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1. Brooklyn Castle
Brooklyn Castle tells the story of teenagers at I.S. 318 who aspired to become professional chess players. Many of these teenagers came from low-income families or ethnic minorities. Life was difficult for them, but when they found the passion for playing chess, it became their way out.
The chess program at I.S. 318 started as a small one, but with the advocacy of teachers and coaches, the program has become the birthplace of many youth national champions. Today, the chess team is put under the spotlight. When you visit the school's website, you can see the chess team at the top of all featured programs, as well as in the first paragraph of the school's introduction.
The student who left me with the strongest impression was Pobo, the student president. He ran the school election because he wanted to solve the financial crisis caused by a budget cut from DOE. He demonstrated the characteristics of a leader when he united the students to voice their dissatisfaction. His efforts finally paid back. Pobo's case is great evidence of youth power in bottom-up campaigns. The youths can stand up for what they care about and what they deserve, and therefore have big influence on the school and the community.
Picture from IMDb
The following is a clip about an Asian American girl, Vicky Yang, on the chess team at I.S. 318 in 2015. She has great talent in playing chess. Like many predecessors in Brooklyn Castle, Vicky is also trying to change her life on the chess board.
The story of I.S. 138 reminded me of a middle school in the rural area in Taiwan. The school was under-resourced and the students performed poorly in academics. However, after the school orchestra was established, the students became interested in playing musical instruments and built up confidence in learning as well. There seems to be a pattern that every under-resourced school needs featured programs to find its worth, and the students can also find their worth in those programs. In fact, it is the community built within the programs that supports the students to be in search of excellence.
After watching the movie, I have a question: how will universities support students like Rochelle who earn a scholarship by winning skill-related competitions? I am not familiar with university programs in the US, but from what I understand, Rochelle will have to major in an academic field in college while playing on the school chess team. Her focus will probably be on chess games rather than her study. However, as seen in the movie, Rochelle already had problem striking a balance between chess and schoolwork in high school. Will she be able to take care of her study in college? Similarly, in Taiwan, I heard some people who excelled at vocational skills and won the WorldSkills Competition get into the best university of skills, but they ended up dropping out because they failed too many courses. Their skills did not help them with the academic learning and examinations in college. As a result, it is important for universities to support these students, or otherwise their scholarship can be a hardship for them.
2. Waiting for Superman
The title of the movie, Waiting for Superman, suggests that children are waiting for someone to save them from the education that is failing them. Schools fail their students for complicated reasons. It can be the aptitude sorting that causes unfair teacher expectations for low-achieving students; it can be the lack of resources like funding and good teachers that prevent schools from making progress; and it can be the inflexible standards that narrowly define success. But there was one fatal cause of student failure mentioned in the movie that caught my attention: the tenure system.
Picture from IMDb
The tenure secures the job of public school teachers and protects them from arbitrary or unjust firing. However, it makes replacing feckless teachers harder in the meantime. Despite the fact that teachers need to survive probation before they can get the tenure, it still cannot ensure the quality of teaching afterwards. This is very similar to Taiwan. Back in the days when economic growth was at its peak, many people chose to work in private corporations to make more money. The tenure system served as a benefit that attracted well-educated people to devote in education as public school teachers. After they became teachers, like many people in other professions, their passion deteriorated as years went by, and the tenure system turned into a shelter for their tiredness.
Nevertheless, I think the problem is not the tenure itself, but the lack of a systematic approach to tackling teachers' tiredness. Since it is common for people to get tired of their jobs and try to figure out tricks to reduce their workload, professional development plays an essential role. Taiwan Ministry of Education requires teachers at both public and private schools take minimum hours of courses that improve their teaching skills. Courses related to student counseling and family education are even marked as mandatory. I believe teachers in the US are also required to take part in in-service training, too. That is why ELA teachers at Shuang Wen School have a gathering every Monday and do peer classroom observations.
The climax of the movie fell on the moment when the kids were waiting for the results of the lottery. The lottery is, to some extent, the most equitable way of determining who can be admitted. However, there are also other ways that are used to match kids with their desirable schools, or conversely, to match schools with their desirable students. The video on the right explains how schools in New York City do the matching.
The concern I have for lottery is from my own experience. I got into my middle school by lottery. The school was affiliated to the best public high school in my hometown. Three years later, I was admitted to that high school via a separate track reserved for middle school alumni who had higher grades. In other words, winning the lottery has made it easier for me to get into the best high school in my hometown, and that has a lot to do with the university and graduate school I went to. Looking back on what I have been through, I suddenly realized that the lottery had a deciding effect on my life. So who were able to take part in the lottery? Since the school was founded to accommodate children whose parents worked in the Hsinchu Science Park (the Silicon Valley of Taiwan), only those children were eligible. As a result, the ticket to the lottery was already a filter, and all of the participants had similar socioeconomic backgrounds.
In conclusion, while we believe that lottery is the most equitable way of admission, we need to question the eligibility for the lottery. Is it open to a certain group of people or to anyone? Even if we are eligible for it, are we satisfied that our children's fate must depend on the next number picked? Are the remaining options for all rejected participants the same? These are the questions we need to think about before believing in the equity of lottery.
Online Speech
1. 100 Years of Paulo Freire: Annual Conference at Columbia University (Link)
Image from Teachers College
This year celebrates the 100th birthday of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose masterpiece Pedagogy of the Oppressed has shaped education today. He proposed the idea of "critical consciousness" to call for awareness of inequity in education, especially under the regime of Western colonizers. A series of conferences was held as part of the Paulo Freire Initiative project by Teachers College, Institute for Latin American Studies, and Transformative Learning Technologies Lab. The session that I attended was the last one in the series.
I learned about Freire's work in college, but it was not until I came to TC that I realized how his thoughts were applied to education in reality. The reason was that in Taiwan, teachers and students are not used to challenging the existing education system. Teachers worked hard to meet the standards set by the government and students endeavored to do well in exams. People seldom questioned who set the standards, why the standards were there, and whether all students were included in the classroom. Even if a new policy was launched, everyone seemed to care about nothing but how it would affect students' performance in the entrance exams. However, at TC, I heard professors talk about inequity in every class, especially the inclusion of students. They were really talking about who was oppressed and who was privileged. I believe it has to do with the social background of the US, where students have been treated unfairly based on their race, ethnicity, and gender for a long time. These issues are also seen in Taiwan but are not discussed as much as in the US. I guess it is because most Taiwanese people are not aware of the oppression on them, and they are taught to be obedient. As a result, critical consciousness was poorly developed.
One of the speakers, Dr. Souto-Manning, shared her experience in the field of culture circles. She invited kids from different ethnic backgrounds to share the meaning of their names. Her rationale was to challenge the idea that every English learner should have an English name or at least a name that is easy to pronounce by English speakers. I felt related to this issue because I also have an English name, Simon, which is not my official name. I got this name from my kindergarten teacher. As years went by, I have become attached to this name. More and more people have known me as Simon, and this name has been used by my friends in daily conversations. However, when I heard the speaker bring up this topic, I suddenly felt detached. Why should I recognize "Simon" as myself? What is the image that "Simon" gives to others? Am I being oppressed when I use this name instead of my official name? These are questions I have never thought of before. I do not have an answer, but at least I feel comfortable when others call me "Simon."
To my surprise, English names are also commonly used by American born Chinese. When I was doing observation at Shuang Wen, I realized that most of the Chinese students had an English name. There was only one student that used his Chinese name in class. My cousins, who were born in the US, also have English names that are used more often than their Chinese names. It could be a way to make themselves feel more included in this country. On the contrary, students who are from countries that shared the same or similar alphabet with English do not have an English name. They tend to use their name in their mother tongue, but sometimes with simplification if it is hard to pronounce.
According to Dr. Souto-Manning, this phenomenon reflects the hegemony of the English language. When people change their names to make English speakers able to pronounce their names, they actually hide their own culture away. In an English class, these new names can be viewed as a tool to immerse students in the language. However, the names also give them a new identity that is different from the names given by their family. It takes time for students to merge the two identities. For me, I can be Yen-Lin and Simon at the same time. When people call me Simon, I do not feel that I am an outsider of the English culture nor a traitor of the Taiwanese culture.
2. Re-envisioning EMI in Higher Education through a Linguistically Responsive Instruction Approach
This online speech was held by Language Teaching and Training Center in Taiwan. The speaker, Hsin-Yi Chang, was an associate professor at National Taiwan University (NTU), my alma mater. Since Taiwan is implementing the 2030 Bilingual Nation Policy (English and Chinese), NTU has founded the Bilingual Education Center, working on the training of bilingual instructors at the level of higher education. Currently, the biggest challenge of the policy is that instructors are unfamiliar with teaching in English even though many textbooks they use are written in English. With the growing popularity of EMI (English as a medium of instruction), instructors will have to speak English in class. How to code-switch from Chinese to English and ensure the quality of teaching becomes a headache for many.
Professor Chang used the following graph to show the difference between approaches that combine English learning and subject-area learning:
In the graph, we see that EMI is located in the first and second dimensions, where language can either be emphasized or not, but content is always the focus. In other words, the core concept of EMI is to teach content to the students. However, at the same time, instructors need to take care of students' language ability. Professor Chang thus used linguistically responsive instruction (LRI) as the lens to make EMI more effective. She stated that there were three aspects of the LRI approach: technical, facilitative, and sociocultural. Instructors could adjust their focus on the aspects based on their needs. The most important thing is that EMI does not forbid students' mother tongue in the classroom. Both languages should be encouraged when students try to answer questions.
Translanguaging was a concept that Professor Chang mentioned to be highly linguistically responsive. It involves code-switching of the teachers and students, but it is more than that. Translanguaging views all languages that a person knows as a whole repertoire that he or she can use. Information in one language can be interpreted into another language, and thoughts can be formed in different languages as well. As the university shifts to EMI, it is essential that teachers and students know translanguaging is natural and acceptable when they are communicating. This idea is often neglected because the Bilingual Nation Policy aims to improve the English proficiency of citizens. It has put too much emphasis on English that people forget the value of Chinese.
Nonetheless, whether EMI should be the the model adopted by the university remains controversial. Supporters believe that doing so can make the university more attractive to international students who do not speak Chinese. EMI courses can make the language barrier disappear for international students, and local students can benefit from the diverse cohort. Opponents do not think EMI is the cure. In fact, according to a professor I know, there was a Spanish-speaking student in her class who had only learned English for three months before she came to NTU. She could not benefit from EMI, either. What the university needs is probably a system that offers help to non-English and non-Chinese speakers. In addition, some opponents even think that the policy itself is implying that Chinese is inferior to English. Doing so will only make students doubt their self worth as a Taiwanese.
Whether EMI is the right track or not, the policy is still going. I personally agree with Professor Chang that instructors should use a linguistically responsive approach to teach content in both Chinese and English. The school does want students to have more exposure to English, but it does not want them to feel inferior speaking Chinese. It is the same when the policy is implemented in high schools, middle schools, and primary schools. The "English only" view of bilingual education needs to be erased, and translanguaging in class should be embraced.
Museum Exhibition
Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
On December 3, I came across MOCA while roaming around Chinatown. Despite its previous controversy about funding, I entered and learned about the history of Chinese immigrants and Asian Hate. The museum collected a variety of objects, pictures, and manuscripts. Some carried traditional Chinese culture, and others symbolized new life in the United States. In one of the sections, I listened to a recording of a man telling his life story as an immigrant in the early 20th century. He talked about how his family set up business in Manhattan. Right next to it was a model of a traditional Chinese pharmacy. It showed how Chinese medicine had developed in the States. It reminded me of a 2001 movie named "The Gua Sha Treatment." The story was about a family tragedy caused by misunderstandings of traditional Chinese therapy.
Photo of Fu Manchu from MOCA
One of the most impressive exhibits was the Chinese Exclusion Act, which came into effect in 1882. This was the first federal law that banned immigrants by their nationality. According to the museum, no other ethnic group was banned at that time. Only merchants, students, and diplomats were allowed to come. The main reason was that the large number of Chinese laborers had caused wage depression, which threatened the American economy. As a result, an act against 4.4% of the total number of immigrants was launched. Originally, the Chinese Exclusion Act was effective for 10 years, but it was not until 1902 that it was abolished. Yet the hate of Chinese did not stop there. In 1913, a fictional character named Fu Manchu was born in the UK. He was the villain of the story, representing the fear and disgust of Chinese invasion in the Western world. Aside from Fu Manchu, there were other drawings of Chinese people, most of which looked undesirable. From these racist images of Chinese, we could see how they were treated at that time.
In another room, there was the "Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism" exhibition, which was inspired by the anti-Asian Hate movement last year. Due to the social and economic frustration caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many Asian Americans were assaulted. This exhibition invited victims to voice their rights and raise public awareness of racial violence. It also recalled different times when Asians were heavily abused in the US, lamenting over the fact that people made the same mistakes. At the end of the exhibition, visitors could write down their thoughts on a piece of paper and put it into a box to support the anti-Asian Hate movement. I wrote "All men are created EQUAL." In fact, the rampant assaults targeting Asians are a big reason why I chose not to come to New York City last year. I am glad that this year the city feels much safer.
While the issues of social justice and racism in the US often circulate around African American, MOCA draws the visitors' attention to Asian Americans. I agree that this is a marginalized group of the minority peoples in America because their voices are hardly heard in the mass media. Compared to Native Americans and African Americans, Asian Americans have shorter history and fewer well-known celebrities like singers, movie stars, or human right activists. Nonetheless, there are still many of them trying to make themselves heard in different professional fields, like Awkwafina and Jeremy Lin.
All in all, MOCA provides abundant resources for educators to introduce racism to their students. It reminds us of how much more efforts need to be made to eliminate Asian Hate and hatred against other minority groups.
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