Fellows Report on Fellowship

Se Habla Español?

Holly Yettick

I met Rosa three years ago in Denver while working on a story about her third-grade teacher. The teacher spoke no Spanish. Rosa spoke no English. She seemed to be a smart, lively child, yet she spent much of her time playing or gazing off into space because she rarely understood what was happening in class. As an education reporter, I wanted to know what Rosa’s parents thought about this. So I approached the child’s father one afternoon as he picked her up from school. I had been told that the family’s legal status in this country was precarious. I could see immediately that Rosa’s father was scared and confused at being questioned by an unfamiliar Anglo woman wearing a badge—my press pass. I tried my best to explain myself in English, sign language, and broken Spanish. But I managed only to frighten him, not interview him. I felt not only frustrated by my inability to include the family in my story but also remorseful about the unnecessary anxiety I might have caused.

If I were to meet Rosa’s father today, I could communicate with him easily. That is because my study plan topic is bilingual education. This plan has allowed me to spend the past school year studying Spanish intensively at the University. While I cannot claim to be fluent, I certainly have the ability to use that language to explain that I am a reporter, not an immigration agent, or a school administrator, or a policewoman. I believe that the language-learning opportunities provided by the Fellowship will allow me to give voice to many Spanish-speaking families who have traditionally been left out of mainstream, English-language newspapers.

My study plan also called for me to find out more about the educational research and policy decisions that affect Spanish-speaking English learners, who are disproportionately poor and enrolled in poorly performing public schools. To accomplish this, I have been taking courses in the University’s School of Education. Last semester in Joanne Carlisle’s language development course, I learned how children acquire language at home and at school. I learned about the advantages educated parents provide their children by reading to them and providing the type of vocabulary children need for school by speaking about abstract subjects. In David Cohen’s seminar on international education, I learned how different cultural conceptions of schooling can deeply affect what students learn and how they perform on standardized tests. For instance, the French conception of equal schooling calls for a curriculum that is much more rigid and standardized than our own, but also, objectively, much more equal.