Lisseth Gonzalez is a fourth year student at UCSB, pursuing a degree in Sociology with minors in Applied Psychology and LGBTQ studies with the completion of the T. A. Barron Certificate in Environmental Leadership. Lisseth’s research interests include investigating the lack of ELD/ESL programs found in low-income public schools with a high Latine population, how that affects students’ academic careers, and how assessments are distributed to minority communities in the public school system. She currently works as a tutor for elementary aged students through the A.S. America Reads/America Counts program. For now, Lisseth is working on a satire piece about the experiences of an ELD/ESL student in public schools.
Project
In the form of a magazine, I’ve compiled a collection of stories and reflections addressing my experience as an ELD in the public school system. A common theme in this magazine is a flow of displayed memes that are relevant to what is being discussed. As this piece captures being an ELD student, there is a lot of English and Spanish throughout it. The goal is to depict how ELD students are categorized as stupid because they know more than one language at an early age. How something that should be a support program becomes something that holds many student’s back from their full potential because they have no confidence in themselves as a student. My piece’s ultimate “message” is that no matter how often I was treated as a “less than” student, I came to a top university with two scholarships and am now graduating from said university. If I had to say what audience I wrote my piece for, every Spanish-speaking student who has been categorized as an ELD student; simply because it can be very isolating the way certain schools treat these students and they really drive us to think that we are not meant for higher education.
Link to year-long project here.
