At the fifth Austin Bilingue meeting held on Wednesday, June 25th we had the fortune of hearing from Dr. Deborah Palmer, Assistant Professor of Bilingual and Bicultural Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Deb’s presentation entitled “Educating for Equity in Dual Language Settings” was an eye opening overview of the challenges (and opportunities) that face dual language education. Of particular interest were Deb’s introduction to the notions of Additive and Subtractive bilingual education, where Additive refers to a bilingual education where kids leave with “more” than what they came in with (e.g. Spanish speaking kid who exits the program knowing both Spanish and English) and Subtractive education refers to one where kids leave with “less” than what they came in with (e.g. Spansh speaking kid who exits the program having lost the command of Spanish but now knowing English).
Deb discussed how the US has developed as one of the only monolingual societies in the world and how the ideology surrounding monolingualism (which permeats the culture in the US) makes it difficult for second languages to grow and thrive. To overcome this, Deb spoke to us about various approaches around two-way immersion with the goals of obtaining biliteracy, academic achievement for all students, and cross-cultural understanding.
All of these topics were then placed into context when Deb talked about her own Ph.D. work in bilingual education. During her Ph.D. research work Deb spent countless hours at a two-way immersion school in California observing the interaction between teachers and students as well as between the students themselves. Her observations provided her with key insights into the role that each of these play in the success or failure of an given two-way immersion program.
Finally, Deb introduced us to an exciting new program at UT called “Proyecto Maestría” that will help foster the growth of bilingualism in the Austin area. The project, the result of a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, focuses on improving the quality and quantity of highly skilled Bilingual and ESL teachers in the Austin metropolitan area, promote teacher retention, and improve the educational outcome for the region’s growing population of English Language Learners.
Deb’s presentation and handout are available for download.
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