Eligibility
All participants must be elementary education majors who will have completed TEAC 317 Teaching ELLs in Elementary Schools (by May 2020). Students from other colleges are not permitted.
Desirable qualifications are 1) GPA of 2.0 or higher, 2) recommendation by elementary education faculty, and 3) students who have not previously participated in education abroad.
Course of Study
Participants will examine how elementary schools and teacher preparation colleges in the Netherlands welcome immigrant students to their classrooms. Through multiple school site visits and meetings with teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers involved with immigrant education in the Netherlands, participants will examine the Dutch example for welcoming newcomer children. Participants will travel to various elementary school sites and the Vrije University (VU), as well as possible other teacher preparation colleges within the city. The Cultural Anthropology department at VU will organize a seminar and ‘meet and greet’ party for participants and students involved in the Anthropology of Immigrant Children graduate degree program.
There are four primary learning outcomes for this program:
- Participants will gain a comprehensive knowledge of Dutch schooling: how it works, its main purposes and unintended outcomes, and the ideologies at work in Dutch educational policy.
- Participants will be able to compare the Dutch response to immigrant students to the American response.
- Participants will experience, in a small way, the disequilibrium that all immigrant children experience when placed in a culture and language unfamiliar to them.
- Participants will make gains toward a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ in their thinking about education that should manifest itself in the ways they think about, plan for, and deliver linguistically and culturally responsive education to immigrant and refugee youth in U.S. schools upon their return.
FACULTY LEADERS
Dr. Jenelle Reeves, a veteran study abroad organizer, will lead this program with the assistance of Dr. Stephanie Wessels. Both leaders are professors in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, and both teach a section of the course TEAC 317, the pre-requisite for this program.
