characterized as an almost invisible one for the students. Guyanese and Trinidadian students of South Asian descent form friendship networks with Bengali students, and these networks rarely overlap with the Black and Latino majority. It cannot be assumed that this patterning of clustering of students was due to any similarity in their culture, in their immigration status, in their religion, or anything like these because these networks compose of a diversity of all these characteristics. It may then be presumed that students were racialized as belonging together, not quite belonging with the Black and Latino majority. To illustrate, in the midst of the 1999-2000 school year, I received a new student from Trinidad, an Afro-Trinidadian, she immediately became included and included herself as part of one group of Black and Latino girls, rather than a group of South Asian diasporic girls that included other Trinidadian immigrants. Thus, racialization was a relevant process at work in students’ friendships, but this process can be better characterized as non-inclusionary rather than exclusionary. The key difference is that the discriminatory and derogatory elements that are missing from the first, as opposed to the second; the first seems to proceed as if it’s a natural clustering of students while the second proceeds with force.

However invisible this group may have been for the students before September 11^th, points of tension did exist for the adults around them. For the parents, the Bengalis became invisible only at moments of tension, as during a proposed rezoning of the students due to overcrowding, like during a meeting concerning the collapsing of one kindergarten class to make another bilingual Bengali class. To many of the parents, it was inevitably the immigrant families from Bangladesh that were to blame for these inconveniences. One parent had even proposed during a meeting that only they should be rezoned. This pattern of intolerance and blaming the newcomer for structural problems is a phenomenon documented for other neighborhoods of New York. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Sanjek’s work, Roger Sanjek, he’s at Queens College. Other points of tension and intolerance were evident, as when parents would groan when meetings were translated into Bengali. And, I just want to note that these previously existing tensions moved from the private sphere, and became exacerbated in the public domain of harassment and discrimination.

Thus far, I’ve tried to show the connection between the students’ hazy understanding of a faraway enemy and the categorization of their South Asian diasporic classmates. While I have relied on a few illustrative examples, my participant observation with the students attempted to contextualize these processes in terms of the students’ overall racial understandings.

I will briefly outline what I consider to be the main dynamics in this specific classroom in this particular neighborhood that is almost 100% minority. The South Asians, including the Guyanese, are constructed by the Blacks and Latinos as a “brown” and foreign other, while some Latinos refer to them as black. The Bengalis, in turn, distance themselves from Blacks while the Guyanese resist being categorized with the Bengalis, vociferously putting forward their racist feuds. While not ignoring previously existing tensions in this neighborhood, I attempted to call to attention the impact of learning about war and learning about an enemy has had in this classroom, where some children are made to feel they belong by excluding others, and other children are pushed belong the margins of belonging. I’ve explored the impact of learning about war has had in this neighborhood, a neighborhood with its on unique group composition, history and tensions. The dynamics in a neighborhood like Jackson Heights, Queens, with a larger and historically older Indian, South Asian population, or a neighborhood like Borham Hill, with a larger Arab-American and Black Muslim population. However, I don’t doubt that these racializing practices occurring nationwide, the infringement of civil rights of persons, citizens or not that look Arab and Muslim, or institutions of the state and civil society, are not reverberating throughout the classrooms of our city. These are processes that are denied, ignored, or more often proceed unnoticed by educators but must be incorporated into their teaching. We must disrupt processes of social reproduction, processes that reproduce group inequalities and maintain white supremacy. It is clear that we must go beyond difference multiculturalism that reified difference with a “have a nice day” smile. We need radical pedagogies that explore power differentials and that emphasize student understandings of their position within structures of power that constitute their lived experiences. The most powerful work, in my opinion, are works that take the ethnographic realities of each side seriously, but work through and with radical pedagogies and attempt to create or sustain alternative forms of social and cultural capital.

These are difficult issues, especially when we’re dealing with children as young as the ones I was talking about. But I hope you respond to these challenges with effort and compassion.

[applause]

So, we’re going to wait til the end for any questions, or, yeah?

Male Audience Member: I did not quite grasp the age level that you were dealing with in your class…

Maria Kromidas: Um, they were fourth grade, some of them were nine, some were ten, some were eight.

Male Audience Member: It is interesting that at that age level they are already cognizant of the fact that they are different and [inaudible].

Maria Kromidas: Absolutely, with my work that I hope to continue, I really want to work further with race and children because I think how we usually understand, we usually present that kids don’t know what’s going on, and I see no difference between this, the kind of processes I see in this classroom with things outside of the classroom, so I really want to kind of recapture that children, yes, they are smarter than we think, or as dumb as us.

Male Audience Member: I just wanted to ask one more question. Do you think that this biased nature of the kids starts at home or is it a peer pressure in school? [inaudible] tell the difference where it came from.

Maria Kromidas: I do think, yeah, many of it is their parents, their parents act just as, in many of the same ways, but it’s also the things like the media, you see a lot of these things that are presented, some of these stereotypes and essentialisms that are really coming out from this constant media bombardment of what it means to be an enemy or an other in this country. That’s part of it. I don’t think the institution of the school does much to help. The teachers are, from my experience, have their own stereotypes that, these things, they’re subtle, but we all pick up on them.

Female Audience Member: [inaudible]

Maria Kromidas: That would be an example of a radical pedagogy, to explore, let’s say, how media constructs race right there. What I’m really arguing against is that traditional multicultural type of discourse that really everything is, okay, let’s bring in our rice and beans, and you bring in your this, and look at this, we have eight languages in our school.

Female Audience Member: [inaudible]

Maria Kromidas: Right, well that stuff can can be important, right, but if that’s all that there is, that’s really just hitting at the surface issues and not getting into things like power inequalities, discrimination, and the history of oppression that groups in this country have faced, and so on and so forth.

Male Audience Member: Following right on that, is that what you’re talking about when you talk about difference multiculturalism versus this, what is this?

Maria Kromidas: Difference multiculturalism is traditional multiculturalism at the surface, and the radical pedagogies explore power differences, inequality and oppression, yes. Yes?

Male Audience Member: Let me go to the question that you just touched on in your earlier answer: teachers. On the one hand, teachers are like parents or like students, which is to say they’re all living in a society subject to all the stereotypes and media coverage that everybody else is. The difference from either of those two is that they’re charged with carrying out a multicultural agenda, racial harmony, ethnic harmony, etc. etc. etc. Did that emerge at all as what you described from the students when the parents began to swamp to school. How did it emerge, if at all?

Maria Kromidas: It really didn’t. This school really didn’t take it upon itself to deal with any of these issues. In this school, this failing school, and I think like most failing schools in our inner city, they’re just inundated and complete pressure put on tests and standardized tests and pre-tests and post-tests and test training. So much so that, during one of the school years that I was teaching, the superintendent had declared that, no more class trips for the whole year because everyone had to concentrate on testing. So it’s easy, it’s quite easy to blame the individual teachers for not responding, but I think if we take a step back and look at just the pressures that are put on our schools and just remediation and not enough rich curriculum, and nowadays, I find it even harder to, where would something like this fit into the politics of education going on right now, where it’s so far removed. Even in the 90’s, we had the culture wars, this could possibly fit in. Right now it’s like testing, accountability, high stakes, I mean, the educational discourse I feel has narrowed, but this is, I don’t know what even principals or administrators would do with this. I know the principal never responded when I gave him my report. Yes sir?

Male Audience Member: Your observations are in fourth grade. What age do you think the stereotyping, the prejudice starts to manifest itself?

Maria Kromidas: You know, I’m really not sure. That’s for further research to show, but I can imagine that we could see some of these processes as early as nursery school, four years old. I have read about race and children in nursery school. Of course, this research is usually, it’s presented very removed from the outside setting, like we present children as living in their own kind of autonomous world, so it’s very hard to gauge what’s going on outside of this little nursery school, in terms of the books that I’ve read and so on and so forth.

Male Audience Member #2: I’m sorry, this is the very first part of your presentation, but these observations were done right after September 11^th? Because I was, I’m really wondering how much really September 11^th impacted the children, because I remember, I grew up in Queens, and I went to public school in Queens. And then I did not experience those kind of things, because I was friends with everyone, there was no, my parents are from Japan, so I’m second generation, but there was no, “oh, you’re Japanese”, [inaudible], one of my very good friends was from Mexico, there was no “you’re Mexican”, none of that seemed to be happening, and I’m wondering if that’s a post-9/11 thing or more like, it’s just a now thing, it’s just the now-generation that because, I’m 26 right now, so I was an elementary school…

Maria Kromidas: I’m 29 and there was always like racial kind of gang things going on in my high school, and I think you might have had an exceptional experience, I mean, I think.

Male Audience Member #2: Maybe.

Male Audience Member #2: I think it goes with what’s happening in the world, with major world events. To continue on the Queens theme, I grew up in Queens, much older than the rest of you, and in the World War II, post-World War II period, we had a game called “I declare war on” where you would take a [inaudible] and throw it in a circle [inaudible] pie section were different countries. And then each person had to be a country, and you threw a ball down, and usually who got declared war on? Japan and Germany. This happened to be a German neighborhood, [inaudible] declare war on Germany or Japan anyway, which meant you were then it, you had to find the ball and then hit with the ball somebody else.

These international events filtered down and influenced the perception…What was I at that age? Five, six, seven, or something like that. And it comes automatically with, almost, unmediated…

Maria Kromidas: Yeah, there’s been evidence of children’s playground games taking on things like terrorists, and Osama, and so on and so forth. One more question?

Female Audience Member: I just wanted to comment. I grew up in the border between Mexico and the States, but in any case, I think if we go beyond in time, or actually behind in time [inaudible], I think we will see that it has almost been part of human history that the new kid on the block is always persecuted, and I think we can attribute it partly, and this depends on the situation, to the tendency in our society is that what’s different is not as good. And that happens at home with your wife and husband, you know, “Oh she does this and it’s not as good, usually it….” It’s a natural tendency and I think that to create this harmony of multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, we always need to work on it to understand our differences, and I think now [inaudible] the same issues, is that now the schools are left with much more of a package than what they had before because I think the family [inaudible].

[inaudible speech].

Maria Kromidas: I agree with all but the, I just, I always get scared of stuff that kind of naturalizes our racial problems, because it makes it seems like, “Oh, well, always we hate outsiders”, but I do think there’s something about the modernity of race that should be distinguished from age-old xenophobia, but I see that I am being pushed off, so thank you very much everyone.

Thomas Tam: Thank you. Thank you very much. Now we are going to our next speakers on the panel. We have talked about languages, we have talked about different geographies, borders, and stuff like that. Now we’re going to dig much deeper and to talk about language and geology. And the two next speakers will be Dr. Neru Cherukupali, who is the chairman and Professor of Geology in the Department of Geology at Brooklyn College, part of CUNY. And he has taught more than three decades at different levels at Brooklyn College and also PhD students at the graduate center. He has authored more than 100 research papers in geology, and also in terms of geology and teacher education, he has taught geology to ESL students, and has published on that subject. Please welcome Professor Cherukupali.

And the next one is, are you going to do it together, or you want to do it separately?

Dorothy Kehl: Yeah, I do first part, Neru the second part.

Thomas Tam: We actually have dig first, I ask before I dig. So maybe Professor Dorothy Kehl will begin the second part of the session. Professor Kehl is the Director of ESL program at Brooklyn College, and also the chair of the college, Asian/Asian American Studies program task force. She is a good friend of Asian American Research Institute, and we are very proud to have her with us. Please welcome Professor Kehl.

Dorothy Kehl: Alright. I think that, this morning, you heard, particularly from Dr. Hwang, from the SAT score, it shows that Asian American, Asian and Pacific Islander students, they consistently score very well in math but in the verbal score, it’s quite a different story. Well, we have ESL programs all over, in CUNY, we have them. But now, the most common thinking is that the best way to help students to learn a language is to put them in learning communities, so this term learning community is a very important term, and that’s what we want to talk about.

So, we call it language and content, two way acceleration. If you go to Neru’s geology class, and my ESL class, that ESL block, you should come out learning English better, and also be more successful in learning geology. So that’s the idea.

Our native speaker students through the first semester typically take freshman composition, next slide please, and two core courses. We have a core curriculum, ten courses that are required, so, freshman composition is required, political science, geology for the native speakers.

For the ESL students, Neru and I developed our own block. It’s like this. And that is ESL 15, which is reading, writing, integrated skills, and geology, core 8.2, which is science in modern life and geology. The idea is to provide a more meaningful first semester experience for ESL students, taught by two faculty members who are sensitive to their language needs. Now how do we handle our block collaboratively? First, we work out our individual syllabi and course outline. We select several topics in the geology syllabus to use in our teaching. The rest of the syllabi, I have my own because [inaudible] requirements and Neru has his own. So you can see that area D, Earth, Materials, Minerals, E, Rocks, Igneous Rocks, Sedimentary and Metamorphic Rocks, and then the economic minerals, meaning gold, silver, copper, iron, etc., and energy sources from sedimentary rocks, coal and petroleum.

After those four lectures or four headings, he gives a writing assignment, how volcanoes make rocks, and in another topic, shorelines and shore processes, he gives his second writing assignment, how do we change the shape of the shore? We overlap our teaching over these several topics. Right, next slide.

In the ESL class, the first thing that I do is to introduce reading skills, and those of you who teach ESL know that this is a very typical approach. I talk about previewing, so take the geology textbook, look at the table of contents, and then we look at each chapter and see how each chapter is organized. The geology text that Neru has selected is very unique. There are three things that are very useful. The first section, it talks about points of focus on learning, and then I think thumb through the pages with the students, we look at the headings and sub-headings and the graphics full of beautiful photographs, and at the end of each chapter there is a review. So I want the students to pay attention, to get a sense of what the chapter covers and how to benefit from the way the information in each chapter is organized.

Next thing, underlining. Students do that, but how well they do it, there’s a lot of room to improve. So I said, don’t underline everything, because then it’s useless, and some books are very clean. I said, “Why is it so clean, you want to sell it back?” I said, “How much can you get for it? The book costs 70 dollars, let’s see, 55, you sell it, you get 20 dollars!” I said, “But if you underline, it’s going to help you to study better. That education is worth far more than the 20 dollars that you get when you sell the book.” So I said, “Underline, look for the thesis in the chapter, and then underline the main supporting points, and also, you need to write notes in the margin, your own reflection, your own comments, and your comparison with things that you have learned before.” I think this is very [inaudible], you have to do that. And when I look at the clean page, I said, “This is very beautiful, but it’s terrible!”

And then the third thing that we do is summarizing. Why summarizing? Because when you summarize, you really bring your level of comprehension to a higher level, and in summarizing I usually teach them skills, what do you summarize, you look for the thesis, you look for the main support, and then you put all these ideas together, mainly in your own words, don’t plagiarize, don’t copy. And if you quote, you have to use direct quote, and also acknowledge the source of the information.

So having introduced the reading skills to help students to read the geology text, well, the other, the traffic from the other direction is, Neru, in his lecture, has to also follow the same scheme. Next slide please.

So, in the geology lecture, I insist that Neru puts on the blackboard, in every lecture, these following outline:
What’s the topic for today?
What’s the thesis?
Subheading, and all the supporting details

This is a very simple visual aid to help students to follow the lecture and to take notes. From time to time, I will say, I like to collect the lecture notes that we took last Monday, and I would look at it, and the good ones I make copies to distribute to the students, to share and say, this is an example of good note-taking. The rest is Neru.

Neru Cherukupali: Thank you, thank you Dorothy. Dorothy has given a beautiful introduction of what she does, and I would like to continue to tell you as to what I do to complement what she does in her class. Like she said originally, we work together, as a matter of fact we’ve been teaching this course for the last four or five semesters, and during the first year we actually sat in each of those classes. And then later on, as time permitted, we used to visit, but we get together on and off to talk about what she’s doing and what I’m doing and then take it from there. Next slide.

We’ll give you the relationship we have between my class and her class. If you look at the left hand side, this is what I do, and on the right hand side is what she does, and they’re all related, I’ll show you how. For example, on the left hand side, we have Earth materials, minerals, and then we also have Earth materials, rocks, igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic, and these rocks contain economic minerals such as gold, silver, lead, zinc, etc. Although they are not written there we will talk about these things. And for sedimentary rocks we have energy resources like coal and petroleum.

And while we are dealing with these topics in the geology class, the ESL class taught by Professor Dorothy, the story of the California gold rush. Now this is a beautiful essay that we read about the gold rush, why people went to California for the gold, and then how, they research on how gold is formed, they read about how gold was formed. I tell them some, and they read some more. They read two stories about the volcanic eruptions of Mount St. Helen’s and Vesuvius. As a matter of fact, the textbook that she was talking about is this one that I use, and in the class it’s very highly illustrated, beautiful pictures, and I just open up the page to show you the before and after pictures of Mount St. Helen’s in this book. This book is very well illustrated all through, and I love to look at the book and I tell them, even if you don’t read the book, look at the pictures and understand what they mean, and they get a lot out of that.

And then continuing on, we do stories about the volcanic eruptions, we have a research on how coal and oil are formed, and we do the sedimentary rocks. When I talk about coal and petroleum, she is asking them to read about how coal and oil are formed. And then she goes into reading about the biographies of Carnegie and Rockefeller. Carnegie and Rockefeller are the two bigshots who made lots and lots of money in the oil, and that’s how their biography is very important. I’m talking about the origin of petroleum. She’s talking about the other aspect, where two people made lots of money, and how did they get to do all these sorts of things.

And when we get to, we go back to, pardon me, I’m not done yet, last item, “The Gravel Page” is by John McPhee, is an excellent writer, in English. He’s not a geologist but he had friends with geologists and he picked up a lot of geology, and if you ever read his articles, John McPhee, he is one of the best writers of geology. Fact, he doesn’t write fiction, he writes facts. And, we also deal with the shorelines and shoreline processes [inaudible], a separate topic that is handled by the next slide, please.

Now, in this way, the students’ interest in knowledge about minerals and volcanic activities are extended and are started and are tied in with the exciting events of the gold rush in American history. Similarly, [inaudible] on coal and petroleum is an extension of the study of sedimentary rocks, [inaudible] of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller realized, [inaudible]. Now, coming to the next item, when geology gets to the shorelines and the shoreline processes, which is the last slide, I have to go back, I’m not done with this yet, I’m coming to it. The shorelines and shoreline processes, “The Gravel Page” by John McPhee. I’d like to take a minute to read this beautiful narrative, it summarizes what was said in that article. “The Gravel Page” by John McPhee is, this reading provides a fascinating story about the Japanese invention called “the bomb”, which could be brought up as a pre-cursor to the inter-continental missiles during World War II, to attack the U.S. continent. In other words, the Japanese are trying to attack the United States at that time, remember, this is going back to World War II times. These bombs were carried by a special rice-paper balloons, blown across the Pacific during the November jet stream, a discovery first made by the Japanese in the 1940’s, to land in the US to cause destruction. As it turns out, there was not much destruction to speak of. Some landed on the west coast and were picked up at once to be studied to find out where these bombs came from. [inaudible] detective work they were doing. Finally, the key element that led to the solving of the origin of these mysterious paper balloon bombs lay in the sand, in the bags that acted as a ballast for the balloon bomb. They had to have sand in the bag so that they could [inaudible] ballast.

American geologists studied the sand and the organisms found in it and narrowed it down to a location southwest of Tokyo. When they landed in the United States, they studied the sand, and they said, uh oh, it must have come from there. So that’s how they knew it came from Japan. The result was that American war planes flew out of Okinawa in the area and bombed out the factories where the bombs were constructed. This is the story that the students read, a very fascinating story, but it is related to geology because it’s like the detective worked on the sand they carry. Next slide please.

Now, to talk about the writing skills. When we assigned these essays to be written, I gave them an outline, for example, how do volcanoes make rocks, that was one of the first assignments, and I gave them an outline of this. For example, I talked to them about writing on the introduction, which includes the thesis, what are volcanoes, where are volcanoes located around the world, the definition of magma and lava, magma is the molten rock material which is under the ground and lava is on top. Cooling of magma and lava and creation of minerals, crystallization of minerals in cooling and effect on grain size. In other words, if it is slowly cooling it makes larger grain size, if it is quickly cooling it makes small grain size. These are the kinds of details that they should pick up and write about, what kinds of rocks were present in volcanoes and textured rocks formed the volcanoes. Then, conclusion, and finally [inaudible].

These are all the things that are necessary for writing the essay. This is the outline we are given so that they have an idea of what needs to be put in the paper. Next slide will tell you.

The writing skills, alright. We not only give them an outline, we also tell them how long the essay should be, and what kind of a font to use. They can’t use any font and then make it large or small, give them a comprehensive idea about how to go about it, and then we request, we ask them to include references which will be used in the bibliography in the end. It’s okay to use any geology textbook, references and internet. Internet is okay, but do not copy full text from the textbook or from the internet, because they’re supposed to be learning English composition, so they should learn to write simple sentences on their own and not just if they are very good in computers, they can just cut and paste. That is not allowed. They can pick it up quite easily, go to Google and you can pick it up. Google is in the news lately.

And then, write clear sentences of your own, submit the essay to Professor Kehl, who will correct the English aspect of it and then give it back and then fix it up and then after they are satisfied, then the essay comes to me for the final checking of the geology, or the science aspect of it. And then after I grade it, she and I get together and decide what kind of grade to give. Often times we agree but then, she is a little bit more easy on them. So I [inaudible]. The next slide.

The [inaudible] writing will teach them about the variable skills, process writing, cause and effect in writing, and then it will talk about content, materials, several sections of the relevant chapters of the geology textbook. These are things that the students learn. We don’t take it for granted that they know what to do, when we assign something, we give them specific instructions as to how to go about…this is probably training, so that next time they are faced with writing something they can do it properly. Next slide please.

[inaudible] and basically I would like to make a concluding statement. After this preparation, the students are given time to write the first ESL draft, and then like I said, Dorothy corrects it, and then I get it, and that’s how we finally integrate between the composition of English that they’re supposed to learn, that’s ESL-15, and then geology, which in our college is a core class. Some of you are familiar with it, some of you are not, but it’s two credits, it’s a two-credit course, which not only has lecture material, also lab material. It’s a lot for two credits, and we also require them to do some writing, and here we’re asking them to do two essays, which are graded by two different instructors and they are learning a lot, they are working hard. Thank you for your attention. Yes, please?

Female Audience Member: [inaudible], but I’m wondering, is it implemented in a lot of CUNY schools, or is it just between [inaudible].

Neru Cherukupali: I think we are the ones who have started this, right?

Dorothy Kehl: For native speakers, they have this kind of block on learning community in their first semester. At Brooklyn College, we are expanding it to the second semester. This is for ESL students. We’ve had blocks nominally in the past, that is, the Dean’s Office will assign and very often faculty members who get the teaching assignment do not meet, but for Neru and I, we decided to do it our way, so we start from scratch, I step in his class, he came to my class, and [inaudible] this integrated approach. As he said, this is the fifth semester we’re doing it, we’re still refining it, because we believe that this pedagogy is very useful. In the past the Dean’s Office, nobody is here from the Dean’s Office; if a [inaudible] for example, for an incoming freshman ESL student, and the assignment is to read the Friday New York Times Entertainment Section, our students have no interest, and they can’t [inaudible] the language, and we said you motivate the students by making them feel, “I am a college student, I am doing something worthwhile and meaningful”; so ESL is required, geology course is required, and they feel, “Yes, I am really doing college work!” So the whole motivation, the perception of what they are doing as first semester students, still there…

Female Audience Member #2: It’s not sort of a follow-up, but the reason why I’m so excited about this model is because in some high schools in Queens, actually I’m from Queens too, they actually have an ESL class in biology in that particular language, and it seems like the other extreme ESL pedagogy, and so, whether you two could comment on that or anybody else in the room? And, I understand the biology taught in Korean or Spanish…

Dorothy Kehl: This morning, I think you mentioned that the bilingual educational model, there are many, many models, it’s very controversial, and I personally believe that you’ve got to give what the students need first. In this country, English. And if they have, a difficult time understanding the class material, and this is particularly for students who arrived in this country as teenagers, the textbook is so difficult and yet cognitively they are ready for very complicated material, so how do you do that? Then, I believe, using the native language of the students is very valid, otherwise doing it all in English and giving them special consideration, you know, like, Neru probably for the native speakers will just give the topic, and the students are expected to know how to search for material and put it together. But because it’s ESL students, we provide all this outline and guideline.

Female Audience Member #3: [inaudible] It’s when they have just gotten into the country and they don’t speak [inaudible]. [inaudible] to continue to progress in their academics, but they have to be [inaudible], [inaudible]. But they have to transition to [inaudible], predominantly [inaudible]. If by the second year you don’t have [inaudible]. Most high schools are not allowed to transition [inaudible].

Thomas Tam: I know that everybody is still very interested in talking to [inaudible] about some of these issues, but I think that there are other workshops are opening up now, so we appreciate your coming here. Thank you very, very much.