Abie L. Benítez
Working in the dual language project has given me the opportunity to associate with remarkable educators who believe that our students can attain high levels of achievement. In this environment of providing access to the mainstream curriculum for students who have linguistic and/or socio-economic barriers we have to be reflective educators. Every utterance or movement we make is part of our teaching. Students are keen to our body language and pay close attention to what and how we say things (Nieto, 1999). All of the above evidently makes teaching a cultural, linguistic, and academic endeavor, to say the least. This is now clear, my practice must be reflective and I have to plan for implementation. Moreover, I also have to reflect on it to improve it.
We have to align the curriculum to national, state and local standards. In addition, we want to follow standards for effective pedagogy. Due to the nature of scheduling we have chosen to prepare integrated science thematic units that permeate throughout the curriculum. This means that I have to integrate the science theme in all aspects of the curriculum. The language arts, social studies, and math must somehow relate to the science topic. The other important aspect is that we must secure teacher and students materials both, in Spanish and in English. Materials in both languages must be similar in content and quality. Indeed, this is a major challenge.
