Cultivating a Sense of Place for Dominican-American Students
"Sense Of Place" (SOP) has recently emerged as an important theoretical framework for exploring a broad array of issues in contemporary education. While its meaning varies based on the educational field in which it used, all definitions appear to encompass one’s personal connection with a particular spatial location. Sanger (1997), for example, who has discussed SOP within the context of environmental education, defined SOP as “an experientially based intimacy with the natural processes, community, and history of one’s place.”
Within the field of science education, considerable research has focused on how increasing one’s SOP can be used to enhance teaching and learning outcomes (Sanger, 1997, and references therein). Sanger (1997) has discussed how contemporary science education considers students’ relationships with their “lived” environments as marginal, uninteresting, and unimportant. The purported marginalization of SOP in education is thought to be related to students’ alienation from their natural environment and alienation from science itself (Sanger, 1997). Curriculum that integrates SOP is potentially important because culturally congruent curricula and culturally-aware teachers have been demonstrated to offset the well-documented disengagement in learning science among many urban and minority student populations (Bouillion and Gomez, 2001).
Understanding student’s SOP and helping students explore their own connection to their environments has particular significance for teachers of Dominican-American students. This is because Dominican-American communities include a large number of "transnational villagers" (Leavitt, 2001). “Transnationalism” refers to a pattern of living and working in the United States for most of the year but keeping strong social, economic, and political ties to one’s homeland. This transnational connection extends beyond politics and economics, however; it includes familial relationships, religion, and culture (Leavitt, 2001). The DR thus remains a central part of many Dominican American students’ lives; indeed, many Dominican Americans have been known to "mythologize" the DR as a "paradise" (Gray, 2001:198).
Teachers and school leaders point out the challenges of educating students who in effect live in two very different worlds, namely the need to address "gaps" in student’s content knowledge and academic literacy skills resulting from their movement back and forth between countries. The transnational character of Dominican-American students, however, can and should also be seen as providing opportunities to enhance teaching and learning outcomes. Specifically, geological, meteorological, geographical, biological, and ecological knowledge about the Dominican Republic, which Dominican-American students harbor to varying extents, can be "mined" during science instruction to generate improved understandings of scientific patterns and processes (e.g., climate, earthquakes, etc.). Science curricula can be constructed in ways that prompt students to contrast natural history components of the Dominican Republic with their new environment in New York City or other areas, thereby making use of their personally experienced environments and ecologies.
Below we review a variety of resources intended to help science teachers gain a better understanding of the transnational environments that are fundamental to forming Dominican-American student’s beliefs, values, and concepts related to the natural world. While some of the resources, such as the Nature Galleries and Video Libraries links on www.DRScience.org focus directly on geological, meteorological, geographical, biological, and ecological features of the Dominican Republic, others offer perspectives on the life experiences and culture of Dominican Americans.
Books and articles:
Torres-Saillant, S. and R. Hernandez. 1998. The Dominican Americans. Greenwood Press. (A good starting point.)
Gray, D. M. 2001. High Literacy and Ethnic Identity. Dominican American Schooling in Transition. New York: Rowman and Littlefield (A personal account of Gray’s schooling experiences).
Diaz, Junot. 1997. Drown. Berkley Publishing Group. 224p. (Short fiction stories by a notable Dominican- American author).
Grasmuck, Sherri and Patricia R. Pessar. 1991. Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. University of California Press. 280p.
Hernandez, Ramona. 2002. The mobility of workers under advanced capitalism: Dominican migration to the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. (A readable introduction to the history of Dominican migration to New York City from an economic and sociological perspective).
Leavitt, P. 2001. Transnational Villagers. University of California Press. 281p. (A “bird’s eye view” of the Dominican-American experience).
Lopez, Nancy . 2003. Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys. Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education. Taylor and Francis. (Rich portrait of Dominican- American secondary school experiences in New York City).
Pons, Frank Moya. 1998. Dominican Republic: A National History. Markus Wiener, 543 p. (A useful general reference on Dominican history).
Cambeira, Alan. 1997. Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective. Sharpe, Me., Inc. (Perspectives on Latin America and the Caribbean Series). 286p.