I was sitting on a
dirt floor with a cup of hot tea by my side, surrounded by thirteen Roma (gypsy)
children all speaking at once in a language I didn’t yet understand, in a
dimly-lit room, in a house with no indoor plumbing, in zero degrees Celsius, in  This was a snapshot from my first day teaching the Roma children of Ponicka Huta, Slovakia. That January day I had come to the settlement with a full lesson plan, one that ended up being completely useless, as few of the children knew how to read in Slovak, much less in English, and I had mistakenly created a worksheet with no pictures. I had been in the Slovak Republic for less than two months working as a volunteer text editor/English teacher/grant writer for a nonprofit environmental organization, Priatelia Zeme, when a colleague approached me to ask if I would be willing to tutor several local Roma children in English. I was hesitant to say "yes." The language, people, customs and culture of ethnic Slovaks were still so foreign to me, and I knew even less about the Roma people other than that they experienced extreme poverty, lived in physical isolation from Slovak villages, and were the object of extreme racial discrimination from an overwhelming majority of the white Slavs. But that first day teaching in the Roma settlement put my hesitation to rest. The children were overjoyed someone had come to teach them English and were willing to put forth amazing effort in our improvised classroom. I spent the remaining two years of my volunteer stint in the Slovak Republic giving weekly lessons to these Roma children of Ponicka Huta, amidst laughing, sharing, singing, dancing, teaching and learning, and when it was time for me to leave Slovakia, my students were all at the top of their English language classes at the local school. Though the children improved dramatically in their English proficiency, I maintain that I learned far more from these children than they did from me. I learned the Slovak language from the children as they learned English from me; we were each in a humbled situation where the other was the expert and we were all, essentially, learners. I learned to work with what I had and that expensive resources are not necessarily the determinant of success in language learning; we had no tangible resources and still I would undoubtedly consider what took place in our classroom a success. Above all, I learned to listen to my students; knowing their stories and letting them express their life experiences were key to my interpretation of their needs as learners, their needs as people. Though my current professional interests center on teaching English Second Language courses to young adults in an Intensive English Program, my desire to teach stems from that first trip to the Ponicka Huta Roma settlement where I initially began to realize that language acquisition takes place most effectively in an environment of mutual understanding and cross-cultural respect. In the classes I teach I strive to foster acceptance of diversity, to encourage student creativity and to facilitate the learner's exploration of new ideas and perspectives. And as we listen to and share with one another, we are able to recognize the interconnectedness that binds us beyond language.
|