“My life, my stories”: Reading, writing, and belonging in the ESL classroom

As I looked around the room, I noticed my students had their heads down, nearly falling asleep. “Class, what’s wrong?” From across the room, José responded, “Miss, we don’t like the topic of pyramids. And who cares about nomads?” (Student names are pseudonyms.) In that moment, I questioned if this was a teacher win or fail. We had recently learned the vocabulary word topic, and José used it correctly. On the other hand, my students were unengaged and uninterested. This was not due to the language demands of our reading, but it was because they simply did not connect to the content we were learning. Suddenly, I saw the irony: my students are not nomadic people and they’ve never been to the Egyptian pyramids. The beginning ESL curriculum was just not working!