The Portland State Bilingual Teacher Pathway Program, a branch of the Graduate School of Education, received a $1.96 million grant from the federal government’s Department of Education. The grant—dubbed the Futures Project—focuses on science, technology, engineering and math and will bring big changes to the bilingual teacher program.
The program provides training for bilingual teaching assistants already working in Portland Public schools to become licensed teachers themselves. The intent is for these newly licensed bilingual teachers to return to work in their home school districts.
“People we are preparing in the Bilingual Teacher Pathway program are from the community. They have family ties there. If we prepare them, they go back to that community and they are going to stay there for a long time. That’s cost effective,” Dean of the Graduate School of Education Randy Hitz said.
Bilingual Teacher Pathway Program Director Esperanza De La Vega said this nearly $2 million grant is an important step for the program in many ways, one of which is the new emphasis on teaching science and technology.
“The grant is beneficial for the program in that it’s adding a different focus to the program that is very applicable for the future,” De La Vega said. “Science and technology and math are areas where there is such need, and school districts need individuals who can teach our English language learners to be competitive in the future.”
According to De La Vega, traditionally school districts have the most difficulty recruiting teachers in math and the various sciences. Proficient bilingual teachers in these areas are even harder to come by.
Hitz claimed that there are more than 25 different languages that exist in the Portland Public School district alone and that the need for bilingual teachers is beyond desperate. The most common language need is in Spanish, but Russian and Chinese are growing constituencies of English as a Second Language students.
“PSU is one of the major producers of teachers in the state, and school districts are crying out for people who are bilingual, so it’s a responsibility we have to prepare as much as we can to meet the needs of the school district,” Hitz said.
Mariela Marquez, a student nearing the end of her time in the program, said that she believes the grant’s focus on science and technology is well placed. During her student teaching experience, Marquez noticed a need for more bilingual instruction in areas outside the traditional subjects.
“I think there’s definitely a void in the [Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics] area; a lot of us students are concentrating on either teaching a world language or language arts and social studies. There’s only two students in my cohort who are going toward math or science,” Marquez said.
According to De La Vega, the new STEM focus will include teaching the program’s students how to use technology to inform classroom activities. Part of the grant money will be used to supply the program with a classroom set of iPads.
“Schools today are changing with new technology. We want our students to embrace math and science more wholeheartedly. We want our students to be familiar with technology and know how to use it in a classroom for engaging activity related to science or math,” De La Vega said.
The majority of the grant will be used to provide financial support for students. The program itself originated from grants given by the federal government in 1999. Federal funding ran out in 2006, but PSU was able to sustain the program and keep it afloat.
“What we didn’t sustain was the support for students,” Hitz explained “But this grant is evidence of an effort by the federal government to help teacher education programs find innovative ways to recruit more people who are bilingual into the field.”
Marquez, who just missed benefitting from the grant, said that financial support for students in the program is extremely important.
“Graduate school is hard for anybody, but there’s so many people in this program for whom it’s a financial struggle. We’ve even had a couple people leave the program for those reasons,” Marquez said. “I think any help financially that students can get to keep going and reach their goal to become a teacher is huge.”
Besides helping to support students, Hitz said this grant betters PSU’s ability to provide local school districts with bilingual teachers while simultaneously benefitting the university on another level.
“We’re going to be able to recruit more people and be better able to serve school district needs for bilingual teachers, but of course, like any major grant, it enhances our reputation and faculty scholarship,” Hitz said.
De La Vega also believes that this grant is simply a means to improve on an already good thing.
“This grant is taking a really good solid program that we already have and just pushing it to a different level, enhancing it a little more,” she said.