David Rogers on Dual Language Education

Hello, you’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I am Nate MacLennan, and I am so excited to be joined by David Rogers from the Dual Language Education of New Mexico. David’s the executive director. He’s been the executive director for 22 years.

And there’s so many connections, David. So first, buenos dias, como estas? Muy buenos dias, gracias, Nate. Estoy bien contento de estar con ustedes esta mañana. Gracias.

Bien, bien, bien. So we have a lot of connections, David and I. So David is well connected with my brother, Abel MacLennan, who is the director of La Paz Community School down in Costa Rica as they think about dual language in the world. David, you and I, you are in the Peace Corps.

My parents are in the Peace Corps. I also went through a dual immersion experience through my elementary through middle school years in Massachusetts. And as we just spoke about, my father was an ELL teacher for many, many years in Framingham, Massachusetts.

So we have all these great connections and I’m fascinated by dual language and Getting Smart hasn’t done a whole lot of work in this area. Our last blog was in 2016 or 2016 and 17. So I’m excited to learn and under better understand, what’s the current state of dual language? Why are we so excited about it?

So let’s kick off with just your, your quick summary of your journey. How did you land in this place of dual language and what inspired you? What’s the founding story? Let’s see if I can get through this quickly or not spend too much time, but it was the Peace Corps.

You mentioned my Peace Corps experience and I was in a, I was in the wonderful country of Paraguay in South America. In my village, I worked three months to become proficient in Castellano or Español. And when I was placed in my village, I come to realize that the only, the only place you would find Spanish use was in the schools.

It was the official language of, of academics there. And yet my entire community spoke an indigenous language, Guanani. And what would happen is in that school setting where I taught for two years, kids that weren’t able to acquire the Spanish language or Castellano by second or third grade would basically opt out of school by the end of third grading.

And it wasn’t a dishonorable move. It was just simply, they weren’t cut out to continue on into secondary school or high school. And they would go work in the fields with their, their parents. And what I learned is these kids were, you know, as my father-in-law would say, nada

de tanto en ellos. And that’s a saying that says there was nothing, not a drop of stupidity in these kids. They were brilliant. It was simply that they could not acquire the language and therefore had limited educational experiences.

When I came back from the Peace Corps and I went to New York City to, I entered a master’s program, a teacher’s college, Columbia, and I taught in the South Bronx. I found a program called Do Language Immersion that was being run by an incredible leader in the community, Ruth Sweeney. And there was a lot of interest in the idea of delivering your elementary school curriculum

in not one, but two languages. And basically taking full advantage of the Spanish language, which about 50% of the kids that entered the program had a command of, they were native Spanish speakers. And it just kind of clicked to me. This is exactly what we need to be doing all over the country.

We need to be able to allow students to come and not ask them to leave their language or culture at the door. But we need to incorporate that into the curriculum, into the pedagogy that we were going to use in educating them. And so that’s how I kind of got hooked in do language education.

And I just, ever since that time, 1990 to 92, when I taught in the South Bronx, I just would not be a part of any other program. It was the program of choice for me. And I just feel very strongly about it. Four daughters, all of them are Spanish English speakers.

And one’s learning Mandarin now. Another one lives in England and has learned French and uses that in her workplace. So it’s just been a very beneficial program for my own family and something that I’m obviously passionate about. I really appreciate that description of the journey and where the passion started.

So from my perspective and looking a little bit at the website and your bio, you’re all in for dual language. This seems to be the life work for you. Do you bullish on the idea that every young person should be in a dual language program? Or is really that not the goals?

That really those who are interested or families that are interested or communities that are interested, et cetera. So you feel like everyone would benefit from it? Oh yeah, absolutely. But I also believe very much in family choice.

So it’s for every student and family that chooses it is my position on that. But I’ve worked in many programs where even in the school that I was a principal at for five years, we had a dual language track in that school. And we also had an ELL or English as a second language track as well in that school. And in the four years that I was there, I noticed some real difference in the academic

development and performance of our kids, our English learners, if you will, that were in both of the programs. The dual language program just did a much, much better job of not only giving the students an opportunity to acquire English at an academic proficiency level, but also to learn the content really, really well as they acquired the English language.

Where kids that didn’t have curriculum available to them in their mother tongue or in Spanish kind of took them a little bit longer to acquire the knowledge they needed in order to meet the competencies and the goals that were set by our district and our school. So just from my own firsthand experience, many, many families that are coming to us from Mexico or Central America will hesitate about putting their students in the program

because they want their students to learn English. That’s learning English and becoming proficient in English is going to get them places in life, which is true. But they don’t seem to understand that by taking full advantage of the knowledge that their children already have in the home language or in the mother tongue, we can really take

full advantage of that as far as helping them with their academic development while they acquire English. So it seems like you would you then support a combo of both ELL and a dual immersion program or would you say that a dual immersion is sufficient to cover the work that’s done in ELL?

Where would you sit on that conversation? I think a well implemented dual language immersion program will out, will be any English learner or second language learner is going to do very, very well in it. So yeah, I would say there’s really no need to have an ELL track except maybe for what we call late arrivals to the program.

So if we have students entering who are 10, 11, 12, 13 years old who have had schooling in their home country before coming to the United States, those programs, sometimes the side by side or the English language development portion is sufficient for them to sort of get on track and to catch up on their English side because their knowledge, their academic knowledge is already pretty solid.

It really comes down to I’m going to be real practical about this. I mean, you’ve got to have a very well implemented. You need to implement your programs well. And there’s not yet in the United States sufficient leadership or teachers who are highly qualified and understand how to do that, how to implement the program well.

So as we’re working hard to strengthen and expand our teacher preparation programs and our leadership development programs, in that meantime, in the meantime, we’re going to have to continue to implement what we call ELL or Title III programs as best as we can as well until the day comes when we have sufficient leadership and leaders and highly qualified teachers that can implement more dual language education in our school system.

That makes sense. I really appreciate that response of the, you know, just a paraphrase is that the dual is really a better option unless they’re late arrivals where that ELL might be a better choice. But generally, the dual language is the better option. And so where are you seeing, if you look at the state of the nation, let’s just talk the

United States right now. I know you’re focused on New Mexico. Where do you see adoption? Is it a sort of a sine curve of like the popularity grows and then it wanes and grows and then it wanes?

Or are we in an upward curve? Where do you see the state of dual language in the US? Well, it definitely is an upward curve. However, we have these times of waning, if you will. Still, unfortunately, it’s not as common as it was 20 years ago, but what we still see

happening today is there’s a lot of excitement initially about starting a dual language education program. And it may start in, let’s say, one elementary school in a particular district. And there may be sufficient teachers and there might be sufficient leadership capacity in order to pull that off.

The issue is, though, is that the district needs to join the school level administration as well in understanding and fully supporting the program if it’s going to expand into other elementary schools or expand forward into middle and high school. And that’s where it starts to get, it’s quite a bit of work. And if you don’t have all levels of leadership on board in understanding what has to happen

in order to fully support. And when I say support, I mean everything from the human resource department, knowing how to identify and hire the right teachers and the right principals for the new programs coming on board or the new classrooms coming on board, but also things like material adoption year, making sure that those monies are now being allocated not only for academic or content

materials in English, but also for the other program language, whether that be Spanish or Denay or Arabic or Mandarin. That’s a huge, those are huge shifts that have to happen in a school district in order to make sure that the programs grow well. And we don’t see that all the time.

And that’s where the interest will wane over time if you don’t have those levels of support. Because now you start requiring or pushing schools to take on the challenge of implementing, designing and implementing a program, but they don’t have sufficient support. And so the frustration is there and the frustration level will rise to a certain level that people start opting out.

But in general, our programs continue to grow across this country. And I don’t see that stopping anytime soon. Yeah, it seems that system-wide support is critical. I mean, it’s true of any initiative, right, in a school system. But in this particular case, I think what I noticed in my own experience in the experiment

that was happening in Massachusetts was that it was really strong and elementary and then middle. And then when we got to high school, it sort of wane. There wasn’t the omef anymore. And they didn’t quite know what to do with us, this cohort that was moving through, so I can

certainly empathize with that. So let’s pivot a little bit. There’s been a lot written, it seems like in the last five or so years, but probably earlier, much earlier than that as well, of understanding how brains develop and the power of dual language on brain development.

And I’m wondering if you think about that at all and your organization or has that come up in conversations with dual language program starts and things like that? Oh, yeah. And in fact, just on our simple Facebook page that we have at Dual Language at New Mexico, whenever we post an article or an executive summary of some new research report that comes

out, it has to do with the cognitive strength of the bilingual or multilingual brain versus a monolingual brain. We get the most hits, the most shares. I mean, everyone is really, really interested in this. And that research continues to pour out.

We know that a bilingual brain has much more capacity for academic success than a monolingual brain. It’s just simple truth is there. And I think in my understanding of that as someone who has worked hard to become a bilingual over the years is by having more than one language, you have access to more than one

culture, more than just a certain portion of the planet that functions in English. When I passed my language assessment in the Peace Corps in order to stay in the Peace Corps and I was given the acceptable grade for my Spanish, I realized that I had just gone from the US, England and a couple other small countries around the world and islands where English was the primary language to all of a sudden all of Latin America, all of South

America, all of countries in Africa, you know, Spain, I realized how much more access I had to content, to knowledge, to cultures, to new people, to new friends. And we know from the assessments that a bilingual student will do better on even high school exit exams, for example. And if I can just share one small experience for myself, I took the SAT to go into undergrad

and if it wasn’t for my math score, I would not have gotten into college for my undergrad program because my English portion or my language portion of the exam was so poor. I always struggled in English. It turned out later on that I was diagnosed, I finally found out that I was dyslexic and that was part of my struggle through school.

It was my math score that held me up in my SAT and then overall score that got me into undergrad. But between undergrad and graduate school, I did become proficient in Spanish. I did become a proficient bilingual. And when I took the GRE, my language score went way up and I had a much better GRE overall

score than I had in my SAT. Why is that? Well, as I learned Spanish, I had now something to compare and contrast what was happening with my English development. So I can then think about grammar in a much different way because I had a new system to

compare it to or even how I spell towards. And I came to realize how difficult English actually is compared to, let’s say, the romance language. Right? So it gave me some confidence, but it also gave me access when I moved from being a monolingual

to being a bilingual. And we see that in our students. Yeah, and it seems like I really appreciate bringing up the, you just sharing that your diagnosis with dyslexia because there is some pushback around dual language and learning needs, right?

Like people say, oh, if I have a linguistic learning challenge for whatever it is, like dyslexia, that’s dual language is not for me. But I think what I’m hearing is that at least for your experience, that’s not the case. It actually helped you. Is that my confirming what I’m hearing there?

I would say absolutely yes. I mean, you know, the first time it comes to mind is poppycock to all of that. You’ve got, you know, I think I actually have a developmental delayed child and she’s been in a dual language program, you know, and she’s done very, very well. We have to be, we can’t be short-minded on this.

If you have dyslexia or if you’re developmental delayed, well, that’s going to be in whatever language you’re speaking or whatever languages you’re speaking. I mean, you’re still going to have the same challenges that a school has to deal with. And I would say, you know, personal experience with special education and special education services.

I actually was a special educator when I was, when I taught in the South Bronx, New York. You know, what’s often happening in schools, and this is just the reality, is that educational services are often only available in English. So you see administrators sort of making what they think are intuitive decisions to say, well, then we can’t put the child in the dual language program.

They’re going to have to be serviced, you know, though they have to be in the ELL program and they’ll have to be serviced in that way. Because of course we have some strong laws and policies that require students to receive those additional services. But that’s also, you know, kind of a pretty silly thing to think about.

We do now see our dual language programs, you know, I’m thinking about school districts in San Antonio or Albuquerque public schools or down in El Paso, who now have everything from reading interventions to math interventions that are available in Spanish as well as English and other languages that their students come to them speaking. So hopefully that’s changing as well now in our special education community.

Right, right. I really appreciate that, that, that perspective. It’s so important, especially for those who are listening to this podcast to say, there’s a lot that’s possible that people are putting up barriers that are, as you said, are poppycock, right?

So it is, it is not, it is not a barrier. So let’s think, speaking of language, I’m always fascinated in the education space when a new word emerges. And last spring I sent my brother this, this concept that I came across my feed as this trans, trans-languaging word.

And I love for you to just to expound upon that just a little bit. What is it? What is your debate about it? And why is it important for us to understand what that word is? There’s still a debate about it.

And, you know, I think, I think the common Joe would, would probably the definition of trans-languaging for the common Joe would be something like Spanglish, which I think a lot of people have heard this. It’s sort of the use of more than one language in a conversation or trans-languaging being a little controversial in the academic setting is where trans-languaging, of course, comes

from. And I’ll just say this in the 90s when I was a dual language teacher, I was, I was what many would call a militant. And that is for the delivery instruction in my classroom and in the classroom of my colleagues, we would try to strictly separate the languages for instructional purposes.

And so if I was, if I was teaching math in Spanish, it would be todo en español. We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t throw in some words in English. We wanted to provide a pure and natural model in that particular language for the, for the students in our classroom. I think that’s honorable.

I think that makes sense. You know, it seems logical. However, our students don’t come to us speaking just one language. And most of them, you know, come from households where English and Spanish are sort of found, you know, throughout the day, whether English is coming from the TV, the language at the

supper table, maybe in Spanish, right? I mean, they, they move back and forth and our students, even if their native Spanish speakers will come with some English, we are wrong to ask them to not or not to accept the full linguistic repertoire that they bring with them to our, to our classrooms. We must honor that.

We must validate that. Because if we don’t, then we’re not honoring or validating them as to who they are and what their families have given them before they even arrived to the school door. So there’s this, there’s this ongoing conversation. I don’t think it’s as much a debate now as it is now we’ve moved into, okay, when is

it appropriate to accept students or even teachers instructing or the learning process to include both languages? And I’ll give you one solid example of where actually translanguaging was happening in my classroom. In a particular math lesson, I may deliver what I would call a mini lesson in Spanish

and I would be, I would, I would go over the content and I would provide instructional guidance to my students all in Spanish. But then I had printed a task and in small groups, they would have a set of equations that they needed to resolve or they had an inquiry question that needed to explore. Once I gave that to them, they were allowed to use whatever language they wanted with

their groups. However, they knew that at the end of their time working together, they were going to have to produce for me in Spanish because that was the language that we were in at that time of the instructional day. And it worked very, very nicely because then all students could participate fully.

And yet if it was Spanish time, those stronger Spanish speakers sort of played leader in those group conversations because they’re the ones now that had the tools, had the, the resources that the group was going to need in the end in order to present their findings, present their product to me, the teacher at the end of that lesson. Yeah.

So it seems like there is, it’s you provided in your classroom setting this a structure, right? So there was a structure of this is times in Spanish. Now you can discuss and using whatever language. And it appears to me that that would bring out the most for those students in terms of

understanding and learning the concept, whatever you were teaching. But with clear expectations that at some point this is a dual language program, you are presenting back. This is the Spanish or whatever sport portion they were presenting in. So I appreciate that.

It seems, it seems to make sense. And I think a lot about the power of sort of that zone, a proximal development. We want students who are learning a new language, especially if it’s in a dual setting and it’s not their native language to be pushed to have some push to them, but also to have opportunities to understand the content part in a way that makes sense for them.

Exactly. So, okay, I’m going to pivot to the, what I consider the big elephant in the closet that I think about dual language, which is technology. So our technology obviously is getting better and better. We know that Google translate is on the computers, it’s on our phones, and it’s probably not

very hard to imagine that pretty quickly we’re going to have like the UN, some sort of instant translation service, and I’ll have my device and it’ll just pick it up and some would argue, especially those that are running technology companies, like there’s no use for our different languages. So, I suspect you have the counter argument for that.

So I’m curious, what are you seeing as technology grows so much and so fast and can be instant in this way? Where do you see dual language sitting in as a critically important piece despite these solutions that emerge? Right.

And I have not used the technology as much as far as translators. I shouldn’t say that. I mean, I look up words all the time on the internet and such, but as far as these real-time translations, I’m not really sure how they work. Let me take a step back and go back to my own daughter’s experience.

I and my wife could have easily helped my children learn Spanish at home. If we had found a great program that was only done in English in schools and we just wanted our kids, had a great pedagogy, had a great set of academic methodologies that they use and it served our children well. We put them in that program.

We could have helped them develop. We could have only spoken Spanish at home and they would have developed the Spanish language. However, what I really wanted for my kids or what we really wanted for our kids is the ability to learn language from their peers. And those peers all come from very distinct cultural backgrounds.

So it wasn’t just the language they were going to learn from their peers, but it also was going to learn the cultural context, as well as the knowledge and perspective and approaches to life that these peers also bring with them to the classroom. They would learn from that, something I could not give that to them. So when I think about the UN, and I suppose there are cold, hard decisions that need to

be made and the vocabulary is going to be very specific to just trying to get everyone on the same page and then vote on something. But if you’re having deep debate conversations and you’re looking for different perspectives in order to understand whatever problem that you’re facing at the time, that’s going to have cultural context.

And I’m not sure how technology is going to provide that for you. And so that’s a big question for me at this point. Not just, and also I think through the pandemic, I think we had kind of had a mini example of how we were isolated and how to depend on technology, this virtual hookup thing for so long. It worked to an extent.

But now I’m back in the office with colleagues and I can tell you that our work together is much more productive because we’re with one another. It’s much clearer what my colleague is asking me to do when I’m there with them and we have an opportunity to fully discuss rather than a quick text that may be missing some of the context of the question and its motivation.

So I’m not sure I’m responding the way you were hoping. No, I think that makes sense. I think this idea of the technology will do the sort of the logical, rational part for us. It’s going to translate a set of symbols that are verbally articulated into another set of symbols that we can understand that’s also verbally articulated, articulated back to us.

So via audio. So so that that but what it can’t transmit is this cultural understanding, this this perspective, which I think what I’m hearing is the argument that when we are multilingual, dual language type programs help with that or develop that is that we’re learning not just the language, but we’re learning cultures.

And I think often about this idea that our world needs way more mutualism, way more people working together from different perspectives. And when we when we speak the other language from another group of people, that helps us more than if it was just translated through. Now, you know, this will have to play out over the next 25 years, I think, or 50 years and see.

But I think I’m more and more convinced along the same lines is that that it’s not just about learning the other language. It’s about when you learn the other language, you start to understand a different culture, different perspectives. Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, that’s fair. And, you know, I had someone the other day say this is look, if if I had Ted Cruz’s kids or grandkids in my dual language classroom, my job isn’t to give them a, you know, a certain level of Spanish so they can go on vacation in Cancun. It’s so they can, you know, so that they can engage international businesses and negotiate a fair

contract for for both the company in Mexico and the company here in the United States, or to be able to engage politically in debate that’s going to help our world, hopefully, unify and come together, reach consensus on big world issues like climate change, or even to fully participate in through the traditions and the religions of other countries as well. That’s a whole different level of language ability.

And it’s completely rooted in the cultural understanding of of of the people and the in the the community that you’re engaging. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s beautiful. I really appreciate that perspective. David, we’re nearing the end of our time together.

And so we’ve had all sorts of interesting touch points that I’ve written down in my notes here. We have we have thousands of people that listen to this podcast. What are the two takeaway messages or one or two takeaway messages that you’d like to share with them? And then the second part of the question is, who else would you like to amplify, elevate that’s important or has been important in this space or any space educationally that might be helpful for us to talk to in the future?

I really do think that every family in our country should consider having their their children in a dual language setting. Important that they start early on, and that is kinder or even pre-K as we have many districts that offer that. Our students can do it. And if let’s say you’re a middle class family like ourselves here in Albuquerque,

we can give our students just about our children just about anything they want as far as education is concerned or anything that they need. However, the gift of language and the understanding of other peoples that come from distinct cultures. That’s something that needs to come through a dual language experience. And that’s why I would choose it if you were a family like mine. For our immigrant families that come here for the American Dream, I know English is important to them.

And that’s what they want their students to learn. But they’re not going to learn it any better than they will in a dual language immersion setting where we not only have high standards for academic proficiency development in English, but also we take full advantage of all of the gifts and knowledge that have been given to our students in their mother tongue, in their home language before arriving to the dual language program. We don’t ask them to leave their language and culture at the door.

We invite them to bring that into them and they see it in the curriculum and the instructional approaches that we take. It’s totally validating and it honors where they come from and where they will continue to be. So that’s the takeaway that I think folks need to know concerning dual language education. As far as the person that I am just really excited for right now is a gentleman named Samuel Aguirre. And he works for an organization called UIDA.

He actually works on the UIDA Espanol program. He’s at the University of Wisconsin. That’s where UIDA is housed and he has been involved in the development of language and literacy standards now for a number of years. And he’s just an exciting individual who was a native Spanish speaker, is a native Spanish speaker, came to the United States when he was a young man and is just providing not only great guidance to our educational leaders now in the country,

but also is just totally inspiring to us all. As he really works so hard to not only provide tools that teachers need in order to help their students acquire the English language as well as the Spanish language, but really to elevate the status of the non-English language and our dual language education programs. And so just a shout out to Samuel, who I just think is one of the most exciting young leaders that we have right now in our country.

Appreciate the takeaway. Appreciate the recommendation for Samuel. My couple just takeaways that I learned today. Every time I do a podcast, I learn something. So one is around, we touch briefly on program implementation is this idea that it needs to be a system where it has system-wide support. So if you’re in a district and you’re leading a district or a teacher in a district listening to this, make sure that you have a system-wide approach and you get both the funding and the resources,

etc., to make sure that wherever those students start that the program continues. So that was my first takeaway. The second, and that ensures that there’s alignment district-wide. Second thing is just just the power of dual language as a way to do a cognitive lift is that it is helping our brains develop and grow and it’s available for all students, not just a particular subset of students.

And then the third and the most powerful for me as I’m always thinking about how do we make the world a better place is this idea of language learning as a tool to understand different cultures, different perspectives, and really to be able to interact in ways that are productive and forward-moving rather than divisive. So I really appreciate what I learned today. David, gracias por su entusiasmo hoy. Tiene un buen día y buena suerte en su viaje. Gracias por todo.

Gracias a ti también, Nate. This has been a real pleasure, which he’s been great. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks so much, David, and have a great day. One last thing, if there’s a website that our listeners could go to or anything else you’d like to promote, what would that be? Absolutely. Our organization works with schools dozens and dozens of schools each year in helping them to implement their dual language education program well.

But the biggest event that our non-profit puts on is called the La Cusacha dual language conference, which happens every November here in New Mexico. This year we’ll be in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the beautiful city different. And I just invite anyone who’s interested in dual language education or is currently involved in implementing a program to join us. It is not only one of the top professional

and largest dual language conferences that you will find in the world, but it also is a huge celebration as we have everything from a student dance that we do with groups from around southwest. This year we have Las Cafeteras. Well, we also have a full traditional powwow as our Indigenous brothers and sisters join us as well. We have a very thick Indigenous education strand and we’re pushing for dual language immersion in our

pueblos and in the Navajo Nation and our Apache tribes as well here in the southwest. So please, if you can join us, lacosachaconference.org, all lowercase, lacosachaconference.org. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in. Have a great day and really appreciate your time and all the work you’ve done.

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