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A Thoughtful Design: The Newcomer Center Experience.
By Dr. Ryan Rumpf In the last article, I presented some considerations for those wondering whether their program model is “educationally sound.” I ended the article by posing a question: “what would I do if I could start from scratch?” Thinking back, I’ve had that experience three times. Twenty years ago, I became the first…
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From Theory to Programs: What Makes a Program “Educationally Sound?”
By Dr. Ryan Rumpf In the last article, we explored what some qualities of effective language instruction looks like in practice. I ended the article by saying that there is no actual mention of any of those strategies or concepts in our lovely compliance mandates. Federal law, largely based on major court decisions, requires that…
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From Theory to Practice: Language Acquisition in Schools
By Dr. Ryan Rumpf So far in this series, we have hopefully learned two things: 1) immigration and language policy has been debated for centuries and 2) actual language policy with which schools need to comply are layered and debatable. While I find both of these complex issues interesting, they do not do much to…
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From Courtroom to Classroom: Exploring the Layers of Educational Decision-Making
In the last article, we learned the complicated, and often repetitive, intersection of immigration, language, and education. We ended with the introduction of two landmark court cases, Lau v Nichols (1974) and Castaneda v Pickard (1981), which helped shape many of the policies that govern language support programs today. Yet court decisions are only one…
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We’ve Heard This Before: The Complicated History of Educating Immigrants
From colonial concerns about immigrants to modern debates over immigrate instruction, this article traces recurring themes in immigration, language policy, and education from the the 1700s to today.
