Blog Post #4

For my fourth blog post, I decided to go more in depth into the benefits of children who grow up in the culture of bilingualism. The article I read was rather short, but it was packed with many valuable facts and sources. It is called, “The Benefits of Being Bilingual,” and although it does not list a single author, it seems to be a great tool for a believer in bilingualism. The article is written from the opinions of the Head Start program, and their programs belief’s about bilingualism staying active between the children’s homes and schools. Because Head Start is a preschool program that serves very low-income families in the United States, this population also includes many diverse families. The Head Start program is so diverse, in fact, that according to the article, “Head Start currently serves more than 300,000 children who ar dual language learners (DLLs) in 87.4 percent of its classrooms (Office of Head Start, 2011). The article places the benefits of bilingualism into four major categories: cognitive, social-emotional, learning, and global benefits.

In each category, there were benefits that I had before never considered. To just give a few examples, some of the cognitive benefits of bilingualism were that research shows that their brains are more flexible than those who are not bilingual. Also, they tend to be stronger in focusing, remembering, and making decisions. In the social-emotional category, research shows that bilingual children tend to have stronger ties within their entire family, culture and in some cases community. The learning category somewhat ties in with cognitive, but what stood out to me was that children who are bilingual develop a more flexible approaches to thinking through problems. Also, because of their ability to read and think in two different languages, they tend to have higher levels of abstract thoughts. Finally, as for global benefits, bilingual individuals have the opportunity to participate in the global community in many more ways.

The section of Affirming Diversity that this article almost directly relates to is under “Linguistic Diversity and Learning.” The section states that “In contrast to negative perceptions of bilingualism, a good deal of research confirms the positive influence of knowing more than one language, and these benefits begin very early in life,” (226). The passage goes on to tell more examples and studies of children who grew up in a bilingual setting. Both of the book and this article work well hand-in-hand to demonstrate the benefits of teachers and parents supporting bilingualism within children’s education.

Blog Post #3

For my third blog post, I read the article “School tracking Harms Millions, Sociologist Finds,” from the Stanford University News Services. This article works as a great parallel to the tracking portion of Chapter 4 of Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. This summary of this article is the compilation of all of the negative affects that tracking can have on students, especially when in high school. The article also agrees that tracking is a system that does no good when met with the demands for a more multicultural education in America. The article explains that one of the shocking parts of tracking is that students and parents in the schools may not even be aware that it is going on, because it is never clearly stated whether the classes they are taking are college preparatory or not. This might be intentional of the schools, the article explains, because this helps them avoid the many complaints and requests they would receive from students and their families.

            Chapter 4 of Affirming Diversity states that, “Research over many years has confirmed that tracking is frequently linked with racial, ethnic, and social-class differences,” (110). The article I read for my blog is just another believer in this situation. The article claims that not only does tracking limit the opportunities for the high-achieving students, but it is particularly “disastrous” for students who find themselves to fall in the middle range. A research experiment that was conducted in this article consisted of researches selecting randomly an equal proportion of students with high, middle, and low grades for each gender-ethnicity combination (so that there were no ethnic differences in school grades for their sample). After comparing the students’ schools records to their current placements, here were the results: “The researchers found that the proportion of high-ability African American and Latino American students not taking college prep courses in math and science was more than twice that of white and Asian American students of the same ability level,” (Standford University). In my personal opinion, this is an eye catching statistic that should not go ignored, and should be an alarm to administrators everywhere that tracking in high schools has to end.