Met a teacher yesterday in a brief exchange who mentioned how a pupil was not too bad academically even tho they were #EAL 🙄 (Deficit thinking abt children who have English as a 2nd language is still a sad stereotype).
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20 yrs ago, my EAL daughter was put on a table with pupils who struggled to read and had limited vocabulary because she had EAL. Thankfully, 20+ yrs later, after various battles at different moments to counter discrimination from some teachers and FFT targets, she has been successful in academia.
Eal learners tend to be the only ones that are able to move through the groups, reseqrch is showing and go on to achieve higher. But unfortunately we hold them back in the system by applying a deficit view to them. Glad she's doing well 👏🏼👏🏼
Thank you for your original post and kind words in your reply Nuzhat. It’s important to shine a light on these discriminatory attitudes that can do so much harm.
It's one of the ways the colonial mindset continues to endure in our systems. The perceived "superiority" of the English langauge is a difficult thing to overcome without understanding the history. Funny as that relates to the 2nd comment the teacher made abt not teaching abt colonialism 🙄
In addition she said she doesn't talk abt #colonialism in class bcos she doesn't know enough. I said yes that's a real problem with the workforce but not an excuse to not find out and learn 🤷🏻♀️
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Theres good work to be done 😊