Worlds to Live By

Secondary Education Majors Learn Life and Career Lessons
from Tutoring Local Refugee Students

Written by Erik Esckilsen
Photographs by Jordan Silverman

Working with you and hearing the other stories of refugees has taught me more than any textbook here at school can. You and the other students have taught me to appreciate what I have. I have also tried to carry this outlook to others that are close to me. I feel that you have taught me far more than I have taught you.

Today’s teachers-in-training must be, above all, adaptable to changes -- in academic standards, credentialing requirements, teaching and learning technology, and the accrued knowledge of varied fields and disciplines. Champlain College students in Ken Reissig’s Learning Theory course, an introductory course for Secondary Education majors, are also learning to adapt to changes in the most important facet of any classroom: the students.

In an innovative program launched in the spring ’06 semester, in collaboration with Edmunds Middle School -- located in the same neighborhood as the College -- 12 of Reissig’s freshmen became tutors to Somali Bantu and Sudanese refugee students who had only recently arrived in the United States. With Vermont’s thriving refugee resettlement program, Burlington -- and, more specifically, its public school district -- today includes students from such geographically and culturally diverse regions as Bosnia, Kenya, Serbia, Somalia, Sudan, Tibet, and Vietnam, to name just a few of the reported 27 nationalities represented in local student bodies. Such diversity, while a tremendous asset to classrooms in one of the nation’s most homogeneous states, also points up a vital teaching skill that Champlain student and Secondary Education major Vince Lanzilotti ’09 knows he will need to develop: “adapting to the students as they have to adapt to me,” he says.

That openness to understanding his students concurs with a tenet of the teaching philosophy informing Reissig’s courses: “One of the things we stress is that you teach children, not subjects,” Reissig says. “You need to know who they are.”

First Impressions, Lasting Impressions

As Brooke Gardner, Edmunds English as a Second Language/English Language Learner (ESL/ELL) instructor, notes, before Reissig approached Edmunds with a plan for deploying his student tutors, her refugee students had the opportunity to work on ESL/ELL skills just two or three periods a day, since teachers can only modify their lesson plans so far to meet the language-learning needs of non-native English speakers. “Ken’s program gave those students extra attention,” she says, “especially in building their literacy, communication, and social skills.”

Lanzilotti, whose hometown is Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, transferred to Champlain after a fall semester at the Penn State campus in Berks County, where he had done some student teaching. While he felt prepared to tutor younger students at Edmunds, he knew that working with a Somali Bantu refugee would present unique challenges. “I was a little nervous because I’d never worked with someone who was from outside North America,” he says. “I didn’t know his level of understanding of the English language.” That nervousness quickly subsided as Lanzilotti, like his peers in Reissig’s course, worked one-on-one with the Edmunds students at least twice a week. Lanzilotti realized that his tutee, Ahmed, was not all that different, in some ways, from any other middle-schooler. “He was, honestly, just like any other kid,” Lanzilotti says. “He would get distracted just as easily as any kid would. For the most part, I’d get him back into the work.”

On a typical day, the Champlain tutors would report to Gardner and pick up a packet of learning materials to use with their tutees. Then tutor and tutee would find a quiet place to work -- typically the library or computer lab -- and begin the day’s lessons. What may have looked, from a distance, like a conventional learning exchange, however, was often nothing short of two individuals exploring new worlds together. “I learned about some amazing child who has gone through more in 13 years than most American adults have gone through in a lifetime,” Al Martini ’09 says. The Champlainer from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, worked with a Sudanese student named Yuol, a learning exchange that Martini doubts he will soon forget. “Working with Yuol will help me work with any student and approach any situation with patience,” he says.

Making the Grade

According to Gardner, the results of the tutorials were impressive. “The kids’ growth was amazing,” she says. “Some of the kids shot up five or six reading levels.” She observed that the one-on-one attention also seemed to have a positive influence in helping the refugee students learn how to behave as students in a U.S. school. “They don’t have an idea of how a classroom in America really runs,” she adds, identifying a significant residual benefit in the refugee students’ “just having someone they know would be there consistently to help them get through things.”

The fact that the Champlain tutors were such a reliable presence speaks well of Reissig’s “teaching style and [ability to get] his students enthusiastic,” Gardner says. Their professionalism was necessary to assuage some of the Edmunds teachers’ concerns about sharing responsibility for their students. According to Gardner, “At the end, the teachers were very pleased.”

The positive feedback pleases Reissig, who sees the Edmunds collaboration as a “win-win” situation and a program offering his students experiential learning activities in a service-learning context. “There was a fresh group of refugees in desperate need of tutoring,” he says. “We saw that need, and, at the same time, we had a learning opportunity to get to know students who are different from them and also an opportunity to engage in some direct instruction. It was a perfect marriage.”

Reflecting on that experience back on the Champlain College campus was also part of Reissig’s course design. Once a week, his students convened to discuss how the tutorials were progressing. The class read The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community, by Mary Pipher, author of 1994’s groundbreaking Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. In Middle of Everywhere, Pipher draws on her experiences working with the refugee community in Lincoln, Nebraska. Reissig’s students also developed lesson plans to help their tutees understand some basic concepts of North American consumer culture -- recognizing that many of them had never seen a modern supermarket before arriving in Vermont.

The Culture of Learning

Taken together, the course activities fostered a deeper understanding of how culture influences a young learner’s attitude toward education. “Some days would be better than others for my student,” Martini says. “Sometimes he’d get picked on. Sometimes he wouldn’t understand how others were socializing with him.” A more enduring memory Martini holds of Yuol is of “a beautiful child in terms of personality. He was just so polite and so friendly and so happy for a 13-year-old, especially one who’d been through the trauma he’d gone through in Sudan and in the refugee camp.”

Reissig notes that working with students in as steep a cultural and linguistic learning curve as African refugees are sends a clear message about how demanding teaching can be as a profession. “It’s a really important responsibility of any education program to give students an experience early on so that they realize what type of commitment it is to teach,” he says. “And this did that …. They saw what a tiring job it is but what an incredible reward they could get.”

That point was not lost on Martini, who gained a new appreciation for the opportunities that have come his way. “I found myself becoming more and more studious in the way I work in college,” he says. “The more I reflect on that, the more I attribute to working with Yuol. I absolutely took my education for granted until I came to college.”

Ahmed Muse from Somalia

Training to Teach in the 21st Century

Inspired by the success of the Edmunds program in its pilot stage last spring, Reissig enrolled another group of students in tutorials with refugee students at Edmunds this fall. Their experiences are bound to be varied and unpredictable. And that, he says, is the essence of the learning experience for the teachers in-training: “A good teacher needs to know every student in their classroom,” he says. This belief makes theories, skills, and methodologies only part of the new teacher’s repertoire. Through programs such as that ongoing with Edmunds and other initiatives in the planning stages, Champlain students learn to see their students’ diverse cultural backgrounds as assets. “It’s not only ‘How do you assist those students?’” Reissig says, “but, ‘How do you use those students to enrich the experience of all students in your classroom?’” Guided by that wisdom, and with a spirit of openness to diverse perspectives, Champlain graduates are on course toward making valuable contributions to education in the 21st century.

I am truly grateful for all that we have experienced together; thank you for giving me the opportunity to get to know you, work with you and watch you grow. To summarize this whole experience I have but two words --
thank you.

Excerpted from letters to refugee students from their tutors, Champlain College Secondary Education majors Abigail C. Hartford ’09, Dan Muniz ’09, Benjamin Perez ’09, and Steven Tanzola ’07