Getting in touch with the real world

We ´ve just come back from Pullman. We participated in two workshops there. They were about engaging students in the classroom through technologies and social justice.

Anyway, I thought it is a good chance to make a quick overview of all the places and schools we visited in the last three weeks.  We don´t often know where we are exactly going, what we are going to find or who we are going to meet. But, that forms part of the adventure. We just get on the vans knowing that something new for us will be on our destination.

We´ve been lucky enough to meet people holding very different positions related to education: from the migrant/bilingual coordinator in Olympia to a couple of Salish teachers in Spokane.

I especially enjoyed the panel discussion we had with immigrant parents in the offices of Catholic Charities in Spokane. It was a unique opportunity to know from first hand their experiences and the barriers they found when they arrived to America. It was also interesting meeting Jennifer, one of the volunteers in Global Neighborhood, a non-profit Christian organization, which seeks to provide services to all refugees in Spokane through close relationships, creating programs focused on education and community development. I was actually touched by these two visits. I became a bit more concerned about the pain these families feel. They lose many features of their previous culture to acquire others from a culture that they couldn´t understand.

We also had the chance to meet the person in charge of the assessment for Special Populations in Spokane, the migrant/ bilingual coordinator for Washington State in Olympia and the coordinator of Home-School connections in Central Valley School District. I consider their job is essential to provide equality as it has an effect on every school in the district or the state. From these meetings I´ll bring with me two main ideas. Firstly, it is necessary a detailed plan of action to help students who speak a different language other than language. Secondly, it is essential an appropriate teacher training to put those policies into practice. These two facts are usually forgotten in Spanish schools. It is a field in which we still have to work a lot.

However, visiting actual schools is the activity that was more linked with my personal interests. We have visited Great Northern School District, Holmes Elementary School in Spokane and Domino Preschool. It is very helpful listening to teachers and principals talking about the challenges they have to face day after day. It is very inspiring getting to know the creative ways in which they solve those situations.

All the visits let me have a taste of the challenges of American education, which are somehow very similar to those we have in Europe, such as, promoting home-school connections and meeting the needs of minorities.