Don't keep blaming the teachers - “Language and culture are linked ... and families should know what they are getting into.”

Heather Clydesdale has written an updated perspective on the state of Chinese immersion programs in America in this article for Asia Society:

Destination: Immersion - As recognition of language immersion’s wide-ranging benefits increase, and schools across the United States establish new programs, many are finding that the journey is rewarding, but also has hurdles.

She highlights insights from leading Mandarin Immersion educators, notably from Chinese American International School (CAIS), Yu Ying Charter, Yinghua Academy, and Pioneer Valley Charter.

They all concur that sustaining ongoing professional develop support for Chinese teachers is no easy task. A few years ago, this issue of "adequate" training for teachers was an oft-cited pain point for the success or failure of a Mandarin Immersion program. These teachers were having to bear the brunt of much undue blame. I think Asia Society bears some of the responsibility for over-simplifying the issues back then, and broadcasting the training challenge as a crisis of the teachers, rather than one of institutions and leadership.

Many of us who grew up bilingual and bicultural - as parents, we protested at the grassroots - we were in shock, really. How could it be this absurd? Haven't "we" (us ABC's) been around for quite some time for the obvious stereotyping blunders and the most unproductive assumptions to have been long dispelled? What, exactly, were we dealing with here? Because it could not be as obvious as saying that the divide between Chinese and English (languages) and the divide between Chinese and American cultures were vast. Hasn't everyone read/seen The Joy Luck Club already? And read most of Maxine Hong Kingston's books, or watched Bill Moyers' "Becoming Chinese American"... or any number of pop cultural forms of identity musings and whatnot? Aren't we in the post-post-post-cultural-modernist era, already? Identities have already morphed to triple and quadruple states, forget the age of the Hyphenated Someone...! So why did it feel so 1980s?

But who was going to believe us when such a viewpoint was not only being articulated by so-called leaders in the field, but also feeding into the general Blame-the-Teacher milieu generated by the likes of Bill Gates lately... Society continues to put all of its motley ills upon the doorstep of the poor, unsuspecting classroom teacher. Every learning, medical, socio-economic, and emotional disorder has been deposited before her with demands that they be fixed with a pile of worksheets and crayons. Now, it seems, Americans' chronic monolingualism would be cured by her solitary efforts, as well. At once heroic, yet maligned for expecting to be ordinary - that is, as ordinary as being available in your friendly neighborhood idyllically situated elementary school that everyone has the right to access upon any given day because this is America, land of the free... because every friendly neighborhood deserves an outstanding teacher who works magic as the true gatekeeper for opportunity in this land of freedom. As absurd as it has been, I do believe there have been these underlying assumptions at work.

Bridging Chinese and American cultures is no casual matter. Demanding that sole, lonely Mandarin teachers navigate this terrain without proper support... especially when some are being placed in outlying areas of the country where few Chinese people even exist in the first place... It was hard enough for the likes of us who grew up in far-flung American Suburbia over the last 20-30 years, but at least we began as kids and could grow with American culture more organically. And then look at how our Mandarin turned out.

We watched how our parents struggled with English. Even the most highly educated (and my parents had PhD's from Berkeley) still spoke English with accents and occasional grammatical errors, and a constant feeling of not really speaking their own language. So you want these full-fledged adults who have perfect Mandarin, but you want them to know everything else.

I would like to see some school adopt the model of taking a fully functioning adult American teacher who knows no Mandarin and teach her how to speak and teach Mandarin, while she also serves as the normal English-speaking elementary teacher that she already is. At least there won't be any complaints by the parent community about having "American style" cultural competence. I know, pure fantasy. But I think doing the reverse mental model is good for people to attain better perspective on any current enterprise.

These days, I look at the scene of Mandarin Immersion with a degree of constant anxiety. When is the other shoe going to drop? Will it ever cross the line? Will Americans ever get it? That is, will Americans who grew up monolingual and complacent in their "American" identity, rather than the ones who are aware of their "immigrant" identity - will these Americans ever get it?

Or will it be constant unspoken subtle ways of demanding that "the foreigner" pony up and get with their program? Just like American foreign policy is always first and foremost about America's agenda, rather than something that looks more equal and global...

I look at French and German immersion programs - they never experience the blowback that Americans "don't need to" learn the culture. If you said that to someone who was French or German, they would think you were crazy and look down on you. But people say that about Chinese culture all the time, that it's unnecessary to learn, but they want their kids to learn Mandarin... All I can do is look at them askance, with a degree of horror...

Nonetheless, I was glad to read that Kevin Chang, Director of CAIS' Chinese Program, was being quoted as standing tall and saying, "Language and culture are linked... and families should know what they are getting into."

In other words, don't expect the Chinese teachers to cater to your little Johnny's each and every sniffle. If you sign up for this cross-cultural and cross-linguistic experience, the whole point is that Little Johnny will have to make the crossing -- to the "other" side. He'll have a much better time of it if you, the parent, can figure out how to be supportive.