As the number of newcomer students rises in many communities, meeting their needs has received increased attention from policy makers and education leaders across the United States. Most of this attention on newcomers, who we define as students who were not born in the U.S. and have attended U.S. schools for less than three years, has focused on the urgency of English language acquisition.
Newcomer students must have access to the common language of their new country to support their educational attainment, upward mobility, and integration as citizens. Yet, the narrow focus of newcomer instruction on rapid English acquisition often comes at the expense of engaging students meaningfully with culturally relevant content.
Challenges That Get in the Way
How can schools do both well? We offer recommendations based on our work with newcomers and their teachers for how educators might “teach up” to one of our newest and most underserved student populations. By teaching up, we mean planning and implementing engaging lessons so that all students have access to a rich and relevant curriculum that supports deeper learning for long-term success. We’ve noticed several common challenges that get in the way of teaching up to newcomers. Fortunately, there are research-based strategies to increase the rigor and relevance of instruction for newcomers and get past these challenges.
Challenges that make it harder for teachers to teach up to newcomers include:
- Deficit views of newcomer students. Many teachers view newcomers in terms of what’s missing. Limited proficiency in English is often unconsciously interpreted as lacking “language” altogether. If newcomer students cannot read or write fluently in English, or hesitate to participate in class, teachers may question their overall intelligence and competence—and teach “down” to them.
- Inconsistent teacher training in English language development and multilingualism. The U.S. teacher workforce is inconsistently trained in English language development (ELD) and multilingualism (Suárez-Orozco & Marks, 2016). While some districts have developed full-day, newcomer-specific instruction, most newcomers experience their first years of school in the United States in a general education classroom, with teachers who have little to no training in ELD outside of English language arts. Moreover, most teachers have little training on how to leverage students’ home languages as they learn English and engage in deeper academic learning.
- Curriculum that centers American whiteness. Schools play an important role in teaching all students what it means to be American—especially North American—and to “belong” in the United States. These messages are reinforced explicitly and implicitly through the school curriculum, language policies, and everyday conversations between students and educators. Unfortunately, the most common message being delivered to immigrant students is that to be American is to be white and English monolingual (Pérez Huber, 2011). By failing to offer an explicit counter message to this narrative, teachers might unconsciously marginalize students who are in dire need of assurance that they belong in the classroom, school, and country (Lash, 2023).
Strategies for Relevance and Rigor
To break through these challenges, there are six powerful strategies that teachers can implement; these strategies support newcomer students as individuals and as engaged members of their school, local, and national communities. Schools can use teaching that bridges students’ home cultures to classroom learning and promotes immigrant students’ strengths, even as many of them are also acquiring English. These strategies and the accompanying examples are designed to help teachers create safe, culturally responsive, democratic learning environments. Indeed, many of these practices benefit all students, not just newcomers.
1. Encourage students to draw on all their languages.
Newcomers have rich, diverse linguistic assets that should be recognized and leveraged for meaningful communication and learning. When teachers believe their newcomer students are linguistically deficient, they are less likely to provide them with academically rich content. But teachers that encourage “translanguaging”—using features of multiple languages concurrently for communication—challenge deficit perceptions and support newcomers’ engagement in classroom activities, sense of belonging, and multilingual language development (García & Wei, 2014).
Teachers could normalize translanguaging through literature with narration and characters that express themselves in multiple languages, such as the picture book With Lots of Love by Jenny Torres Sanchez (Viking, 2022). Or, as another example, students could write a descriptive poem about themselves using words and phrases from any or all of their languages. Students will see that it is acceptable and valuable to draw on their home languages to communicate thoughts and engage in course content while simultaneously increasing their English proficiency. When students use their full linguistic repertoires, their access to a rigorous curriculum expands exponentially.
When students use their full linguistic repertoires, their access to a rigorous curriculum expands exponentially.
2. Embed language instruction into content that inspires.
Students feel inspired when they can talk about their lives, interests, and aspirations. One way that teachers can inspire more engagement with language learning is to organize lessons as thematic units (or theme webs) that tap into all students’ unique funds of knowledge, including knowledge that newcomer students bring. Example themes might include “Things I’ve Learned from My Family,” or “Where I’m From.” Teachers can design multipronged units around such relevant themes to explore related vocabulary, parts of speech, functional skills, conversation skills, and literature. Besides the clear connection to ELA content and skills, educators can embed social-emotional learning and connection to family within reading, writing, and other classwork.
For instance, with the theme “Where I’m From,” a lesson on parts of speech for elementary students could focus on past-tense verbs. Vocabulary work to prepare for a writing task could center on words within a neighborhood, like street, store, church, and school. Inviting students recently arrived in the U.S. to share about their experiences, skills, and families helps everyone in the classroom challenge deficit views of newcomers. While such deficit views are often unconscious, they are deeply rooted in an education system that favors English dominance at the expense of multilingualism (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010). Many newcomer students pick up on these cues and conclude that their perspectives, experiences, and prior knowledge do not matter in their new environment (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). With care, harmful deficit views can be challenged.
3. Celebrate and integrate students’ existing expertise.
To teach up to newcomers, we need to explicitly challenge existing narratives and help students recognize and celebrate the cultural and linguistic diversity of the nation. Newcomers bring a wealth of knowledge and experience into the classroom. When we celebrate newcomer students’ assets, sources of strength, and “superpowers,” we affirm their identity as knowers, thinkers, and doers. Teachers can capture students’ strengths and skills through early “getting to know you” activities. We recommend that teachers start a “Student Funds of Knowledge” journal where they jot down the skills, interests, and strengths each student displays; this journal can provide helpful inspiration when planning future class activities. Additionally, teachers can incorporate literature that reflects students’ lived experiences (e.g., books focused on immigration, multilingualism, and family cultures). The nonprofit We Need Diverse Books has many recommendations for relevant and inspiring multicultural texts.
As students get to know each other, teachers can scaffold activities in which each student gets to be an “expert” and teach a lesson—for example, explaining the rules of soccer or demonstrating how to make a pupusa. Activities, projects, and everyday conversations with newcomers about their lives and interests help make learning relevant and engaging. Such activities ensure that new learning builds on the existing cultural, cognitive, and linguistic resources that newcomers bring with them to the classroom. It also supports newcomers’ sense of belonging within their school and broader community (Dover & Rodríguez-Valls, 2022).
4. Cultivate community and creative expression.
Teachers can create the conditions for rigorous instruction for all students by building a classroom environment that conveys a sense of warmth, community, and connection. This kind of positive environment fosters a safe atmosphere where students can stretch themselves and take intellectual risks as they learn.
One way to do this is to invest time in community-building activities, like opening each class with an icebreaker, creating opportunities for students to collaborate through group work and hands-on projects (e.g., team games, a whole-class activity, pair work), or assigning newly arrived students a language buddy who speaks their home language and can help them with class activities.
Teachers can also cultivate community by integrating opportunities for creative expression into language lessons. Creative expression offers multiple modalities for students to integrate and demonstrate new learning. For example, for a vocabulary lesson on relationships or family, students could create their own “important people” constellation, in which they draw and label the important people in their lives. Teachers could also demonstrate vulnerability and risk by sharing their own cultural, familial, and linguistic journeys, making it easier for students to do the same. Creating an environment of care and trust allows students to take risks and bring their whole selves to the classroom, facilitating deeper learning.
5. Make space for difficult topics in the classroom.
Discussing issues like immigration or racism with students can be difficult. But when we avoid “difficult” topics, we miss opportunities for students to develop critical thinking, analysis, and discussion skills with their diverse peers—skills that they need to engage in rigorous learning and effectively participate in a multicultural democracy. Shutting out or shutting down discussions of sensitive topics like immigration or family trauma or violence also denies newcomer students and their classmates the opportunity to connect their personal experiences to classroom learning.
Teaching up requires teachers to be brave and use difficult conversations as opportunities to engage in deeper learning. For example, a teacher might introduce a book about the immigrant experience and ask newcomer students to interview family or community members about their own “moving stories,” including stories of international migration. (The websites ReimaginingMigration.org and FacingHistory.org offer ideas for lesson plans that engage students in thoughtful conversations around the immigrant experience.) However, teachers must be mindful of students’ reactions; don’t push these conversations if it appears students are not ready or feel too vulnerable. It’s important for students to have agency over how much of their personal lives they disclose in the classroom.
Teachers can be responsive to this concern by allowing students to interpret and fulfill an assignment in multiple ways. For instance, the prompt of “moving stories” is open enough to allow students to share their immigrant experience, but they could also respond with a less sensitive story of moving between neighborhoods. When teachers find safe ways to break the silence on immigration and other sensitive topics, they help normalize newcomers’ experiences and increase their sense of belonging.
By celebrating newcomer students’ assets, we affirm their identity as knowers, thinkers, and doers.
6. Encourage student voice and civic action.
Schools are an important place where newcomer students learn what it means to be an engaged member of their new community. Newcomers need to learn that their voice matters and that they have the power, individually and collectively, to make positive change, regardless of their legal citizenship status. Teachers can intentionally support students’ agency and sense of empowerment by designing opportunities for them to exercise their voice and choice in the classroom, for example, by taking on class jobs or leadership roles, choosing among learning activities, or choosing how to present their learning using different modalities.
Teachers can help newcomer students learn about civic action through videos and books, like The Artivist by Nikkolas Smith (Penguin Random House, 2023) or Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh (Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2014). These texts introduce complex topics like homelessness, racial segregation, and gun violence to students with varied proficiency in English. By the nature of their content, such resources provide a more realistic view of U.S. diversity.
Teachers can also develop students’ critical thinking skills and empower students as changemakers by designing activities to identify and discuss problems in their school or local community (like housing insecurity) and brainstorm needed solutions. They can create opportunities for students to share their ideas with school administrators, local politicians, or community members (Banks, 2008). Leaning into a translanguaging pedagogy for these kinds of activities helps newcomer students meaningfully engage in content, collaborate with their peers, and develop their leadership skills.
Looking Beyond “Learning English”
To support newcomer students as deep thinkers and connected members of the classroom community, educators need to fundamentally shift the way we think about language and language learning. We need to look beyond an exclusive focus on English language development and integrate meaningful opportunities for newcomers to engage in relevant content and critical thinking, thus teaching up to our newest community members.
