Youth Tutoring Program
In Summer 2017 I volunteered to be a tutor at the “Youth Tutoring Program”, an after-school educational enrichment program for vulnerable first through twelfth-grade students who live in six low- and mixed-income housing communities in Seattle, WA. I was a part of this program for 6 weeks and I got the opportunity to tutor and mentor 15-20 Vietnamese and African refugee students from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia in the age group 7-14. A significant majority of my students studied English as their second language and were a part of the Lake Washington Apartments community (which has been a part of the Low Income Housing (LIH) project since 1998). My goal was to encourage my students to pursue educational challenges in their lives by helping them improve their math, science, reading and writing skills through in-class exercises that ranged from reading in groups, solving math problem sets to outdoor activities that help them build social bonds. Since Tuesdays were “Weekly Science Days” at the tutoring center, a large part of the day was dedicated to ornithology whereas group reading and writing sessions occupied most of the Wednesday sessions.
(Science Day Field Trip to Rainier Beach Farm & Wetlands)
(Students made paper masks after learning about different types of bird beaks)
I then analyzed the interaction with my students and their interaction among themselves, to develop a 16 pages-long case study which was titled, “Scaffolding Language Acquisition by ESL Refugee Students & Enabling their Ideological Becoming through Problem Posing Education”. This study aimed to answer the following research questions: How can we use literacy tools to support and scaffold the learning of ESL students, who are refugees, to access their ZOPD (Zone of Proximal Development) in English language acquisition? How have attempts to implement problem-posing education enabled these students’ ideological becoming and language development? To address these questions I used the theoretical framework from my online UC Berkeley summer course (The Art of Making Meaning), which included concepts such as Lev Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development”, Luis C. Moll’s “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching”, Gloria Ladson-Billings’ “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” and Paulo Freire’s “Problem Posing Education”. My role was that of a participant observer for this case study, as I observed the interactions between students to collect data related to my research questions while guiding the discussions and reading sessions for a group of 3-4 students on each day, as their tutor. I also varied my teaching techniques and asked / encouraged students to ask questions, that were guided by the theoretical framework for this case study. I then documented interactions relevant to my research questions in 5 detailed ethnographic field notes for 5 weeks. I subsequently read my general and focused observations in the field notes and inductively coded those segments by listing the course concepts that stood out and highlighting the relevant sections of evidence that related to those concepts. You can read my case study here:
This case study makes me think about what an ideal school in US would look like and how could we design it to ensure that it serves everyone in the society, questions which I had previously explored in my “US Educational Institutions” course. You can find the ideal school designed by my friends and I here - Wald Academy. This school essentially incorporated most of the course concepts we discussed in class and also the ones which were highlighted in this “K-12 School Diversity and Integration” Cross-comparison Research Paper, we drafted:
This summer I tried my best to go beyond my workplace and classroom, to contribute my efforts towards the enrichment of the communities around me. I sincerely hope that I made a constructive and positive change in the lives of my students and I aspire to continue such efforts to fulfill my social responsibilities.