“Speak English. No Spanish.”
Those were the first words that young Esperanza De La Vega heard on her first day of kindergarten. She had been so excited to go to school with her five older sisters. They all spoke Spanish at home, and English was to be learned at school and outside. But the experience of her teacher raising her voice and yelling at her to speak English stunned her.
“I feel like I was a bit traumatized by that experience. So, in kindergarten, I just stopped speaking,” De La Vega said. Throughout that first year, De La Vega learned to watch and not speak. But when it was time to go into the first grade, she was put into special education.
“I became connected with this speech pathologist who was a very kind little lady with a nice, cozy little office,” De La Vega said. “I would just go in there and we would talk and play games. In essence, she was my ESL teacher.”
Today, De La Vega knows the bilingual educator was born inside of her that very first day of kindergarten. “I always thought that kind of instilled in me this tension between language and education, and throughout my academic experience I kind of felt like there was something going on,” she said.
Told that she wasn’t “college material,” De La Vega dropped out of high school. Now, after going back to school and getting her doctorate, De La Vega is a professor and the coordinator of Portland State’sBilingual Teacher Pathway program. In February, the program was recognized by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education as a teacher education program that incorporates culturally responsive practice.
The program was created in 1999 with funds awarded by a grant. Lynda Pullen, program assistant and administrator, said the grant allowed the new and innovative program to recruit and instruct bilingual and bicultural instructional assistants.
“It’s such a unique program. We attract a lot of first generation students and non-native English speakers, so it’s a place for unrepresented students to become teachers,” Pullen said. “And our teachers get hired.”
The idea of culturally responsive practice, which is what the award was intended for, is something De La Vega said has been a buzzword for a while. “In my mind, it is the action in social justice,” she said. “A lot of people talk about social justice, and yeah, we want our teachers to have this stance toward social justice and to fight racism and inequality, but how do you do that? I believe that culturally responsive practice is the way to do that.”
Last year was De La Vega’s first year at PSU. And the program seemed to be exactly what she found most important. So, after spending most of the year getting used to the program, learning all about it and teaching classes, she was able to send in an application to the AACTE.
“I realized what a really unique program this was. We could actually teach through the lens of social justice. Every single course has that lens,” De La Vega said. “Everything is revolved around‘how are you, as a teacher, going to take this teaching practice and make sure that all your students are reading; that all your students have access to the math that they need in order to get into middle school so that when they get into high school they can take AP [advanced placement] classes?’ How can teachers ensure that their students have pride in who they are?”
Since the first student started in 1999, the Bilingual Teacher Pathway program has graduated almost 300 students. All kinds of students have completed the program, which offers instructional assistants and future teachers—who speak a wide variety of languages—across the state. Some students are non-native English speakers themselves, and some have learned a second language.
There are instructional assis-tants from the bilingual program in 14 school districts around Portland, helping kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. “The whole education system benefits,” De La Vega said. “Kids are given someone they can talk to if they need help with anything. Parents are offered a link to the teachers that would not be there if someone who only spoke English was there. And the schools benefit because they have someone who can answer any questions that arise.”
“I think [the program] reflects the need for diverse teachers to go out there so that those students have role models to look up to,” said graduate student Mariela Marquez, who is going through the program. “I think Portland, and the nation as a whole, is moving toward being more diverse and having the diversity of the languages and the cultures, and I think that having teachers that can go through this program and graduate with this knowledge of multicultural education is just going to enrich the education system.”
Marquez is in the final stretch of the program and is currently completing her full-time student teaching at Whitford Middle School in Beaverton. This is her third class with De La Vega. “She’s just like another mom to all of us. And she’s just so nurturing, yet she really understands education. She’s so knowledgeable. You can go to her with any question and she has an answer for you. She’s really invested herself in us, which is really cool.”