| Over the past few weeks, the IRC has asked members of our community to nominate Illinois teachers working with multicultural, multilingual students who are going above and beyond, and now, we’re celebrating them and highlighting their work. Keep an eye out for these features in the coming months – and if you’d like to nominate someone, email leanet@cntrmail.org. Next is Amy Harder, a multilingual specialist at Windsor Elementary School in Arlington Heights.
Says Michelle Conway, a colleague who nominated her: “I would like to nominate Amy Harder in Arlington Heights School District 25. She goes above and beyond to help our ML students. This year she organized lunchtime meetings for our Ukrainian students so they could talk about how they were feeling about the conflict in their home country. She helped them show their pride for Their Ukrainian heritage by making flags and bracelets and many other art projects. She tutors our Spanish speakers after school, and she does all of these things without being asked and without being paid extra. She will reach out to parents and give them her cell phone number because often they feel more comfortable talking to her. She is truly an advocate and a trusted liaison for our ML community.”
Moving across an ocean for school is hard. Being across an ocean for school while your home country and family are impacted by war is even harder. When the war began in Ukraine earlier this year, Amy Harder and her multilingual team at Windsor Elementary in Arlington Heights wanted to create a safe, supportive community for the school’s Ukrainian students.
Windsor Elementary had a group of about 10 students from Ukraine who were struggling with the impact of the war. Harder and her team began organizing lunchtime gatherings for the Ukrainian students. For the first 5-10 minutes, the students had a safe space to talk about what was going on and how their families in Ukraine were doing, and then have some kind of mini cultural celebration or activity–they would play Ukrainian music, make Ukrainian crafts, or make flags and zipper pulls they could give to their friends. The students enjoyed this community time so much that what began as a biweekly meeting became a weekly one, and students even received baskets so they could take crafts home to friends and family. The students filled a basket at school and classmates would take crafts to show their support of Ukraine.
“It’s really important to make them feel comfortable, to be seen and to know that we see their struggles and their family’s struggles and that we are supportive of them,” Harder says. She adds that it was important for her to not just be there for her students affected by the conflict, but their entire families, so she sent emails to their families to extend the school’s support.
As this program was taking off, Windsor also welcomed some new students from Russia. Nobody at the school could speak Russian, so the Ukrainian students, who could communicate, stepped up to support and create an accepting environment for their new classmates. Harder says this led to many conversations about how many Russian people living in the U.S. are helping out Ukrainian families – for example, one of their Ukrainian students is recording music at a studio owned by a Russian family. “We had lots of conversations about how you really have to get to know people, and how sometimes where you’re from doesn’t mean you believe everything that’s said about that country,” Harder says.
Harder encourages teachers with newcomer or SLIFE students to reach out to places like the Illinois Resource Center, other teachers and peer-to-peer support groups of multilingual teachers to share ideas and resources about what’s helped their students. “Spend time learning about the background of your students and know where they’re coming from, what kind of a situation it was, and try to link your students with supports,” Harder says. “It really takes time to reach out to different resources.” |
