PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT MidTESOL Conference // Heidi Jo Gallagher, M.S. Ed., Traditional Preschool Teacher This past September, through the generosity of the Ford Foundation Endowment, I had the privilege of attending the MidTESOL Conference in Kansas City with my colleagues Maisy Ritter, Sumita Ghosh, and Cathy Gray from the Early Childhood Division. The theme for this year’s conference was “Crossroads of Culture.” During this conference, I was able to introduce my fellow Early Childhood teachers to my favorite part of the education world: TESOL. This acronym has different variations in our country as TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) is also commonly referred to as ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) and ESL (English as a Second Language). The four of us attending the conference went to Patrick T. Randolph’s session on Body-Based Vocabulary Acquisition. His whole premise and field of research at the University of NebraskaLincoln is in teaching students to feel the emotion of words, to internalize the meaning of a vocabulary word through context of sentences, and to sense the meaning of a word through the way our body interacts with vocabulary in our spoken words. In his classroom, Randolph does not provide students definitions of new vocabulary. Rather he demonstrates by speaking sentences with complex vocabulary to teach students to infer the meaning, to then feel the meaning, and then internalize the complex vocabulary through the way we naturally use our facial expressions and hand and body gestures in conversation. His research emphasizes the need for connecting with words on a physical and emotional level. By doing so, our brains are able to then incorporate said vocabulary into our daily lives and better remember the words for the future. This is in contrast to how we attempt to teach complex vocabulary by use of repetition drills of word and definition. We all left his session craving more of his knowledge and enthusiasm for language. We also attended a presentation focused on incorporating families into our classrooms through
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the use of “culture grams.” A culture gram is a single power-point slide with photos from the student’s family traditions and backgrounds. By setting up this project together as family and student, the students are not only learning to value the experiences their family provides them, but are given the opportunity to develop their speaking and presentation skills with the support of their family next to them. We were immediately drawn to this culturally sustaining program because we know our Collegiate families are proud of their diversity and their ability to provide culturally engaging experiences to their children. We value all backgrounds of our students, be they from other regions of this world, distant cities, local neighborhoods, or small farming communities. There are already plans to begin using this method of family engagement in our classrooms starting second semester. We came home from an intense research- and pedagogy-based weekend with many new concepts both encouraging our current practice and challenging the ideals behind why we do certain things, and informing how we can update our teaching methods to better reach our linguistically diverse students. Through attending this conference, we are now better able to incorporate each student’s family background into our teaching, and design literacy lessons based on the newest research in the field of language development. There are new additions to our bookshelves from presenters and key-note speakers who inspired us, and we gained a closer teaching relationship with our colleagues. Going to a conference together not only allowed us to learn about the same concepts, but gave us time together to talk about how we have been impacted by this new information and how we can work together to make small or large changes to our classrooms in order to best suit the needs of our students. My colleagues and I would, again, like to thank the Ford Foundation Endowment for providing us the opportunity to attend MidTESOL. It was an inspiring conference.
