Building Community Through Language Proficiency: Q&A with Andrew Sansone
For immigrant families living in the U.S., language skills are the keystone for turning a new community into their home. Speaking English helps family members to better communicate across generations and with their communities. What’s more, language skills are a vital tool for families who benefit from access to supportive services and other community resources.
To Andrew Sansone, Director of the Families for Literacy collaborative at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City, the role language skills play in unlocking families’ full potential is made clear through his interactions with families inside the classroom every day. Andrew oversees the English as a Second Language (ESL) program, where he administers the program and teaches ESL classes to immigrant parents in Jersey City. Andrew’s classroom reflect the city’s vibrant diversity and large immigrant population: it includes a large number of students from Egypt, as well as from Central and South American, and North Africa.
Andrew’s dual role as program director and ESL educator gives him a unique perspective into how language skills contribute to the Whole Family Approach’s goal of improving family stability. We had the chance to speak with him about how the collaborative service model contributes to family success, and how he uses language classes to get families thinking about their long-term goals and realizing the futures they dream of.
The Whole Family Approach is often implemented through a collaborative model where multiple agencies come together to offer a range of personalized tools to families seeking greater stability. Can you tell us about the Families for Literacy collaborative that Saint Peter’s University a part of?
New City Kids, the lead agency, connects families with case managers who help them create goals and develop plans on how to reach those goals, including connecting them with relevant services. WomenRising provides classes on bookeeping & Microsoft Office, vocational training, workforce prep, and domestic violence counseling to women and families. Rising Tide Capital provides entrepreneurship training through their Community Business Academy so folks can start their own small businesses. In combination with Saint Peter’s University’s language classes, families have easy access to support in gaining financial and personal stability.
The Whole Family Approach exists to provide families with the tools and social support they need to reach their full potential. How do your classes contribute to this? What skills do you build?
We offer specific programs to address the whole family as opposed to working with students on a one-on-one basis, so we ensure our curriculum accurately reflects our students’ families’ needs. If our students are unable to communicate in English, they find it very difficult, if not impossible, to tackle the everyday tasks they need to provide for their families. Accessing public transit, understanding how the education system in Jersey City works, navigating looking for a job, buying a home, creating personal networks — all of these are critical to families’ success. We aim to set students up for success in these areas through our curriculum.
One of our programs, Conversation in Context, takes language learning out of the classroom. We take day trips that are focused on accessing community resources, in particular resources that would be of interest for immigrant families. For example, we took the class to tour the Jersey City Library with an English-speaking guide. Students can apply that experience to their lives. For example they might think, “Hey, my child has a summer reading list from school. Maybe I can go get that book from the library. I can ask a librarian.”
How do the skills your students learn in the classroom impact the well-being of their entire families?
Most crucially, our curriculum helps facilitate communication within the family. Many students have expressed a desire to communicate better with their children in English. In cases where children arrived in the United States with family members while they were relatively young, or in cases where adult members of the family are not necessarily fully literate in their first language, children within the family may have difficulty communicating with the adults. I also find that increasing language proficiency among parents in a family helps to build literacy as a family unit. If a parent isn’t able to help their child with summer reading tasks, or they’re not able to read to their child, their children will go on to struggle with language skills themselves. Language proficiency gains in English can be a great way to help achieve all of those.
Beyond the family home, language proficiency is really the keystone for our program participants being able to access the rest of the wonderful services offered within the Families for Literacy collaborative. For example, understanding English is core to the workforce training that Women Rising offers and the entrepreneurship training that Rising Tide offers. It touches all aspects of the collaborative.
What are the kind of barriers to success your students face, and how do you empower them to overcome these barriers?
Many of our students have fairly low digital literacy. There are many mobile assisted language learning tools out there, but those aren’t useful if students aren’t able to use those tools. As part of our curriculum, we’re designing activities that can increase our students’ digital literacy to expand what tools are available to them.
Another challenge is that all of our program participants are parents — it’s a requirement to be enrolled. And if you are a parent and an immigrant in Jersey City, that often means you are working very long hours for fairly low pay. That can mean family time is at a premium, and there’s not much time available for families to talk about long-term goals. Our collaborative makes it a point to help families achieve their goals with this context in mind.
How do you build a supportive environment to enable them to achieve the goals they set in your classroom?
Every aspect of our program is designed to make language learning a supportive and welcoming environment. We try to schedule classes when students are most able to attend, usually during the daytime while kids are at school. New City Kids provides childcare during some of our classes to free up time for parents to participate. We also prioritize establishing a strong rapport with students and building a classroom where students aren’t afraid to speak up, where attention is paid and where errors are considered part of the learning process. Our students trust us, and that is echoed in their class performance.
How do you coordinate your students’ goals and progress in collaboration with their family advocate to ensure their classroom performance shapes their overall family goals, or informs additional resources that may be helpful to the family?
We have a constant open line of communication between the case managers at New City Kids and our university. That’s one of the things that makes our program successful. New City Kids case managers regularly meet with families and can often shed light on a student’s personal situation that directly impacts academic performance. If a student is absent multiple times, for example, I can send a message to that student, but I can also go to the case manager and try to find out if there’s an underlying issue causing the absences. Sometimes the answers are surprising and help us to understand more about what’s going on.
Beyond that, we schedule ongoing conversations with each student’s coach throughout the duration of their ESL course to cover how they’re doing and whether there are any problems we should know about, such as whether someone is battling an illness or if there is a change with their child. We also share information about the families we work with on a shared database each agency within our collaborative can access and hold collaborative meetings so everyone is in a room together talking face-to-face on a regular basis.
What are the lessons learned you would pass on to other service providers looking to improve family well-being holistically?
I would encourage anyone who’s looking to develop a program related to family well-being to strongly consider the collaborative approach. It has been a cornerstone of the success that we’ve had. It helps ensure the services families need are collaborating with one another and not operating in silos, which agencies are often predisposed to do.
