PETE FARRUGGIO (PhD, Education, UC Berkeley)

My more than twenty years in low income schools have taught me that linguistic minorities and children of color can attain impressively high levels of intellectual and academic achievement when they are provided with appropriate schools and pedagogy. As a teacher, I developed methods and classroom practices over the years that accelerated and deepened minority children’s cognitive and social development by incorporating holistic teaching with a cultural empowerment model of education. This pedagogy was largely informed by a careful study of the seminal work in sociohistorical theory by soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, as well as by the research in linguistic mediation by such innovative theorists as Stephen Krashen, James Cummins, and Luis Moll. Year after year, large numbers of my low income, linguistic minority students, all Latinos and African Americans, would exceed the academic expectations that had been set for them because my teaching focused on their intellectual curiosity and higher levels of thinking, instead of the low level, basic skills teaching that had been their academic fare in previous years. Indeed these children’s successive and continual conceptual leaps exemplified Vygotsky’s maxim that “learning drives development.”

Later in my teaching career, when I became a Bilingual Resource Teacher, I was able to help numerous classroom teachers to apply the pedagogical lessons I had learned to a larger field of practice with a greater diversity of conditions. During these years, I was able to assist several schools in developing collaborations and partnerships with minority parents by showing them how to apply a community organizing approach to parent involvement.

Through my years in the K-12 school system, I developed a research agenda that focuses on the interaction of minority communities with their public schools. I am interested in exploring how we as educators can participate in the creation of truly democratic models of parent engagement in their children’s education, and how a culturally relevant and intellectually challenging pedagogy and curriculum can stimulate high levels of academic achievement.

Included in this research agenda is the important realization that the current wave of high stakes testing and its attendant standardization of a mandated, low level curriculum is the exemplification of anti-intellectualism and is harming our children of color and accomplishing exactly the opposite result from its stated aim of “leaving no child behind.” Therefore, as a researcher, I seek to test the effectiveness of teaching and school programs that do not employ such practices as scripted curricula and “teaching to the test,” but that do use the skills and resources that students bring to school with them from their families and communities.