Nilson DaSilva # 3

Nilson DaSilva

FNED 547

Memo# 3: Wondering on Counter Narratives

09/26/2015

 

             It is really exciting to observe how undergraduate students whose first language is not English act in their social relationships with professors, students and staff in the college environment. I wonder what actions they take to create feelings of empowerment despite all the general classifications and descriptions of these students as failures. I have worked with undergraduate bilingual students at Rhode Island College whose attitudes can be classified in two categories: those who retain the stereotype of failure and those who have a growth mindset.

 Among my group of twenty, there are two bilingual undergraduate students who present similar proactive patterns of human agency. I have begun paying close attention to their process of developing and achieving self-efficacy and self-empowerment in the college environment. These two students have in common an optimistic outlook towards personal achievement, perseverance, self-esteem and high levels of integrative motivation. A freshman female Peruvian student and a junior male Dominican RIC undergraduate student have created various mechanisms of human agency as a result of their attitudes such as self-efficacy, goal representation and self-advocacy.

            These empowered students have shown positive attitudes that allow them to cope with social challenges, including their own unique language development processes, in order to achieve their academic and personal goals. I have been working with these two students as a Navigator helping them identify, plan for, and execute plans to achieve their personal and academic goals. These students often surprise me when they build solutions for their problems based upon their available resources. They demonstrate a high level of creativity to meet their academic, emotional and personal needs.  

 In Rhode Island College`s Learning for Life program, I have observed bilingual undergraduate students who find success in their academic, social, and emotional performance regardless of their level of language proficiency.  I notice these students achieve a higher level of language development in less than the five to seven years which Cummins (1981) allows for in his theory of Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). Based on my observations, I believe that there are definitive patterns of human agency, goal representation, motivation, and teacher validation, patterns that rely upon self-empowerment, which leads to enhanced language improvement.

From this critical perspective, I wonder what would happen to bilingual students if they’re forced to carry, despite their personal attainment, a self-identification with that of a “struggling” or “failing“ student.  I wonder how such labels of deficiency affect their ability to become self-empowered or actualize their latent human agency.  How do these students feel when the central tendency emphasizes failures and inadequacies as a result of their being seen at a low cognitive level, and how do such feelings impact their ability to develop and effectively utilize their own human agency?