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ABSTRACT
Museum educators and instructors of English as a Second Language (ESOL) at a community college in New York reflect on their experiences facilitating a program designed to enrich the language, cultural, and visual literacy skills of adult immigrant students. The CALTA21 program brought together three stakeholders, immigrant ESOL students, language instructors, and museum educators in collaboration to build linguistic, social, and cultural capital. A professional development institute, utilizing Visual Thinking Strategies as a core pedagogy, provided a common practice used by the stakeholders in the classroom and the museum. This democratic method subverted the traditional student–teacher relationship by using inquiry and personal narratives to inspire an exchange of ideas. The case study will consider the elements of the program that supported the development of a dynamic community of learners, and the empowering experience of teaching and learning within a model of shared authority.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the people and organizations that made the collaboration between CALTA21, the Katonah Museum of art (KMA) and Westchester Community College (WCC) possible, including Patricia Lannes and Professor Kitty Bateman, founders of CALTA21; WCC administrators Teresita Wisell, Vice President and Dean for Workforce Development and Community Education and Robert Nechols, Director, English Language Institute; Yvonne Pollack, KMA Advisory Board member, the KMA Board of Trustees and Education Department, the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, and all of the WCC students who shared their ideas and personal narratives with us.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
About the authors
Joy Eileen Ahern is an examiner for the International English Language Testing System and was a senior adjunct professor for Westchester Community College from 2001 to 2015. She earned a bachelor’s degree of arts for psychology at SUNY Geneseo and an associate of applied science for accessories design from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Joy endeavors to help immigrants weave their way into the fabric of the cultural diversity of the United States.
Lisa Hockstein is currently a senior adjunct instructor at Westchester Community College, and the Coordinator of the Learning Center at Purchase College, both SUNY institutions. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College and a Master of Arts from Yale University. Lisa is a New Yorker, and she is profoundly grateful to her mother for taking her and her sister to museums and art classes as children.
Karen Rattazzi-Stein is a consulting museum educator with 35 years of teaching and administrative experience dedicated to and advocating for learning through art. In 2005, as the Director of Education at the Katonah Museum of Art, Ms. Stein expanded the education mission to include an art and museum-based family literacy program developed in partnership with early childhood organizations, with the goal to enrich and support the literacy and social inclusion needs of the Latino immigrant community. In 2018, the programming continues at the Museum. From 2012 to 2016, Ms. Stein's work expanded to involve a partnership with Westchester Community College co-facilitating the CALTA21 Professional Development Institute for teachers of adult ELL students, Museum staff, docents and family literacy specialists. She holds a master’s degree in Art Therapy and Creativity Development from the Pratt Institute, NY.
Helena Vidal is a museum consultant with 20 years of experience designing, managing and facilitating museum education programs for adults, K-12 educators, youth, and families. As a consultant, Ms. Vidal leads the Katonah Museum of Art’s community engagement initiatives. Currently, she manages and facilitates ArteJuntos/ArtTogether, the Katonah Museum’s nationally recognized family literacy program for parents and preschool aged children, designed in collaboration with local community organizations. Previously, she was Project Director for El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection Online, where she oversaw the development of curricula and interpretive materials. Her past professional positions include Director of Education and Public Programs, El Museo del Barrio; Assistant Director of Education, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Associate Director of Student Programming, New York University.
Notes
1 Zong, Batalova, and Hallock, “Frequently Requested Statistics.”
2 Population growth in the suburbs was 31% vs. 13% in metropolitan cities. Suro, Wilson, and Singer, “Immigration and Poverty,” 4.
3 U.S. Census Bureau, “2016 American Community Survey.”
4 Growth in the adult population with Limited English proficiency was over 8% between 2005 and 2013. In Giles and Wijering, “New York State’s Language Barrier.”
5 U.S. Census Bureau, “2012–2016 American Community Survey.”
6 Nationally, foreign-born residents of America’s suburbs experienced markedly higher poverty rates (14.1%) than the U.S. born (9.8%) in 2009, in Suro, Wilson, and Singer, “Immigration and Poverty,” 1.
7 Day and Shin, “How Does Ability to Speak,” 6.
8 Merritt, “Migration Reshaping the World.”
9 Scanlan, “An Asset-Based Approach,” 3.
10 American Association of Museum and Reach Advisors, “Museums & Society 2034,” and Farrell and Medvedeva, “Demographic Transformation.”
11 Huerta and Migus, “Creating Equitable Ecologies,”12.
12 Sandell, ‘Social inclusion,” 1, 55.
13 See also the recently released report by the American Alliance of Museums’ Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Working Group for insights on museum inclusion strategies, “Facing Change: Insights from the American Alliance of Museums’ Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Working Group,” 2018.
14 Duclos-Orsello, “Shared Authority,” 122.
15 To learn more about CALTA21, visit www.calta21.org.
16 Lannes, “The Image is the Text,” 2.
17 Please visit the CALTA21 website for related publications and reports: http://www.calta21.org/publications/#.Wy_zEi-ZNn4.
18 Tazi, Vidal and Stein, “Arte Juntos/Art Together: Promoting School Readiness,” 158.
19 For the CALTA21 initiative, the WCC instructors agreed to pilot the program for level 5 and above. Students participating in CALTA21 were intermediate and advanced ELLs, as defined by WCC.
20 Kingsley, “The Practicum Course Model,” 250.
21 Ibid.
22 Housen, “Eye of the Beholder,” 18–21.
23 The VTS website, www.vtshome.org, has an extensive selection of publications and evaluation reports related to the teaching methodology and its impact.
24 English for Academic Purposes classes are a bridge to credit bearing college courses.
25 Notes submitted by ESOL Instructor Lisa Hockstein for this article, June 2018.
26 Garner, Kaplan, and Pugh, “Museums as Contexts,” 345.
27 Notes submitted by Joy Ahern for this article, May 2018.
28 In this video, a CALTA21 student talks about how the program’s emphasis on classroom discussions allowed her to practice speaking and develop her English language skills. Visit: http://tinyurl.com/CALTA21-1.
29 Akresh et al., “Beyond English Proficiency,” 210; Verga and Kotz, “How Relevant Is Social Interaction,” 3–4.
30 Quotes from CALTA21 Online Symposium Presentation, “Museums and Institutions of Higher Education Unite to Empower Adult English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL),” June 3, 2014.
31 In this video, a student named Catherine discusses the impact of her experience at the Katonah Museum of Art: https://vimeo.com/111859023.
32 Quote from a student in Lisa Hockstein’s class, in notes for this article submitted by Hockstein.
33 Garibay, Schaefer, and Smiley, CALTA21 Summative Evaluation Report, 21.
34 In this video, Catherine, a CALTA21 student, discusses how the museum experience helped her connect with her classmates: https://vimeo.com/111859508.
35 Garibay, Schaefer, and Smiley, CALTA21 Summative Evaluation Report, 39.
36 In this video, a CALTA21 student named Dolores talks about how she learned to express her ideas though the program: https://vimeo.com/90263202.
37 Notes submitted by Lisa Hockstein for this article, May 2018.
38 For a video of Badr, a CALTA21 student discussing how he would continue to use VTS to visit other museums, and learn more about his friends visit: https://vimeo.com/85276889.
39 For a video of Katherine, a CALTA21 student, discussing how the program helped her understand how to look at images, in the museum and in daily life, visit: https://vimeo.com/111858534.
40 Notes submitted by Lisa Hockstein for this article, May 2018.