Adult Learners in the Neighbors Link Worker Center

Adult Learners in the Neighbors Link Worker Center

by

Caitlin Geoghan

Professor Barbara Gleason

ENGL CO855: Teaching Adult Writers in Diverse Contexts

May 17, 2015

     The subject of my fieldwork is the Jobs English program held 5 days a week in the Neighbors Link Worker center. My interest in the Neighbors Link site is driven by the sense that this is an excellent use of time that would otherwise be unutilized.  Because of hiring constraints, applicants/students must remain in the hiring hall in order to obtain work.  If they leave, they, essentially, lose their chance of acquiring work for the day.  As such, many people stay all day, often their numbers aren’t called. In addition, as many of the workers are Spanish or Spanish Creole speakers they don’t typically speak English with other people waiting for work, although many express a desire to learn and have the perception that learning English would be a great benefit. Offering an educational opportunity in this setting seems the best way to fill hours with purposeful, helpful activity.

     My learning goals for this fieldwork are twofold. First, I’m curious about the efficacy of education in this setting.  How effective are lessons that are delivered in such a chaotic environment? Are the students able to take their lessons into the world with confidence? And, do the lessons have any other effect? For example, do they decrease affective factors that prevent the people from speaking English both within the hiring hall and outside of it? Secondly, I’m interested in ascertaining the instructor’s methods and practices in curriculum design and delivery. Do lessons respond to students’ specified needs when creating lessons or do they anticipate their needs? How does he maintain class flow and order in this environment? Is he mindful of and does he utilize communicative language techniques and/or other adult learning theories? How does he choose materials for the class? In the scope of this particular project, I am unlikely to answer many of these questions. A more widely stated purpose might simply be to observe and be present for a unique learning event in an unlikely learning site.

The Observation Site     

      Neighbors Link in Mt. Kisco, NY provides education and employment opportunities to immigrant families and individuals in the community. Their stated mission according to their web site is “to strengthen the whole community by enhancing the healthy integration of immigrants”.  Their strategy is to provide education and employment resources as well providing opportunities for new arrivals to interact with the established community in positive ways. Neighbors Link programs attempt to facilitate the needs of a new population which might otherwise be isolated while simultaneously addressing the concerns of the established population.

     Neighbors Link offers a range of educational and community outreach programs. Different services are associated with and administered by three different programs housed within Neighbors Link: Adult Education, the Family Center and the Community Outreach program.  The Adult Education Program provides ESL classes and tutoring, computer literacy classes, and vocational training programs, such as the Eco-Cleaning Training Program which trains and certifies people in the use of non-toxic cleaning products that are not harmful to them or the environment.  In addition, the participants of vocational programs are trained in effective work practices, customer service and business management skills.

     The Family Center works to strengthen families by supporting the development of the family as a unit The Neighbors Link Family Center is a “hub for three main areas of learning: 1) family education; 2) early childhood development and academic support for children; and 3) gateway for linking families to related community resources” (Neighbors Link Web site). Their principal goal is to close the achievement gap between immigrant children and their native-born peers by facilitating communication, understanding and interaction between parents and schools, as well as connecting immigrant parents with “medical, legal and social service assistance and referrals that connect families and individuals to community-based resources to address critical needs and provide vital solutions to help stabilize their lives in times of crisis” (Neighbors Link Web site). In addition, they build a sense of community among immigrants through their Family Night program, a bi-monthly communal meal during which families can provide support for each other by sharing problems and brainstorming solutions with regard to navigating the unfamiliar school, healthcare and financial systems.

     The Community Outreach program brings immigrant families together around common goals and fosters integration and participation in the larger community.  Community outreach opportunities include: Day Worker Community Service during which day workers volunteer to  clean up local parks and communal areas or provide labor to set-up and break down for fundraising drives; the Healthcare program which focuses on medical intervention and prevention and facilitates visits to local medical facilities; Community and Police Together (PACT) which helps foster understanding between local police and immigrants; and, Cultural Competency Training which provides training sessions to members of the Mt. Kisco police department in order to enable better communication between local police and the growing population of immigrants.

     Neighbors Link also houses The Worker Center, a hiring site for general labor and a separate job bank for more skilled workers.  According to their website, the hiring site and job bank negotiate nearly 8,000 jobs per year.

Inside the Worker Center

     The Worker Center “grew out of local discord: Residents were unhappy that Hispanic men were hanging out on street corners looking for work” ("Community Colleges Build Programs That Fit Immigrants' Needs" Gonzalez). In effort to address the concerns of the community and the needs of the workers, Neighbors Link established the Worker Center where men had a safe environment to gather for work off of the community’s well-travelled thoroughfares, allowed them access to inexpensive, healthy food and linked them to vital social services. In addition, the Worker Center worked with the affluent community of Mt. Kisco to combat the myth that the day laborers were a dangerous new itinerant population which would increase crime and lower the quality of life in the community. Citing findings from “On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States,” the first comprehensive nationwide study of day laborers, Neighbors Link executive director, Caroline Otero Bracco, states that many day laborers are long-standing members of the community who “attend church regularly and are involved in sports clubs and community centers” ("Wanted: Day Laborers" Bracco). These invisible members of the community do more than provide labor; they contribute to the community financially by paying property taxes through high rents, paying sales tax and supporting local businesses. 

     The Neighbors Link Workers Center, like many other worker centers in the United States, is a “hybrid that combine[s] elements of different types of organizations...committed to going beyond advocacy to providing a means through which workers can take action on their own behalf…” (Fine 55) In order to promote self-advocacy, the Worker Center provides English language classes with the hope that greater English language proficiency will smooth relations between immigrant and native-born communities, and allow immigrants to access the services that are their right as contributing members of the community. The classes have a very high participation rate. From the workers perspective, English is essential for getting steady employment, negotiating and collecting wages, and advocating for themselves and others in educational, institutional and legal spaces.

Who are the students?

      ESL classes in the Worker Center have no attendance or registration requirements, tuition or textbooks.  The students are men who are waiting to be hired as day laborers.  Women are rare in these classes because jobs for women are usually arranged through phone lists. Women are usually hired for cleaning or work individually within private homes; as such employers typically want a different vetting process for women. The Worker Center provides references for the women to assure clients that they are reliable and safe to hire. Men are usually hired for manual labor like masonry work, construction, moving, painting or yard work. Typically, men work on crews that don’t employ enough permanent employees to complete large jobs in a timely manner.

 The Worker Center environment is extremely active; men arrive early in the morning, receive numbers, and then wait for work. They can be hired at any time via phone call or through pickup—when a contractor or other employer stops by and indicates how many workers they need and what they are being hired for. Once a person is hired, they typically leave immediately. ESL classes in the Worker Center, Jobs English, are conducted simultaneously with hiring.  They begin at 9am and end at 12pm. Even though the majority of hiring happens prior to 9am when the classes begin, jobs become available throughout the class period; as such, the students come and go throughout the class session. Justin Smith, the first regular teacher for the Worker Center ESL class, said that his classes usually begin with approximately 45 students and end with 5 students.

The Class

  I arrived at Neighbors Link at 7am, 2 hours prior to my scheduled observation appointment with Justin, in order to observe the start of the hiring day and the transition between hiring only to hiring during class time. When I entered the Worker Center, a Neighbor’s Link staffer immediately approached me and asked if he could help me.  I explained the purpose of my visit. He asked me to step away from the door of the Worker Center so we could talk without obstructing men who were waiting to enter the Center and seemed hesitant to approach the door with us standing there. He very politely, but formally, asked why I was observing the class, who I was affiliated with, and if I would be willing to show him some photo ID preferably from a professional or educational institution.  I showed him 3 forms of photo ID: a New York State ID card, my CCNY graduate student ID, and my SUNY Westchester Community College adjunct instructor ID. SUNY WCC is affiliated with Neighbors Link; it provides instructors and fully funds all of the ESL classes at the Worker Center. When he saw the SUNY WCC ID, he became much more relaxed, escorted me into the Worker Center, introduced me to some of the men that were waiting and got me a cup of coffee. 

     Over the next hour and a half, I sat at a table in the Worker Center and watched as men came and went with a number of different employers that came to the center. I was approached by many men who came and sat at the table with me to talk. I left my SUNY WCC ID on the table next to my coffee cup so they could see it without asking. I saw a number of the men look at the ID, but no one asked about it directly or picked it up to look at it. The men who sat at the table with me asked a variety of questions. They started with questions like, “Where are you from? Where do you live?  What’s your work?” Once they’d determined that I was a native-English speaker who spoke some Spanish, a few of the men asked me to teach them some English vocabulary. They would point to an object (hat, table, coffee cup, notebook, pen etc.) or say a word in Spanish and ask for the English word. One man even asked me to help him understand an article from the local newspaper that was on the table. There was a lot of coming and going, men were eating breakfast, playing checkers, talking, drinking coffee, and reading El Diario. Men entered signed in for work and left after they’d been hired.

      The hiring is done by lottery. When workers enter, they draw a numbered ball out of a jar and write their names on the Jobs Board, a large white board numbered 1 through 40 in black marker. The right hand side of the board, under the heading “English OK,” was numbered 1 through 15. There were three names written in this section. Through a conversation with one of the men waiting for work, I discovered that the system had been designed by workers who regularly came to the Center to find jobs. Once the balls are drawn, they go into a different jar and are randomly selected when employers come in to hire workers. There is a separate jar for English OK workers that only had three balls in it. If an employer wants a worker who is English proficient, the ball is drawn from the English OK jar. Workers who speak English have a much greater chance of being hired than workers who don’t which provides tremendous extrinsic motivation to acquire the language.

     Justin arrived at the Worker Center at 8:25 am carrying a large shoulder bag and wearing a backpack.  We talked for a minute, then he talked to some of the men in the room; he said hello to some he knew and introduced himself to others he didn’t know. After he’d greeted the people in the room, he unpacked his bag and started assembling materials for the class. After he had collected some papers together, he said, “Does anyone have anything for the class?” One man walked over and gave him a sheet of paper. Justin took it and said, “Anything else? No? Okay. Class starts in 15 minutes.” He left the room to make copies of the materials. When he returned, he started handing out papers and said, “Okay, we’re going to start with the application for ID that [a student] brought”. There was a bit of reshuffling in the room. Five men moved to the back with their newspapers, a checkers board and their food and drinks. The rest of the men arranged themselves in a loose semi-circle of desks facing Justin with their backs to the Jobs Board. Class started with the men working together to fill-in the application for ID. Justin circulated answering and asking questions. He moved some people around to take advantage of the multiple levels of proficiency in the room, pairing students with greater language proficiency with beginners.  At one point, a student called out that you could get the application in Spanish if you asked for it at the DMV. Other students said it was better to use the English language application because sometimes Spanish ones weren’t available.  By this time, five more men had entered the room and joined the student group and seven men had left for jobs. Each man that entered received an ID application and the ones that left took theirs with them.

     The environment was chaotic and noisy. Men continued to enter and leave; there were multiple conversations going on in the room: wages and being negotiated, conversations about children, family, sporting events, food, bosses, bills, questions about bus and train fares, and questions about how to get different places. At one particularly active moment, Justin said, “Okay, there’s a lot going on. Let’s do vocabulary…5 words each.” Students took turns listing English vocabulary words for objects in the room. Then, Justin passed out a circular from the Home Depot and they listed English vocabulary about items in the circular. Justin repeated some of the words and asked questions like, “What is a hammer for? What do you do with a saw? Do you have any screwdrivers? How many do you have? Do you have any other tools? What kind of tools do you have?” After the room settled a bit, the students went back to filling in the ID application. The rest of the class period followed this pattern.  During busy moments or hiring, Justin would switch into activities that didn’t require as much concentration, such as the aforementioned vocabulary exercise. He also had little cards that had actions listed on them. Students would act the cards out and others would call out describing what the student was doing. Justin guided the students into producing the sentences in present progressive tense. I attempted to count the number of men who entered and left during the class but lost count. Justin ended the class by reminding the men that there were classes every day from 9am to 12pm and that they should attend as often as they could. He also told them to bring materials that they wanted to work on or needed help with. We said goodbye to the men and left the Center.

Justin Smith’s Pedagogical Practices at Neighbors Link (An Overview)

     In an interview performed subsequent to one of my observations, Justin stated that the environment was extremely challenging for teaching and learning.  He said, “There’s little consistency and no quiet.” He told me that even though some students attend classes regularly, it’s very rare for anyone to stay for an entire class. In addition, he said that since many of the men have other more regular work, some of the students only turn up occasionally. Justin stated that this environment has caused numerous shifts in his pedagogical practice. He’s constantly attempting to negotiate new situations and ascertain and address the needs of a changing cast of students. Every class is different; there’s no continuity; lessons must be delivered in discrete units. Complicating the situation further, Smith stated that lesson planning prior to the class is impossible; there’s no way to know what will be appropriate for the class until he arrives and talks to that day’s students.

     Justin seems to focus on teaching “survival” English defined as “‘the minimum functioning in the specific community in which the student is settled’…in practice, the term has been widely used to refer to literacy and prevocational and basic skills for students with zero to intermediate language proficiency” (Auerbach Burgess 476). The single unifying characteristic of this type of approach is that it is situationally organized around functioning in the world on a daily basis. The focus of each class is a practical communicative English language lesson with real world applications.  Justin places the emphasis on vocabulary and conversational skills rather than focusing on grammatical concepts. According to my own observations and classroom materials provided by Smith, visits to the grocery store with food vocabulary, buying clothing, ordering in restaurants, asking for help finding items in the pharmacy, visits to the DMV, how to get a state ID, visits to the doctor (answering questions about medical history and insurance or lack thereof) and the Home Depot (English names of tools and associated verbs) are regularly featured topics in Justin’s lessons. Reading and writing skills are also practiced; the focus again is on real world material and features employment applications, insurance forms, newspapers, letters from teachers/schools, store flyers and circulars, pay stubs and more. The purpose is to familiarize the students with the language they will encounter in their everyday lives as well as providing practice in conversational English in a low stakes environment.  

     Like most practitioners of survival or competency based language teaching methods, Justin believes that language learning for adults should be “experience-centered and reality based.” In The Hidden Curriculum of Survival ESL, Elsa Auerbach and Denise Burgess write that approaches like Justin’s are informed by the idea that adults learn language “for and from the situations in which they find themselves” (477). This pedagogical approach to reality-based language teaching and learning grows out of theoretical developments in both adult education and second language teaching. Malcolm Knowles adult learning theory asserts that “adults must be treated as people with complex individual histories, responsibilities, needs and goals” (qtd. in Auerbach Burgess 477). Knowles’ theory reinforces the “functional-notional and communicative trends in ESL…characterized by real language use, a student-centered classroom, [and] humanistic approaches to instruction” (Auerbach Burgess 477).  This combination of adult and ESL pedagogical approaches explains how Justin chooses materials for the class.  Figure 1 is a listening and conversation practice activity in Pearson Longman’s Future English for Results 2.

     The activity asks that learners listen to and then practice the conversation by choosing options from different colored boxes—altering the conversation a little each time they practice. The conversation activity doesn’t seem appropriate for adults who despite not speaking the language are capable of reasoned thought. Aside from the fact that this type of language practice is an ineffective way for students to derive meaning through context, the conversation is unreflective of a situation that these students might encounter in their daily lives. First, most low cost health care clinics don’t make appointments over the telephone; rather,  you go to the clinic, fill out an intake form and wait (often for hours) for your turn to see the doctor. Even if clinics scheduled appointments over the phone, they would likely ask for other information as well such as, do you have insurance? How will you be paying? They might ask for contact information or who referred the patient to their clinic. In short, the conversation in the book doesn’t approximate the situation that students would encounter in real life.

Figure 2 Activity from a widely used ESL textbook

Figure 2 is an application from Open Door Family Medical Center in Mt. Kisco N.Y.  Open Door is a low cost clinic that is widely used by the immigrant community in the area. During an observation, I saw Justin using this application as the basis for a lesson. He went through the application defining unfamiliar terms and the students helped each other complete the application. In addition, there was a discussion about what sliding scale for payment was and the students were asked to share experiences they had with Open Door. About half of the students had either been treated there themselves or someone in their family had gotten treatment there. These students were able to give the others valuable information about costs of treatment and payment options. One student suggested that late morning was the best time to go to the clinic. He said that people tried to go early before work so it was crowded then, but by around 11am workers had gone to work. Since it was too early for lunch break the clinic was relatively empty at that time. Some of the men in the class for that lesson didn’t know about the clinic so they got valuable information about a low-cost clinic that was safe for them. Justin’s emphasis on “experience-centered and reality based” pedagogical practices guides him toward the presentation and use of materials that students could be expected to encounter in their lives. In addition, as with the ID application, many of the materials he uses are brought by the students when they encounter a situation they need help with.

     Justin perceives the importance of social context to learning in this situation.  To quote Hansman in “Context-based Adult Learning,” he pays “attention to the interaction and intersection among people, tools and context in a learning situation” and crafts lessons that he hopes will facilitate the needs of his students defined by his students.

     The unique ESL program, Jobs English, at the Neighbors Link Worker Center left me with more questions than it answered. In answer to my questions about the efficacy of the program, Justin was only able to say, “There’s improvement in the speaking and writing skills of some of the students who regularly attend”, but because most students don’t attend regularly it was difficult for him to give specific information about improvement. I found his pedagogical appropriate for adult learners and he was adept at managing and delivering content and maintaining students’ focus in an extremely chaotic environment. Best of all, there was a sense of fun in the room and comraderie among the students facilitated, I believe, by their shared participation in the learning process.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Elsa Roberts, and Denise Burgess. "The Hidden Curriculum of Survival ESL." TESOL Quarterly 19.3 (1985): 475-95. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.

Bracco, Carola Otero. "Wanted: Day Laborers." Editorial. New York Times 12 Feb. 2006: n. pag. Print.

Fine, Janice. "Worker Centers." Race, Poverty & the Environment 14.1 (2013): 54-57. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.

Fuchs, Marjorie, Beatriz B. Diaz, Ronna Magy, and Federico Salas-Isnardi. "Health Watch." Future English for Results. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education, 2010. 135. Print.

Geoghan, Caitlin. Field Notes. N.d. Raw data. Neighbors Link Worker Center, Mt. Kisco.

Gonzalez, Jennifer. "Community Colleges Build Programs That Fit Immigrants' Needs." The Chronicle [Mt. Kisco] 28 Feb. 2010: n. pag. Print.

Hansman, Catherine A. "Context-Based Adult Learning." New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 2001.89 (2001): 43. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

"Justin C. Smith." Personal interview. 21 Apr. 2015.

"Justin C. Smith." Personal interview. 5 Apr. 2015.

"Neighbors Link." Neighbors Link. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2015. <http://neighborslink.org/>.

Open Door Family Medical Center. N.d. Intake form. Open Door Family Medical Center, Mt. Kisco.