![ourBRIDGE Kids. (2021). [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/ff38ed_2d5646d549b74da2aa59dfbff045c462~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_485,h_362,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/ff38ed_2d5646d549b74da2aa59dfbff045c462~mv2.jpg)
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2021). Sil with students. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
Diaspora, Access, and Inclusion in K-5 Education:
by Rachel Bornstein on October 7, 2022
How ourBRIDGE Acculturates Migrant Children While Fostering a Learning Environment that Retains Pride in One's Identity and Heritage
In Charlotte, NC, what once began as a for-profit after-school tutoring company for low-income students grew into a non-profit organization and Trauma-Informed Care Center advocating for migrant and refugee families by providing internationalized education for their children along with family support.
Keep reading to learn more about the mission and achievements and how the director and founder, Sil Ganzó—whom I had the honor of interviewing—, makes inclusion and representation a priority at ourBRIDGE.
Why Is This Important?
Learn the terms. Understand the context.
Slide 2: diaspora and acculturation
Slide 3: access
Slide 4: cultural capital
Slide 5: cultural wealth and deficit-thinking
Slide 6-7: Put it all together: What is the social issue?
Slide 8: Make the connection: ourBRIDGE addressing the social issue
What is diaspora? What is acculturation? What does it mean to have a diverse and inclusive classroom? Why is this relevant to educators? Why is this relevant towards social justice?
Click through these slides for a crash course.
ourBRIDGE for Kids. (2019). What Is Our Bridge for Kids? [Video]. Facebook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKLC79Tc20U
ourBRIDGE Mission
ourBRIDGE fosters the education, acculturation, and resilience of newly arrived and first generation children and their families.
During our interview, I asked Sil what social justice meant to her. She told me the following words:
"It is valuing a person as a human because they're here and alive and don't have to prove attribution or value to deserve social justice."
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2020). Sil Ganzó. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
Sil Ganzó
Founder and Director of ourBRIDGE
ourBRIDGE History
In 2010, Sil Ganzó was working as an Administrative Coordinator for a private after-school tutoring company called The Bridge, which served 75 students. Sil fell in love with those students she worked with, whom she found out later in her job that they were English Language Learners and newly arrived immigrants.
In May 2014, The Bridge closed its company because it did not want to pursue a non-profit status. For four months, the company remained closed until Sil took it over, renamed it ourBRIDGE, and claimed its non-profit status in September 2014. Being an immigrant herself, Sil's passion to give these children and families opportunities and her efforts in diversifying her team and every element of the curriculum resulted in increased number of students. In 2017, ourBRIDGE expanded into a new building to provide more space for this growth.
In 2018, ourBRIDGE was recognized as a Trauma-Informed Care Center for their methods in helping young kids' and their families' socioemotional and academic well-being.
How does ourBRIDGE work?
"There is always a [debate] about how much money immigrants will bring [to the economy], but I'm like, 'We had to leave [our country] for a reason. What we bring to the economy comes after safety, well-being, health, and finding a home.'" --Sil Ganzó
It's NOT a school.
ourBRIDGE is a K-5 after-school and summer program that offers homework assistance, a cultural-focused hands-on curriculum designed by the ourBRIDGE facilitators, ESL centered programming, literacy programming, and support for families,.
It takes a trauma-informed approach.
Sil explains that trauma-informed care is the idea that kids and adults need certain things to heal from post-traumatic stress, or things from a past traumatic event can manifest as you get older. When learning more about trauma-informed care, Sil noticed that the descriptions didn't include any context like resettlement, war, or migration. Therefore, Sil adjusted ourBRIDGE's trauma-informed care to the lens of migration and resettlement.
Students are not punished. Privileges are not removed. Expulsion is not an option. Talking negatively about the children to their parents is not allowed.
The curriculum follows STEAM.
Students learn subjects and develop skills in line with North Carolina's Common Core Standards: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Art is an aid to trauma-informed care to help students with exceptional levels of post-trauma and allow kids to share express themselves and share with the class.
Students receive ESL and literacy programming.
Besides learning in an English-speaking classroom, in small groups or one-on-one sessions, students enhance their English communication skills and reading abilities in a non-stressful environment.
It prioritizes cultural representation in the materials, staff, curriculum, food, and events.
A balance of acculturation and diaspora. Every single book at ourBRIDGE is screened by the staff to ensure the content and authors represent the students that they receive. When Sil's hiring strategy was to hire people that reflect the countries that students are from— some being immigrants themselves—, she noticed a huge change in the relationships and responsiveness from the children's families. The classes involve hands-on learning with a cultural element attached to each activity. For example, students might do cooking activities that involve exploring the children's native dishes they make with their families. For breakfast, lunch, and snack time, food is culturally-relevant; it is representative of the countries the students come from.
Every year, ourBRIDGE hosts music, food, and cultural events where all the families and their children can participate and share their culture with others— when you think about it, it is the families' participation that actually does the hosting!
It is NON-FAITH based!
ourBRIDGE is the only non-faith based non-profit in North Carolina. Families come from different religions and beliefs, and all of them must be welcomed.
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2022). ourBRIDGE family event. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2022). ourBRIDGE family event. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2021). ourBRIDGE volunteers during COVID. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2022). ourBRIDGE family event. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
Accessibility Through Language Justice and Family Support
I was already impressed with ourBRIDGE's impact on students, but learning about how the organization includes the students' families as an important element to the student's learning development and confidence in their identity made me completely fall in love with its mission.
Family support included:
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quarterly check-ins with families using staff that can speak their native language or providing translations
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access to ourBRIDGE's "Program Portal" with free programs available
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15-passenger vans picking up students at their homes and returning them to their homes
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delivering 140,000 dinners and groceries to families during COVID that come from immigrant and refugee-owned markets and culturally-appropriate restaurants
ourBRIDGE Values: LERD
Evolving the ourBRIDGE Mission
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2019). Sil Ganzó and student. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
Education, acculturation, and resilience. ourBRIDGE has evolved its practices to carry out their mission at its fullest.
Since its inception, ourBRIDGE has been an advocate for newly arrived families, responding to what their needs were. Hiring procedures changed to better support this. Sil saw increased responsiveness from the families when she hired facilitators who were also immigrants or from the same countries as the students, so she removed the requirements of needing a college degree to apply for a position.
ourBRIDGE's mission statement evolved over time, removing the word 'empowering' from its aim. For Sil, it didn't feel appropriate:
"When you say something is 'empowering,' it implies that by doing this action, somebody now has power, which implies another person doesn't [have power]—but we all have power. [It's the] systems that prevent us from [power], which implies access. Refugees have been through a lot. Some have made businesses. They already had power. It's about access to it." - Sil Ganzó
Evolving Access During COVID
COVID-19 disproportionately affected immigrant families, so the biggest challenges during the pandemic for ourBRIDGE were about eliminating the barriers to the families' children's education and access to health resources.
With the help of volunteers, partnerships with organizations, and donations, ourBRIDGE eliminated those barriers by providing families flu shots, COVID tests, masks, school supplies, headsets, groceries from international markets, and culturally-relevant prepared meals long enough to last families two days!
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2020). Volunteers helping families [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
While access is a big part of ourBRIDGE, the space of the facility poses challenges for the increasing growth of students joining. It is also difficult to address the problems and advance its mission proactively at the board level. Sil wishes the board would be more focused and would get things done faster.
ourBRIDGE Kids. (2021). Students. [Photograph]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ourBRIDGEkids/photos/5367489720007673
Author's Note
I chose the social justice topics addressed in this post because of 1) my commitment to diversity and 2) because of my own frustration with my country in oppressing it— seriously, hearing some insulting words from fellow Americans regarding rights for underrepresented groups had me in a state of depression. As I have become more aware about institutional oppression over the past 8 years, I enjoy reading literature on these challenges and making connections to enhance my understanding of linguistics, history, and culture.
For example, I connected the concept of cultural capital to my sociolinguistics course during my undergrad years. A big topic we discussed was social identity. Basically, an individual realizes the groups in which they feel included in due to particular characteristics the group members have in common. They then can see the differences from other groups where they wouldn't be included. Language, or the way somebody speaks, can reveal many ways in which the individual is expressing their memberships in different groups. While individuals have the autonomy to express their memberships, the culture in which they live in imposes "value" and attaches attitudes to the different ways they express their social membership. This, in turn, can influence the choices individuals make to express themselves under different social contexts.
Unfortunately, the K-12 system does not actively value the unique cultural identities of migrant students or students of color. Teachers and classmates have negative attitudes if there is too much difference to deal with. While acculturation is a process, the United States pushes it onto immigrants, pressuring them to acculturate quickly.
Institutional racism in the education system became a topic of interest to me when I overheard my mother's white friend directly say that black students don't work hard enough (then quickly adding she isn't racist because she had a black doctor, and that his title made him "different." Yikes!) Statistics showing the learning gap shape and reinforce negative sociocultural attitudes towards underrepresented students, which is why I hear racist statements like my mother's friend said.
I never knew there was an organization as devoted to providing educational access to underrepresented students as ourBRIDGE. While this page was dedicated to explaining the ways ourBRIDGE works to include others and fight for social justice, I will sum it up in one sentence:
After talking to Sil and reading everything I could about her creation, I truly believe the organization fights for justice by seeing these newly arrived families as already capable, intelligent, and powerful human beings that don't need to owe anything to the United States except being themselves and not letting go of their roots.
For more information on ourBRIDGE:
References:
1. Access. (2014). The Glossary of Education Reform. https://www.edglossary.org/access/
2. Jaschik, S. (2021, April. 13). Is diversity moral? Educational? Inside Higher Ed. https://tinyurl.com/27aucwsj
3. Kohil, R., Pizarro, P., & Nevárez, A. (2017). The “new racism” of K-12 schools: Centering critical research on racism. Sage Journals, 41(1). https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X16686949
4. Lucko, J. (2011). Tracking identity: Academic performance and ethnic identity among Ecuadorian immigrant teenagers in Madrid. Anthropology & Education, (42)3, 213-229.
5. Our Bridge For Kids. (2022). https://www.joinourbridge.org/
6. Punteney, K. (2019). International education handbook: Principles and practices of the field. NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
7. Swan, M. (2016, Jan. 29). Here’s why immigrant students perform poorly. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/heres-why-immigrant-students-perform-poorly-52568
8. UNCF. (2022). K-12 disparity facts and statistics. https://uncf.org/pages/k-12-disparity-facts-and-stats
9. Yosso, T. J. (2005) Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, (8)1, 69-91.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006