Evidence of Critical Consciousness - Fall 2024

Back to Dispositions

I began my student teaching year by looking up the public demographics for my school, and noticed that 35% percent of the student body this year is Latinx. A large number of our students self-identified as “Spanish-speaking only” on their student survey forms at the beginning of the term. For the posters and signage in our classroom, my MT and 

I used our commercial art training to think about font anatomy, colors, and spatial organization to strive for the most readable experiences in both English and Spanish.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced the joys, fears, and confusion of visiting other countries where the main language is not English. I recall these memories when 

I have ML students in my class. Those memories of holding a post-grad education from another country, yet struggling to communicate that I was looking for shampoo, and then struggling again to count the currency (especially the coins), foster empathy that 

leads to effective actions.

At the start of the school year, I felt so dissatisfied as a teacher about the fact that the ML students in my class were only getting single words and gestures as instructions, compared to the rich explanations the English-speaking students were receiving. So after checking with our translation paraprofessional for accuracy, I subscribed to an AI app that allows me to accurately translate to and from most languages, either by typing or even speaking into it. Using this communication method has enabled me to communicate with much more explicit explanations of our learning goals and technical processes with many ML students (examples below).

Moving forward, I will continue to use whatever means I have to translate, whether via AI or paraprofessional, but I will also make it a point to learn basic phrases in languages that are common in my classroom so that ML students can feel the connection of being spoken to in their native languages.