On Teaching Foundational Academic Skills

Students who are pre-literate, or who are struggling with literacy and numeracy, or who have not had formal experience with schooling do not have cognitive deficiencies. We recognize these challenges are a product of political and economic conditions in which access to education and literacy may have been impaired.

Our program aims to expose students to learning experiences which will help students build fundamental skills necessary to navigate American schooling.

The goals of this basic skills curriculum is driven by principles of culturally responsive teaching that drive our instruction at all levels of ELD:

• Build learning partnerships with and among students to establish a safe and trusting learning community.

• Help students succeed within their new learning environment. Since new neural pathways are built and reinforced through repetition, it is imperative that teachers provide constant exposure to new academic learning activities that focus on building literacy and independence. To do this, teachers use learning processes which are familiar to students, and gradually move towards unfamiliar learning processes (i.e. oral transmission of information to print material; collectivist and interdependent to independence).

• Ground all learning experiences in what matters most to students: language, culture, community.

Learning is done with students and not to students; teachers are committed to establishing a practice of metacognitive reflection among students (and within themselves) so that students concretize the changes and challenges they may experience throughout the learning process and learning activities.

Our Fundamentals course is intended to be an immersive, one semester or (at the most), one year experience for students with the goal of advancing them into our ELD 1 course so that they may make timely progress through a high school level study of English.