2.4 My experience as a professor in an institute with immigrants  (Page 7/8)

In the next pages, I shall move on to a new model of formation for these centers that is in accordance to the new linguistic reality that immigration has taken to the scholastic centers and institutes.

Toward a new model of formation

It seems necessary to give a positive reading of the socio-cultural reality of our students in response to new educative challenges they give in order for us to escape from the fatalistic association of immigration with scholastic failure. For this reason we emphasize the importance of education as a catalyst for the future of the children of immigrants. The mission of the parents is to favor school attendance and to avoid absenteeism. The mission of the educative centers is to serve as the means by which these immigrant families can transform their reality; because scholastic success generates their social success.

New strategies must be developed which will facilitate the students who have just arrived during their first encounter with the scholastic culture. The framework for these strategies must allow for the recognition of potential in each student. Within this process, the professor acts as a mediator to establish contact with the new classmates, situations, and objects that surround the student in the scholastic world. Once this contact is established, the student makes use of the new language by means of real linguistic practices. This requires the teacher to become an observer of the affective and cognitive capacities and difficulties of the students. The teacher must also be able to stimulate communication, energize the students when they face difficulties, negotiate the objectives and the contents of learning, provide information, manage activities, and organize resources.

On what premises is this model of formation based? Firstly, especially when it comes to teaching bilingualism to the immigrant student, I part from the decisions made by the political administration which define how education will be practiced by determining what methodology to follow. In general, models oscillate between fundamental compensatory expositions in support groups and specific structures of welcoming those who have just arrived, like ATAL classrooms where the student is immersed in the Spanish language during a course. They all present a common denominator in our country: the total absence of methodological directives in relation to learning processes of the second language and the deficiency of true intercultural expositions, since the possibility of preserving languages and cultures of origin by means of bilingual programs or programs of support in maternal language is contemplated in any case. Merino Fernandez and Muñoz Sedano (1995) indicated that a pluricultural school must propose a multicultural pedagogy based on different principles: anthropological (identity, dialogue, diversity), epistemological (universal values), and pedagogical (affective educative programs). The school must respect and develop the sense of personal and cultural identity, which is obtained by respectful education with cultural diversity that includes the possibility of cultivating one’s own culture as a guarantee of personal identification for the subject and of cultural permanence for the group.