FIELD NOTES

Amelia T. Correa

Professor Barbara Gleason

ENGL C0855

Teaching Adult Writers in Diverse Contexts

April 26, 2015  

Research Field Notes 

That Thursday evening of March 26, I found a parking spot around the New York Public Library branch in the Morris Park section of the Bronx a few minutes before the class I was going to observe started.  And interestingly enough, I felt as though I was playing to be an ethnographer, as though I knew something about the stepping into someone else’s culture and stepping out of your own which Drs. Stone and Chiseri-Strater make allusion to in their Fieldworking. Regardless of what I read, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  So I walked down the street with the uncertainty of a freshman student on her first day of class.

Instructor

I met the instructor of the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class, Mr. Obregon, on the first floor of the library branch while he was making copies of that night’s class for his students.  He is a slim man with an ageless face and broad smile. I introduced myself and shortly thereafter I asked him if he had been teaching at that branch for a long time and he stated he had not. However, he volunteered telling me he had been teaching for twenty-five years and he was also an instructor at the Long Island University. I was quite impressed.  He was pleasant but he was in a rush as he only had a few minutes before his class began and before everybody arrived.  Once he was done, we went down to the basement and into the classroom where the class was being held. 

Classroom setup:

The classroom was set up with three tables with their respective chairs forming a U and a tripod with a paper pad utilized as a writing device; there was no projector or regular whiteboard in sight.  I immediately observed the seating arrangement of those students who had already arrived:  There was a group of easily-recognized female Muslim students, for they were wearing hijabs, sitting at the table that was facing the entrance door. A few more Muslims came in and said a general hello and smiled shyly to their fellow religious sisters. The table to the left of the teacher was full of talkative Hispanic students. And the table to the right of the teacher was full of eastern European students, some of whom looked at me and smiled.  The majority of them were conversing and giggling among each other in their respective tables.  With nice, relax attitudes all the students were displaying, they simply struck me as a friendly crowd eager to get the best out of that beginner’s class.

Although the description of the class at the NYPL website stated clearly this class was for adults over fifty years of age, I observed it was very heterogeneous as students seemed to range between the ages of nineteen and sixtyish. In fact, the nineteen year old student, with whom I had the opportunity to converse, stated in a stuttering voice, “I am in my last year of high school, but I’m here to learn more.” Never did I think that an ELL teenager would have such a vehemence to achieve his goals of learning the language to the extent of taking an extra English language class.  That was just fantastic and it reassured me that no matter where learning and teaching happened, when a student has set their mind to learning something, the setting has negligible bearing on their level of achievement.  Boy, I found myself repeating in my mind the corny saying, “When there is a will, there is a way.” I was laughing at myself while I continued observing and taking notes.

To my surprise more students continue arriving to the class while I was studying the table to the right of where the teacher was standing.  Honestly speaking, I always looked at teaching and learning from a rather narrow-minded point of view, in that I always thought whatever learning outside of a college scope was informal and to top it all up and prove my great misconceptions about teaching and learning, once the teacher announced, “Okay, let’s begin” he got from students nothing but their undivided attention.  Oh my God.  After this man made some announcements to the class, including the fact that some of them were going to be pulled out of the classroom to be tested on their conversational skills, he began teaching his lesson. 

This teacher moved in the classroom with the agility of a cheetah.  He passed around the in-class work, the same sheet he had made copies of upstairs.  The sheet included the WH questions words. And then he proceeded to explain, “You will practice conversation with a partner.  He mobilized the entire class to be able to have students take turns conversing with different partners.  The first pedagogical theory he displayed was Context-Based theory.  However, he made more emphasis on the scaffolding of this theory.  He used all his available resources to help students understand they were to use what, where, how, what: He asked a question then he had students answering back to him in unison; he repeated the drill several times to make sure everyone understood it. Furthermore, he used many gestures to help students whose English skills were not as advanced. And at times he pointed to objects around the room to help some ELL students understand when they seemed lost.

Mr. Obregon made choral drills more than once, and I was truly amazed to see he did not displayed a drop of impatience when he performed this task. His body language was very expressive, allowing for students to understand him faster.  And save for some students, the majority of them understood by the second time he gave the prompts for the assignment.  Those students who did not understand, called on the teacher to ask for clarification by saying some parts of their sentences in their native languages due to their limited lexicon.  In return, the teacher used the more advanced students to explain whatever word their classmates did not grasp. There was definitely a cooperative effort both to teach and to learn.

Right away he was able to multitask in a way that left me completely flabbergasted. And what went through my head was that he could be the perfect instructor to teach me the gist of teaching.  “This is exactly what I need,” I thought while I pictured myself observing him during an entire semester to gain the experience I cannot gain otherwise.  But first things first, now there were eighteen, then twenty, then twenty-two students, until I became completely baffled to see what I thought to be an informal ESL class had an amount of twenty-four students all of which were very eager to learn.

The entire classroom with students and teachers became a Pandora box for me.  There were so many things happening at the same time that I had to abbreviate my words or use acronyms to be able to keep up with note-taking.  Nonetheless, that was not all, for Mr. Obregon also managed to speak to me while teaching his lesson.  Also, he observed his students completing the task at hand and announced who the next person would be to be tested on conversational skills by the director of a program.  

When the teacher was done giving students the first directions, he came to me and told me to never assume anything about people’s learning styles and to never underestimate the power of body language.  Shortly after making this comment, I realized he was really willing to help me understand what pedagogical tools he was. He had proven to me that indeed body language was one of his best resources to help students learn effectively. The instructor also elucidated, “At this beginner’s level, repetition is an essential tool.”  I got the message clearly: teachers ought to be patient if they want students to learn.

Students Background:

Since I did not know what type of information I was in for, I proceeded to perform my headcount and there were twenty-four students altogether that night. I walked around the room and took advantage of the fact that a few of them were curious to know what I was there for, and I converse with some of them briefly.  And by doing this I was able to learn their backgrounds in a nutshell.  There was the one the nineteen year old young man who seemed to be the youngest and who was still completing high school.  There was a gentleman who was pulled out to be tested for conversational skills. This man’s vocabulary was obviously too advanced for that beginner’s level as he spoke with me with very little problems and very enthusiastically about his college studies in his native Dominican Republic.  There was also an Albanian young woman, perhaps in her early thirties who was a doctor. That group of students in its majority had formal education beyond high school.

I could easily say that my notes that night revolved mostly around the characteristics of the students and the teacher's pedagogical methods.  And although my handwritten notes had much more information about the students than what I am including here, that night I was able to unpack some of the uncertainties I first walked in that classroom with. Two hours later I walked out feeling as though I had achieved something: my apprehension to the unknown had dissipated to a great extent and it felt great.