Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D.

teacher, researcher, life-long learner

Copyright © 2018
Lisa M. Dorner, PhD
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SEE-TEL at Cambio de Colores

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On June 8, 2018, Dr. Kim Song and I presented one of the plenary talks at the Cambio de Colores – Change of Colores annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri. In the Cambio Center’s own words: “Cambio de Colores is a multistate conference about integration of immigrants in new destinations. People from various fields who work with Latinos and immigrant communities come together to share research and best practices that facilitate the integration of newcomers.” It’s one of my favorite conferences because it brings together researchers and practitioners from a huge variety of fields: truly the only way we can solve the grand challenges of our society is to collaborate across fields and social agencies, and Cambio de Colores is a space that helps us do this!

Kim and I were asked to provide the education-focused plenary, and so we decided to share the background and framework for our current project, SEE-TEL: Strengthening Equity and Effectiveness for Teachers of English Learners. We felt it was important to highlight key terms (why we might prefer the phrase “emerging bilinguals” over “English Learners”), describe our own histories and how we came to work together, explain the goals of our current grant, and then conclude with two key pillars we believe are essential in helping educators, immigrant families, and their children succeed: Collaboration and Translanguaging.

Take a look at our presentation here and then please join us in our journey to enhance equity and excellence for all of our students! 2018 Cambio Plenary Dorner Song

Foro Fulbright at Uninorte

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I have been so honored to be a part of the Fulbright Specialist program this past February and March 2018 in Barranquilla, Colombia at the Universidad del Norte. I’ve worked for the past few weeks with colleagues at the Instituto de Idiomas on a new undergraduate program: Lenguas Modernas y Culturas. This program has a special focus on not only teaching multiple languages (students will be proficient in two and know a third upon graduation), but also integrating ideas of critical citizenship, discourse studies, and global perspectives into their coursework.

On March 16, I presented some thoughts on this ambitious goal, based upon my own (and colleagues’) work on dual language/two-way immersion programs and transnational/lingual youth in the US (Heiman, 2017; Kim, 2018; Layton, 2017). This work is also inspired by colleagues in citizenship education, such as Nicole Mirra and Thea Abu El-Haj.

I welcome your ideas and feedback on this Foro Fulbright!

“Our future is not in the stars but in our own minds and hearts. Creative leadership and liberal education, which in fact go together, are the first requirements for a hopeful future for humankind. Fostering these–leadership, learning, and empathy between cultures–was and remains the purpose of the international scholarship program that I was privileged to sponsor in the U.S. Senate over forty years ago. It is a modest program with an immodest aim–the achievement in international affairs of a regime more civilized, rational and humane than the empty system of power of the past. I believed in that possibility when I began. I still do.”

[J. William Fulbright, From The Price of Empire]

Doing Service-Research Projects in STL

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Many St. Louis area residents may not think of their city as multilingual, but it is. We could consider just one group that has changed the face of our metropolitan area over the past 30 years: Bosnians. In 2012 (and probably still today), they were the most populous foreign-born group here, estimated at over 70,000. The majority of Bosnians came to St. Louis as refugees in the 1990s, but secondary migration from Europe and from around the US continued throughout the early 2000s.

As an educator of students studying to become teachers, I always look for ways to help others understand the communities that they serve (or will serve). Toward this end, partnering with local educational organizations, students in one of my teacher-education classes studied qualitative research methods and conducted what we called service-research projects. Similar to but somewhat distinct from service-learning or community-based research (Boyer, 1999, see Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professorate), service-research projects combine these kinds of efforts: they are learning experiences that simultaneously teach research skills and academic content, while students serve an organization and learn about its particular community. In one particular semester, students’ projects explored the linguistic, racial, religious, and migrant experiences of youth in the St. Louis area, including those from Bosnian Muslim families.

In a recent publication in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2017, click here!), my co-authors and I discussed the results of this work. As defined in our abstract, we argue: Skills developed through qualitative research and community partnerships can be essential for developing education students’ cultural competency and understandings about diverse student populations. This paper provides a snapshot of our work by defining service-research and showcasing one student research team that worked with a local immigrant organization and developed three case studies of young women from Bosnian Muslim families. Through an analysis and discussion of service-research and the students’ results, we argue for the integration of qualitative research skills, service projects, and community partnerships into educator preparation programs.

Please join me in learning more about how working and studying with community members helps us understand and work with our communities better!

University of Missouri Awarded Department of Education Grant!

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Just last week, my colleagues (Drs. Kim Song and Sujin Kim of the University of Missouri-St. Louis) and I found out that we were awarded a new National Professional Development Grant. Our project, titled Strengthening Equity and Excellence for Teachers of English Learners (SEE-TEL) is funded by the Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition. Over $2.6 million will allow SEE-TEL to more effectively prepare hundreds of inservice teachers, administrators, teacher education faculty, and parents to be responsive to linguistically and culturally diverse K-12 learners. I’m especially excited because our grant activities will emphasize equity and civil rights for immigrant and refugee children from across the most high-need areas of Missouri, a state that is often passed over for seeming monolingual (but it’s not!).

This work is critical to help Missouri meet increasingly complex needs facing our schools in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Most significant, SEE-TEL will offer seven online TESOL courses and certification to a select group of 50 teachers from four school districts: Bayless (St. Louis area), Carthage (near Joplin), Kansas City Public Schools, and Columbia Public Schools. In addition, SEE-TEL will arrange intensive summer institutes to 120 educators and school leaders from these districts and beyond; training for university faculty members; and partnerships and literacy activities with 160 family members over the five-year grant project. A program evaluation, led by myself and another colleague, Dr. Christine Li-Grining of Loyola University-Chicago, will study the long-term impact of the professional development activities on participants and students.

The growth of immigrant and refugee children is significant across the state, which faces a shortage of teachers for emerging bilinguals (or “English Learners,” ELs) in our K-12 schools. For instance, Kansas City Public Schools currently has 3800 active students in English education support programs and 400-500 who are being monitored. Over the last school year they saw a 180% increase in refugee enrollment. KCPS’s largest language group is Spanish, but second to that is now Swahili, which just moved past Somali. They have multiple job openings right now for teachers in language education (posted on the Missouri Dual Language Network’s Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/moduallanguage/).

Job openings specific to this grant and more information about our project will be posted soon!

How can we get out of our bubbles?

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This morning, I was listening to NPR, and I heard a story about how one young man decided to get out of his same old bubble. He built an app that used publicly-listed Facebook events to randomly choose new places for him to go — to get him out of that bubble. Attending random events, he made new friends and had various opportunities to view the world from new perspectives.

So how might we help develop similar bubble-popping experiences for young people? I believe that schools like the St. Louis Language Immersion School (SLLIS) can and do help children view the world in new ways. SLLIS has integration as one of its core values: integration across race, income level, language background, immigrant status, and more. The school immerses children in new perspectives, quite literally, by teaching students all of the typical subject areas using a language other than English. For most students at the school, English is their first and only language, but the school also attracts many children from multilingual households.

How else might schools pop bubbles? We cannot just put people together in the same room to explore new perspectives; we have to talk, think, and write about such experiences. In the spring of 2017, the Quality Teachers for English Learners project led by Dr. Kim Song supported a series of family literacy events at SLLIS. I participated in these events as both a leader and a participant with my daughter. Our goal was to work with families to support them sharing their stories, as one more way to “pop some bubbles” and learn from others. I’m thrilled to share the pre-press version of my daughter’s book, in which she documents how her school has opened her eyes to an Outside World.