Description:
In this episode of “Learning with Multilingual Students,” Dr. Megan Alubicki Flick, the multilingual learner consultant at the Connecticut State Department of Education, discusses recent developments in supporting English Learners and Multilingual Learners (ELs/MLs).
Key points covered:
- The English Learners Bill of Rights: While not introducing new rights, this legislation makes existing rights more accessible by requiring districts to post them online and provide them directly to families of identified English Learners.
- Terminology Evolution: Dr. Flick explains the shift from “English Learner” (which focuses on what students lack) to “multilingual learner” (which recognizes their linguistic assets), though both terms are currently used as the field evolves.
- Common Misconceptions: She addresses the misconception that English Learners are a monolithic group, emphasizing that these students come from diverse backgrounds with varying levels of education, language proficiency, and life experiences.
- Shared Responsibility: Dr. Flick stresses that while ESL and bilingual teachers have specialist credentials, supporting multilingual learners is everyone’s responsibility in a school. The supports and structures that help MLs are beneficial for all students but are essential for English Learners.
- Resources: She recommends several resources for educators, including the Connecticut State Department of Education’s English Learners webpage.
- Throughout the interview, Dr. Flick emphasizes an asset-based approach to multilingual education and the importance of making educational rights and resources accessible to all students and their families.
Show Notes:
Transcript
Please note: this transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors.
Narrator: Welcome to learning with multilingual students, a podcast for educators working with students classified as English Learners.
In today’s episode, we hear from Dr. Megan Alubicki Flick, the multilingual learner consultant at the Connecticut State Department of Education. Dr. Flick provides information about the recently adopted English Learner’s Bill of Rights and other developments that aim to ensure the educational rights of multilingual learners.
Sophia Diamantis: Thank you so much for being here, if you don’t mind, could you introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do.
Megan Alubicki Flick: Absolutely. I am Megan Alubicki Flick. I work at the Connecticut State Department of Education, where I serve as the Title 3 state director, multilingual learner, consultant.
And in that capacity, I oversee the federal Title 3 grant and the state bilingual grant and associated programs and activities. And I’m also lucky to oversee the seal of biliteracy program for the state and really engage in a lot of the work of the agency because the student group that we’re discussing, our English Learners, multilingual learners are so prominent and are part of, you know, most of the initiatives that are happening outside of specifically that group. And so as a result, I get to participate in that work.
Sophia Diamantis: I’m curious if you could tell us a little bit about the recently proposed English Learners Bill of Rights. Could you tell us what it is. Is it anything new? What will it change, if anything?
Megan Alubicki Flick: Absolutely. It would be my great pleasure to talk about this. This English Learners Bill of Rights is a proposed legislation in the process of being considered for legislative action in Connecticut and essentially what the English Learners Bill of Rights does is affirm rights that the students and their families already have.
So when you asked if it’s anything new, the rights themselves are rights that the students and the families have had. But what the Bill of Rights does is it makes those rights more accessible, and it elevates the importance of those rights for our students and for their families.
So let’s see what will it change? I’m pleased to say that a few years ago, the State Department of Education developed a document that actually mirrors the English Learner’s Bill of Rights almost identically. It was called Information for Parents and Families of English Learners and it in many cases like verbatim to the current proposed English Learner Bill of Rights. So again, what this Bill of Rights document does is it amplifies this resource to a greater degree.
One of the two key proposed actions related to the Bill of Rights are that districts would be obligated to post the Bill of Rights on their web page. So certainly that’s a matter of access. And they would be required to provide the Bill of Rights directly to families of identified English Learners. So both actions, you know, are affirmative steps to ensuring that families get the information that they’re entitled to receive.
Sophia Diamantis: I wanted to recognize that the language, the terminology that’s used on the Bill of Rights, and the terminology that I’ve heard you use, and I was just hoping that you could speak to the difference in terms and explain which ones you’re using and why.
Megan Alubicki Flick: Absolutely. And I’m really glad you asked that question. So right now in our field, there seems to be evolving thinking about terminology and assuring that we are speaking in a way that acknowledges the assets that our students and families bring.
So I am using a couple of different terms, English Learner and multilingual learner. The former English Learner is the term that is currently used to refer to students who have been identified as needing language support in order to access grade level content so English Learners are a student category that we look at for accountability purposes or programming for services etcetera.
And our federal law that guides our work still uses the term English Learner. However, the field rightly feels that English learner is deficit oriented in that it calls out what students lack English. Whereas terms such as multilingual learner, emergent bilingual are more asset oriented, acknowledging the use of multiple languages, the ongoing development of those languages.
As a result, my preferred term is multilingual learner, but acknowledging that English Learner is still this federally used and recognized term, I’m using them synonymously for the most part, and in concert, so it sounds a little clunky, English Learner, Multilingual Learner, but it covers it and I think it provides some clarity and allows me to use the assets based language in addition to our federal language. With that I also just want to quickly note that multilingual learners really span a broader range of language than in the defined group of English Learner, because a student could be reclassified as a former English learner so proficient in English, but still of course be a multilingual learner, someone who is continuing in the development of English and another language, for instance. So while there’s a lot of shared space in those terms, they also can refer to different student groups. So I think more to come as our field evolves in its thinking on how we refer to our students.
Sophia Diamantis: Thank you so much for unpacking that and I’m curious if there were any other misconceptions that either you’ve held or that you’ve encountered most often related to the educational, the educational programming, or access and opportunity for English Learner classified students.
Megan Alubicki Flick: The first is that this is more of like a generally held misconception. So not one that I have held, given that this is my professional passion and you know my life’s work professionally, that the Group of English Learners and multilingual learners are monolithic. They’re one type of student. They possess one collection of skills, descriptive characteristics, etcetera.
That couldn’t be less accurate, in fact. So when we do need to sometimes group students to think about accountability, to think about programming. It’s appropriate in my opinion, in an instructional setting to be thinking about students and thinking about their shared needs.
However, English Learners multilingual learners come from all over the world, including this country, they come with differing levels of language proficiency, different languages, different languages, themselves, very different life experiences, cultural experience and school experiences. So we receive some multilingual learners that have, you know, participated fully and robustly in an educational traditional educational system in the home country, and are coming at or above where the grade level expectations would be. Here we receive others who have limited or interrupted formal education. We English Learners, multilingual learners may have come for a variety of reasons to this country, if they’re students they’re immigrating from.
So the point being that our students are extremely diverse, and while they may have in common some linguistic needs, they also have these very, very diverse characteristics and it’s problematic to think of them in this monolithic way.
Sophia Diamantis: With listeners in mind, if they were to understand kind of one thing coming out of this conversation that they may not have understood before we started, what would you most want them to take away or to remember or to understand?
Megan Alubicki Flick: Well, because I feel so passionate about this topic and about these students, I could go on all day about what I’d like people to know, but I think that one thing that stands out to me is the idea that supports and structures that are built for multilingual learners to provide access to them to grade level content are good for all students. That is really important. But what I’d like to add because I’ve heard people say that many times, what I’d like to add to that is, that these supports are essential for our multilingual learners English Learners and it is their right to receive them as students who are identified as such.
So it’s never going to be a disservice to provide effective strategies. Multilingual learners in one’s 7th grade classroom. It’s never going to be a disservice to the other students. It’s going to provide better access and a more diverse range of scaffolding techniques and strategies for other students to access, but it’s really essential that those supports are provided to assure that our English Learners multilingual learners are receiving what they need, and with that said.
We’re all in it together. Our English Learners, our multilingual learners, they are all of our responsibility. So I make the specific example of the 7th grade classroom, but that applies to all classrooms across all grade levels and we are lucky to have certifications for our bilingual teachers and for our T cell certified features and those certifications tell us that these folks are particularly knowledgeable on how to serve these students and have received these this specialist credential.
But they are not the only professionals responsible for our multilingual learners education, in fact, if we rely exclusively on our TESOL or bilingual teachers then we’re doing our students disservice because the majority of our students day is likely unless we’re in a self-contained bilingual program, it’s likely to be in a general education setting. And so it’s really incumbent upon all professionals in a school to really be equipped with skills to serve multilingual learners and then to implement those strategies. It’s our students are all of our responsibility. It’s a shared responsibility to serve our kids.
Sophia Diamantis: Thank you for that. And you know, just hanging on to that word responsibility and I’m wondering if there are specific resources for more information.
Megan Alubicki Flick: Yeah, absolutely. There certainly are. So I will certainly suggest our English Learners page of the State Department of Education Portal. There’s loads of resources. I feel like it can be almost a little overwhelming because there’s just so much there. And I frequently am working with my colleague who uploads the content thinking about ways that we can structure it in a way that feels a little less daunting. Nevertheless, there’s a lot there, a couple of resources that might be helpful.
In particular are the 17 ways that the State Department of Education is supporting English Learners, multilingual learners. That document is sort of like a broad scan across the areas of the state agency and initiatives that identifies different ways that we are working to support districts students, families, etc. So that’s a good way to kind of familiarize yourselves with just some, like high level actions. There’s also a document that’s the guidelines for administrators of programs for multilingual learners I think that’s a very helpful document, particularly if one is new in the field or if someone needs a refresher, or if someone’s in a new role. So maybe you’ve moved from a classroom teacher to a ESL teacher or to a principalship because it identifies some key areas that we need to assure that we’re meeting the needs of our students and approximately when during the year that that happens so that that tool is quite helpful.
Sophia Diamantis: Thanks so much, Megan, and we’ll definitely have links in the show notes. And I know I’ve been asking all the questions. I don’t know if you had any other things you wanted to share that we didn’t get to discuss because of the questions.
Megan Alubicki Flick: I don’t think so, but I do think that I probably should plug my own talk and so that’s on having an assets orientation to multilingualism and advocating for dual language programming in schools that will be on Ted. Come. So check it out.
Sophia Diamantis: All right. Wonderful.
Megan Alubicki Flick: And thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to talk about these topics with you and that I know we feel we both feel so passionately about them and about our students. So thanks for the opportunity.
Sophia Diamantis: Thank you so much.
Narrator: We hope you found this podcast informative and encourage you to contact SERC for additional support. We provide resources, professional learning, and a centralized library to educators, families, and community members to learn more, visit www.ctserc.org that’s c-t-s-e-r-c.org.
Links to resources will be provided in the show notes.
The views of guests are not necessarily the views of the learning with multilingual students podcast or the state Education Resource Center. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity..