One Woman Fights for Bilingual Education in Rural Southern Illinois

By Michelle Adam, ELL Outlook™ Contributing Writer

Two years ago, while teaching linguistics at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Joan Friedenberg discovered that there was not a single certified bilingual teacher in the entire rural Southern Illinois area. "I didn't know that there were these growing numbers of Latinos and Chinese, and that all these kids were not getting certified teaching, and our university, the only university down here, did not have a single course on how to work with these kids."

Friedenberg's discovery seemed especially surprising given the fact that Illinois has a very progressive bilingual education law. In Illinois, schools with 20 or more students of limited English proficiency are required to teach core academic areas in the students' native languages and to teach native culture as well.

"There are teachers in schools who are bilingual but aren't allowed to teach in Spanish," said Friedenberg. "The biggest challenge is getting administrators to drop their fear of having kids learning in their native language for too long. They see Spanish as a problem, and there's no appreciation for bilingualism. No one is taking advantage of these Latino kids, who could help other students learn Spanish."

After 20 years in bilingual education, Friedenberg arrived at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1994 to teach linguistics and to direct the school's Center for English as a Second Language. "I didn't dream that there was a need for bilingual education," she said. "I came here to direct the ESL program for international students and really missed bilingual education."

An unusual set of circumstances, however, pushed Friedenberg to apply for federal funds and begin a bilingual teacher education program at the university. It all began when she read a letter to the editor of a Kansas newspaper condemning bilingual education that was picked up by her local paper, The Southern Illinoisan . "I became outraged. The letter had a lot of misinformation on bilingual education. So I wrote a guest column, which is really just a glorified letter to the editor, in the paper, addressing each point in the original column, and showing how each was misleading," said Friedenberg. "A teacher from a town called Cobden saw the column and wrote to me, telling me that I should apply for funds to create a program, that there was a real need here. I said 'Great! Get me the demographics,' and with that I wrote a letter to the federal government, explaining that there was not a single certified bilingual teacher in all of Southern Illinois."  

In her grant proposal to the federal government, Friedenberg argued that Illinois had one of the English language learner (ELL) populations in the country, with the greatest percentage growth seen in the rural southern part of the state (90% growth from the 1980s to the 1990s overall, with some southern Illinois districts realizing 250% increases). Despite the significant growth in Hispanic families over the past 20 years, southern Illinois had no certified bilingual teachers in the public schools, had school administrators who were so inexperienced that ELLs   were often not even identified, and had mainstream teachers who were unskilled at serving ELLs. Her proposal also made clear that the area had no bilingual teacher certification program at the local university and that teacher educators were equally unskilled at preparing future classroom teachers to work with ELLs effectively.

In response to her plea, Friedenberg received close to one million dollars from the federal government to start a bilingual teacher education program, the "Training for All Teachers Project." The project, which has been in effect for three years now, provides bilingual teacher certification, scholarships for bilingual students to attract them to K-12 teaching, and programs for local teachers and university education professors to incorporate bilingualism into the curriculum.

"It's taken off far more than I could have imagined-it's going like gangbusters," said Friedenberg. "It's a big deal getting $925,000 in Carbondale, Illinois, so we got reports in the local newspaper and that did the recruiting for us. I got lots of calls from students, from community people, from Hispanic women who had always wanted to be teachers but never had the funds. Some people were so desperate to get started that we squeezed out scholarships for four people the first year, when we were supposed to start with two."

Despite the successes of her bilingual program, the process of not only developing a program to certify bilingual teachers but also persuading local school administrators to accept bilingual teaching in their schools has been a challenge. "Most of the people taking my course have said that they had seen the need to teach in the student's native language but were told otherwise by the administration," said Friedenberg. "This course gives them the ammunition to go back to their administrations and teach more in the native language."

Friedenberg, who was raised in an immigrant neighborhood in New York City, has been a strong advocate of bilingual education for decades. She recognizes the benefits she received from an early age in being chosen among a select few to be placed in a two-way bilingual Spanish class. "I have been so lucky to get all the opportunities that I did. Just speaking Spanish [although her family did not speak Spanish] has given me so many opportunities," she said.

Friedenberg started her career as an ESL/bilingual teacher in Puerto Rico, followed by university teaching and research assistantships, and then worked as a bilingual curriculum development specialist in public schools. Eventually, she became a university ESL instructor and director of several bilingual training programs in Florida and California and, later, a project director for a bilingual education program in Ohio.

She is especially passionate about two-way bilingual immersion programs, and believes that research has thoroughly proven their merit. As she explained, "I emphasize what the research shows is effective in teaching English. The research is admittedly counterintuitive. You would guess that if you immerse people in the language, students will learn faster. But the research shows that the longer you keep them in their native language, the better they will develop their English skills."

Friedenberg visited a school in Chicago where the entire school, made up of half Latinos and half Anglos, was set up as a two-way bilingual program. "The Latino kids were not segregated from the English kids. Just about all instruction and textbooks were in Spanish. But the language the kids were using in the classroom was English, because English was the dominant language," she said. "When you have half the kids speaking English, you are going to learn English. Studying with the English students helped the Spanish students learn English much better than teachers could have taught."

Friedenberg encourages those of her students who are already classroom teachers to advocate for change in their schools. One student decided to conduct announcements in both English and Spanish, and Friedenberg is trying to show others that they can create two-way bilingual programs in their classrooms when enough Anglo and Spanish parents agree to this program for their children.

"My name is going around. I get calls from places that I have never heard of," said Friedenberg. "I've reached hundreds of teachers. And I encourage all teachers who get certified to become administrators, to write grant proposals, to advocate, and to show research to school boards and other groups."

While Friedenberg admits that change happens slowly, she can feel proud that there will soon be a few certified bilingual teachers in southern Illinois, when only a few years ago there were none. "It's been better than I dreamed," she said. "In fact, I'm exhausted."