Embracing, Not Erasing, Vietnamese Heritage

“I remember setting foot on my first Boston snow in February 1992,” said FFT Fellow Thu-Hang Tran-Peou describing her arrival from Vietnam as a young girl. “It was my first encounter with tuyết (snow)—a word I had read, wrote, and pondered before but had never known. The coldness, the fragility of the white cluster melting in my hands—it felt like a metaphor for my identity as a Vietnamese immigrant and refugee.”

Beautiful, bracing and ephemeral. Everything about the life she and her family fled in Vietnam now abutted against assimilation.

“I lived in two worlds—ashamed of my Vietnamese at school and never fully confident in my English at home,” she continued. “I was told that success was when I could leave my Vietnamese roots and thrive as an ‘American’ with my new branches. Today, after 17 years as an educator, I find my reflection in the eyes of my students, who also navigate these dual identities.”

Thu-Hang and her FFT Fellow teammate Thuy Nguyen teach at Boston Public School’s Mather Elementary, the oldest public school in North America, where they are charged with implementing the Vietnamese Dual Language (VDL) program for fifth and sixth grades. (EdWeek recently reported on their work). The veteran teachers were inspired by the fellowship of 2024 Fellow Vincent Pham (Brooklyn, NY) after following his fellowship across Southeast Asia last summer and decided to design and submit their own proposal focused on ensuring that their students’ histories, heritages, and home languages are seen as assets to be embraced, not erased.

In a beautiful spirit of collaboration, Thuy and Thu-Hang met up with Vincent in New York this spring to collaborate on fine tuning their upcoming fellowship itinerary. In August, the teaching duo will navigate across Vietnam’s three regions—Ha Noi in the North, Hoi An and Hue in the Central, and Ho Chi Minh City in the South — to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Saigon’s fall, gain linguistic proficiency in various dialects, and explore community spaces that represent the interplay of language, commerce, and culture in daily life. They will document each experience through oral interviews, videos/digital film, photography, and primary artifacts to bring back to share and teach in the classrooms.

“Over the past five decades, three generations of our Vietnamese families have navigated the complexities of displacement, survival, and identity,” wrote Thuy and Thu-Hang in their grant proposal. “From our parents, who risked their lives on perilous boats to escape conflict and rewrite their histories; our generation, navigating the tension between forgetting and forging a new identity in a foreign land; and our students, who now piece together hope for the future as the first cohort of Vietnamese bilingual learners. By embracing the diverse backgrounds of our students – culturally, linguistically, and even racially – we will create a learning environment that not only celebrates their differences but also unites them in shared pride and purpose in our Vietnamese Dual Language (VDL) Program, the first and only in the school district and Massachusetts”

^{Thuy and Thu-Hang are the inaugural recipients of Fund for Teachers’ Dottie Engler Follow the Learning Fellowship. Dottie served as the director of special projects at Boston Plan for Excellence and the director of external relations and development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. However, we are most proud of her role as Fund for Teachers as a board member.}

Fellow Friday | Speaking Their Language

Each Friday throughout the summer, we are highlighting one of our 2019 Fellows — their inspiration, itinerary, and plan for transforming student learning going forward. Today, we highlight our first team, which named themselves “Spainward Bound.” Erin Strack, Andrew Murphy, Juan Carlos Lara and Pato Cabral will use their $10,000 Fund for Teachers grant to attend the International Colloquium on Languages, Culture, and Identity in Schools and Society in Soria, Spain, this summer. Because they work at a dual language school in Kansas City, they designed this fellowship to address topics in the forefront of dual language educational practices and inform a new Spanish/English poetry unit inspired by Spanish architecture and landscapes.

Why This Experience?

We’re an urban elementary school (grades K-6) with a population of about 80% Latino students, the remaining 20% being mainly comprised of African American students. While being part of such a unique form of education is engaging and rewarding, it can also be frustrating and confusing at times:

We say frustrating because our student population has very different needs than the typical student population of a monolingual school, yet we’re expected to instruct, assess, and perform according to the same rigid guidelines put in place for those monolingual programs, and our students’ test scores are measured by the same district-wide metric used for their monolingual peers.
We say confusing because there aren’t a whole lot of schools like ours out there, especially given our geographical location. We’re one of only a handful in our state, so finding relevant professional development opportunities, appropriate classroom resources, and effective instructional practices can be extremely challenging.

There simply aren’t enough teacher education agencies in the US that can appropriately train and prepare teachers how to competently teach both English and Spanish literacy simultaneously.

Having the opportunity to attend sessions on effective bilingual teaching practices presented by people who have more knowledge and experience in dual language education than anyone we could find in the US will be immensely beneficial to our program, our teachers, and most importantly our students.
There are also many sessions on identifying culturally as a bilingual child in society and how “living in two worlds” can be as equally enlightening as it is alienating. We hope to learn how to better support our students with this unique cultural identification.
Finally, we anticipate networking with authors and booksellers at the conference and around the city, in order to obtain authentic Spanish literacy resources to take back to our classrooms.

The Planned Itinerary

The Colloquium will highlight topics that are in the forefront of dual language educational practices. When not in sessions, we’ll scour the city of Soria for natively written literature for both children and adults. There is a huge need for Spanish books in content areas such as science, as well as fiction books and comics. Most of our Spanish teachers have to create much of their content area resources themselves, as it’s next to impossible to find this variety of resources in the US.

Upon completion of the Colloquium, we’ll explore the Casa de los Poetas, which describes the lives and works of three famous Spanish poets. We also plan to visit the nearby village of Calatanazor, which was a location for Orson Wells’ Chimes at Midnight, and Agreda,
the village of three cultures: Arabic, Jewish, and Christian. In visiting these local points of interest, we can enliven our classroom teaching with vivid descriptions of Spain’s history, architecture, and natural beauty.

Panoramic view of Calatanazor (courtesy of sorianitelaimaginas.com)

Plans for Students

Our team consists of a 5th/6th grade Spanish math teacher, a 4th grade Spanish literacy teacher, a 3rd grade English literacy teacher and literacy coach, and an ESL teacher that co-teaches in 3rd and 4th grade. Working collaboratively, we’ll use our newly learned strategies and newly acquired resources to create a Spanish/English poetry unit. This would include author studies, poetry reading and writing, and shared presentations of written poetry. Both 3rd and 4th grade have poetry standards that have been notoriously
tricky to cover in Spanish. None of the nuances of poetry that make it so beautiful (rhythm, imagery, descriptive language, word play) can be translated well, so finding famous poems written in English and then translating them is not an option. This fellowship would provide our students with this brilliant new learning opportunity, to engage in a linguistically balanced poetry study unit.

Closing Thoughts

We’re incredibly grateful for the opportunity to attend the colloquium on dual language education in Spain. The knowledge, experiences, and resources we expect to return with are beyond measure. Our colleagues are equally excited, as we’re all well aware of the positive and direct impact this fellowship will have on our students and school community as a whole. We’re deeply honored, and of course, more than a little excited!