Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents

5. Living through the Battles: Billy, Andy, Jake, and Tina

CHAPTER FIVE Living through the Battles Billy, Andy, Jake, and Tina The four learners featured in this chapter were from Ms. Dawson’s grade 4/5 combined class. They volunteered to participate in the study with the consent of their parents. Round-faced Billy Chung was 10 years old. Like his sister Sandy, he took everything very seriously, and was under tremendous pressure to achieve and do well because he had not seemed to be able to improve his English language proficiency much since he had entered the fourth grade. Andy Lou, age 10, Billy’s best friend in school, was the opposite of Billy. He was sociable and easygoing. He lived in the shadow of his older sister’s school failure and also experienced tremendous difficulty in school, especially in English reading and writing. Frustrated at the school’s failure to teach Andy English, his parents withdrew him from the ESL list and considered moving to another school district. Eleven-year-old Jake Wong was in grade 5 and was very verbal, outgoing, active, and well liked by his classmates. He was a leader among his small group of friends. Judging from his interaction with other students, it was hard to believe that Jake would soon be referred for psychoeducational testing due to his lack of academic progress since grade 1. Twelve-year-old Tina Wei was tall and thin. She was shy, quiet, and timid looking. Being the only Mandarin speaker who had recently come from Mainland China, Tina had a hard time making friends at school. Although she was struggling with writing and math, Tina had a strong desire to learn English and to fit in. She soon began to develop a negative attitude toward the Chinese language and culture. 147 Starting in grade 4, all children in British Columbia were required to take part in the provincial Foundation Skills Assessment tests. The tests, though not counted toward students’ grades on their report cards, created much anxiety among the Chinese families. In addition, departing from the emphasis on learning through play in the primary grades, the curriculum in the intermediate grades increased in both scope and depth, also causing great concern to the parents. When the children did not perform well in school, the parents held the school practices accountable. The parents not only critiqued the school’s literacy instructional approaches, but also its assessment and placement practices. To compensate for what they perceived as lacking in the school program, they also employed their own financial resources to seek more teacher-centered, traditional instruction after school. As the children’s school and home experiences will demonstrate, the children were socialized into culturally different literacy practices and were subjected to a cultural mismatch that was detrimental to their academic success. In order to highlight these cultural mismatches , in the descriptions of each child’s school and home experiences , I include separate sections on the teachers’ and the parents’ perspectives of the children’s struggles with schooling. Since I did not interview Tina’s parents or visit their home, I do not provide the home experiences or parent perspectives of Tina’s learning in and out of school. Experiencing the “Fourth-Grade Slump”: Billy’s Story At the end of May 2000, Billy finished third grade with Level 3 (intermediate ) ESL skills. However, since he had started the fourth grade his literacy performance had not improved: in May 2001, he was still classified as a low Level 3 ESL student (with Level 3 in oral and writing skills, and Level 2 in reading). He was, however, at or above levels expected of his age group in math, fine arts, music, and physical education , and he took pride in his accomplishments in these areas. Billy was a serious fourth grader, conscious of other students’ comments about him. He was sometimes defensive and abrupt in his interactions with others. After observing him for a few months, I discovered that he was a child of paradoxes and contradictions. He expressed high interest in learning. He wrote during one of our focus group interviews, “Leaning is fun because you can learn more about Science, spelling, and lots of other stuff.” But he often resisted learning 148 Culturally Contested Pedagogy and doing home and schoolwork; he often appeared “lost” (as Mrs. Smith described it), and sat in his seat staring blankly and doing nothing when he was assigned independent tasks in class...