RITELL Conference 2014: Strengths, Weaknesses
I attended the RITELL (Rhode Island Teachers of English Language Learners) Conference this year at RIC, and I'm ambivalent about what I found there.
Firstly, it must be said that it was more difficult for me to find anything that might relate to my classroom because it appears as though RITELL is more oriented towards elementary school. The highest grade level that anything was advertised to be for was 6th grade. And I can appreciate this; I'm the first one to say that we need to be targeting ELL's sooner rather than later, and that we need to be looking at kids who are behind in reading levels before it really starts to be problematic. Still, it seems a waste to have an entire ELL conference and not include anything that might relate to middle or high school.
But the real problem I had with this conference was not this; the presenters, to me, were far more problematic. While an excellent speaker, D.H. Figueredo spent as much time explaining the process of writing a book as he did saying anything that an educator could use. His book is very good, and he's a good speaker (and he seems like a pretty nice guy) but it seemed to me like his speech would be very good for informing people on how to get into publishing their own book. And I'm not saying that he should get up in front of us and tell teachers what they should be doing; we can draw our own conclusions from evidence. But there was argument to be made, there was nothing to be gleaned from his speech that might even apply to teaching. Sure, if you're an elementary educator, you can use his book and that's lovely, but you didn't need to listen to him for an hour to figure out that he has a pretty great book.
Still, my frustration with the conference has more to do with the other presentation that I went to. There were 3 going on at the same time; some others in my class and I split up between two of them so that we could explain what happened to each other and gain as much knowledge as possible. From what they told me, it appears that their presentation was essentially along the same lines as the one I attended.
The presentation I went to was called "Engaging ELL's with Culturally Diverse Authors and Themes", which seems good enough to me. There's no problem with the title; I was interested going in. However, the presentation ended up being about an hour of 3 speakers essentially giving book reviews of about 12 books they had in front of them, organized into 3 groups based on ethnicity. On one level, this was useful, because at least I know now that there are, indeed, Cambodian-American texts that I can use in a classroom. My problem is that I could have learned as much from a handout with a list of resources.
I have to trust in these people that these texts do, in fact, engage ELL's, because there wasn't any evidence saying that they would. I'm willing to believe that they will, especially if the books are about their own culture, but this wasn't even brought up. There was no, "So, therefore, use literature that pertains to the culture of your students, because it's out there." Even that would have made me feel better. It was just one book after another, telling the plot of each of them, giving us character synopses...I found it painful, and not all that useful. It is especially troubling that I spent, what, $35 dollars to listen to book reviews?
I was just disappointed. I didn't really gain very much from the experience; I knew going into it that using texts that match the culture of the students can be useful in getting them engaged and excited about reading. It can also give them a world of texts they didn't know existed. If I didn't know this going in, then hey, maybe I'd have learned something.
