By Sarah Ottow

Jessica Lander is the kind of teacher you wish you had. She is warm, engaging and completely focused on students finding their own joy in learning. Plus, she learns from her students. Jessica embodies the concept of confianza--mutual respect and trust--between herself and her immigrant origin students.

What’s more is that Jessica gifts the rest of us publications documenting her work and research from the field. Her newest book Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education, is a capstone of learnings from the past, the present and the personal, informing everyone--not just educators--of what binds us together around belonging and striving for education.

I recently had the chance to catch up with Jessica to dive into her book. I’ve been struck not only by the book’s overarching messages of hope and justice but by the practical takeaways connected to our mission at Confianza. For example, in Chapter 5: Advocates, Jessica highlights a successful schooling model in Guilford School District, North Carolina, in particular the work of a team of educators led by EL Director, Mayra Hayes. When Jessica observed instruction in 2019, multilingual  students were engaging with this complex sentence:

On an autumn night in 1607, a furtive group of men, women and children set off in a relay of small boats from the English village of Scrooby, in pursuit of the immigrant's oldest dream, a fresh start in another country.

One of the educators told Jessica that if she had visited the school three years earlier, she would have witnessed simplified text like:

Chimpanzees are eating bananas. Bananas are yellow.

Simply put, when we “water down” language, we water down expectations. Our students deserve access to rigorous, grade level text. At Confianza, we teach this in our coaching and courses as exemplified in our “makeover” process like these coaches discuss in this article. My coaching team and I also try to put educators in students’ shoes, as much as can be done from a monolingual perspective, by having them tackle new, complex text that they may not have a connection to, for example:

When you read this text above, you may wonder what the topic is. You may also feel panicked or vulnerable since you may not know what this text is about, especially if you cruise through life as a “proficient reader” or someone who doesn’t typically struggle with language, even in your first language of English. This kind of confronting of cognitive dissonance is what we want to help educators feel. Why? Empathy-building, as Jessica highlights, is a major part of the educational process and the overall human experience. (Hint: the text is about music.)

We know that language can be inclusive or exclusive, yet when it is complex, we don’t need to lower the expectations for what students can engage with. We can provide pathways into learning at grade level. We need to. We must. Our students deserve that. All students deserve this. What Jessica reminds us of is that we actually have higher impact with higher expectations. We don’t need to throw an entire book or even an entire paragraph at students. Less can be more when engaging with complex text. 

In Jessica’s new book, she provides us with creative and inspiring current, powerful examples and stories of why high standards are necessary and how to do this work in a practical way, including one of our featured schools, The ENLACE Academy. We need more and more examples of what’s working, not more status quo lowering the bar for our students who have historically experienced the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

As Jessica shared with me, her classroom and her teaching has been transformed by all she learned from the classrooms and programs across the country that she profiled for Making Americans. This Calm Corner in her classroom holds a small herbaceous garden filled with herbs from around the world where students can come when they are feeling anxious, sad, or upset, the garden is modeled off one she saw and writes about in Making Americans at Houston’s Las Americas newcomer school. 

Jessica teaches history and civics to recent immigrant and refugee students at Lowell High School in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her students come from more than thirty countries from across the world. (In the image at the beginning of this article, her students explore a map of the world in her classroom that shares where all her students come from.)

Check out the interview with Jessica about her new book below: