Our names are part of our identity, and often the first window we offer people to get to know us. We have stories and experiences related to our names. Your story might be how you were named after a family member or how it reflects your culture; or, your story may be how your name was changed by someone in authority. We did this activity with almost every educator who was part of our initial Cultural Proficiency roll-out. Our goal was to help people to understand how important it is to learn a child’s name and how to say it correctly. Further, we wanted to emphasize how disempowering it is to change a student’s name no matter how well intentioned our motives. For example, an educator might tell Jaimina (Hi-MEE-na), “Let’s just call you Jaime, OK?” When people tell the story of their own names, it helps them to reconnect with why it is so important to acknowledge and pronounce their students’ names correctly.

One of the groups that we involved in the Cultural Proficiency Learning Strategies was our English Learner Task Force, which was composed of one teacher from each of the school sites. At our first meeting after our Cultural Proficiency training, we did an activity called “Telling Your Stories.” The activity asks participants to share a social experience where they felt alienation, dissonance, marginality and dualism. After sharing, the participants discuss where actions or behaviors at their school might be creating similar experiences for their students. Initially, we hesitated in choosing this activity because of the level of trust participants must feel in order to share their vulnerable stories, but we were glad we did. Participants left with increased levels of trust for each other because they had shared their stories, and they had an increased awareness of how their instructional activities could unintentionally create alienating or marginalizing experiences for their students.

Of course, knowing a student’s story is very important. Yet, it is also essential to know where they want to go in their lives. What are their talents and dreams, and how could we help support them to achieve these dreams? For our Cultural Proficiency team, our dream was to raise the lens of equity in our district. We wanted to change the system that kept the status quo of the dominant culture. It was our perspective that by raising the awareness of staff for the need to change that we could indeed make in-roads towards educational equity in our district.

While the Cultural Proficiency training focused on getting to know ourselves deeper, uncovering our biases and learning how to overcome these so that we could better serve our students, our team was able to take this work a step further by developing a framework to get to know our students and their stories (Know My Name, Know My Story, Know My Dreams). When working with students commonly labeled “English Learners,” we began to question the terminology used to describe these students. English Learner (ELs) is a term that focuses on what students are supposedly lacking, English, not on their bilingualism. The language that we use to describe our students matters; it becomes the way we see our students. For this reason, we began to refer to them as “emergent bilinguals,” focusing on their assets, their bilingualism. In this same manner, we redesigned our “Summer EL Intervention” program to an enrichment Summer Academy program that capitalized on their bilingualism. We believe that as a result of valuing diversity, (5 Essential Elements), in just five weeks, 90 percent of our emergent/multilingual learners grew one rubric level in their writing and at least one reading level. When we presented the data to the board, they were impressed with our results and commended our team for our work. One of the highlights of this work was our culminating event. On the last day of our Summer Academy, we hosted an open house for our students and their families. We had a 95 percent attendance rate, including many of our families from Guatemala. It was heartwarming to observe our students using all of their linguistic resources, including Spanish and indigenous languages, to share their work with their families.

During the 2018-19 school year, with shifting demographics in our community, we were tasked with the urgent need to address support for transnational migrant youth. Over the course of the year, we welcomed more than 100 transnational migrant students into our schools. Most of the children were from Guatemala and some were not of school age when they left their home county. Despite their lack of formal education, these students brought a wealth of knowledge and experiences to the classroom. Unfortunately, because of the lack of formal education or interrupted schooling, and their limited English proficiency, the funds of knowledge of our transnational migrant students were often not recognized and included in the classroom curriculum. When asked to work with migrant children, our teachers were paralyzed with fear and questioned their ability to work with children who had never held a pencil and who didn’t speak the English language. In an effort to adapt to diversity and to get to know our transnational migrant youth, we began conducting interviews and sharing their stories with their teachers. As part of this work, it was important to learn about their lived experiences and funds of knowledge to not only make connections to the classroom curriculum but to sustain their cultures, languages and ways of being. By sharing students’ stories and positioning their linguistic resources and experiences as assets, we focused on developing awareness among teachers and staff on the challenges our transnational migrant children face in and outside of school as they navigate a new country, culture, language, etc. Our Cultural Proficiency work was deeply connected to understanding the journeys of our emergent bilinguals and migrant children.

Initially we began this work with an understanding from district data that our emergent bilinguals were not performing as well as their counterparts due to limited language proficiency, socioeconomic status, etc. However, as we went through this process, we realized that we needed to shift our gaze towards us (the educators) and the system(s) and the conditions that were not leading to the success of our emergent bilinguals. As the pandemic hit our district in March 2020, it became evident that the system(s) in place were not working for our emergent bilinguals. The pandemic brought to light the disparities in our community: who had access to the internet, whose families could provide support with technology, whose families could stay at home during the pandemic, whose families were most disproportionately affected by COVID. While remote learning created additional barriers for our emergent bilinguals and a stronger sense of urgency to make up for the lost instructional time, we challenge this narrative by questioning whether the system(s) in place before the pandemic were actually working and to reflect on those previous systems and practices. We present Cultural Proficiency as an essential model for needed individual and organizational systems change. By enacting the 5 Essential Elements of Cultural Proficiency we can all embark on this dream for equity and systemic change.

Randall. B. Lindsey, K. Nuri Robins, & Raymond. D. Terrell. Cultural Proficiency: A Manual for School Leaders (4th ed.). 2019. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.