“Experiential” is the word the Puente Program uses to describe itself. The concept is that students learn best by doing. When I first heard the word “experiential,” I had just begun working with the 30 year-old Puente Program in spring 2009, where I teach at Laney College. I fell into it because an instructor went out on maternity leave, and I took her place without any introduction or background.
The team of Counselor and English Instructor recruit from local high schools, community services, and within the college. The program is open to anyone, but it attracts students who are under-represented in higher education. The students are mostly Latino, as the program was originally designed to help that group transfer to four year colleges by giving them a counseling class and English class, which the same cohort of students would take, along with a mentor program, where a professional—inside or outside the college—helps guide each student. In fall the students take what’s called English 201 at Laney, and in spring, English 1A: Puente calls them Phase I and Phrase II. In the first semester, the students read materials which reflect their own experiences and do more personal writing. Puente calls this the “mirror.” The second semester should segue into critical analysis and look beyond what’s familiar to them, as well as finding an academic voice. This is called the “window.”
At first, teaching Puente, I groped along in the depths, happy when an afternoon seminar at neighboring College of Alameda elucidated issues I was already grappling with in regards to Latino communities. And when a student in my class said in a soft voice that she was “undocumented,” I suddenly felt included in her secret, what many Latino students hide. What that word meant, and all its repercussions, and what “familia” meant, would take a couple more semesters, as I heard the realities of my students’ lives, so different than my own, and so far, unfamiliar in my experience as a teacher.
It wasn’t until I had taught three semesters of Puente classes that I attended the Puente Summer Institute, or PSI, in summer 2010. Only then did I experience first hand what the program is intended to do. PSI is a teacher training and has the benefit of the several decades of experience and materials behind it.
The training took place at UC Berkeley’s Faculty Club, a rustic setting. Sitting around a rectangular table in the Seabourg room, on the top floor, overlooking oak trees and the lawn to one side, and the music buildings to the other, along with a deck coming off the room, seventeen of us made this our home for eight days. Unlike other conferences, here, we did not look at our watches or the clock repeatedly—participants did not have to swig tons of coffee or iced tea to keep awake, and did not have to sit through endless presentations as passive viewers. Here, we all were active. The work that the leaders of the training, Grace Ebron and Julia Vergara and those who supported their work, did, engaged us as learners, a testament to their passion. Ironically, the depth of the writing that came out these eight days has surpassed what I’ve done in creative writing workshops.
My recent experience as an graduate school teaching assistant figured well into what I was learning in Puente, and now in PSI. My background as an MFA Fiction student at Mills College, along with the critical essays I wrote, both finishing up my B.A. and working on my MFA, helped me understand the relationship between the creative and the critical. Further, my own presentation at the conference for the Teaching Methods Course at Mills demonstrated my attitude towards teaching early on. Ruth Saxton, the teacher of the course, said we did not need to incorporate the pedagogical essays we had been reading into the presentation, yet I was one of a few who did not rely on the rhetoric and jargon in the diatribe. Instead, my focus was on using poetry in a composition class, in this case Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina,” as an example in showing how to make poetry analysis accessible to anyone.
Equally relevant to teaching Puente was my experience in the teaching scholarship program at Mills. Every student-teacher: 1: Acted as a teaching assistant in a Mills English instructor’s English 1A classroom; 2: Taught ten students from that 1A class in a “Basic Skills” class; 3: Individually tutored each of those ten students for 20 minutes a week. Saxton not only taught the course, but created the teaching scholarship program—how it was implemented, the three layers acting as a thorough and complex way of learning. Working with students intimately as both teacher and helper invited different ways of assisting and relating to the students. The layered system was thorough and effective, much like the Puente program, I would realize later, with its arms of support.
As a composition teacher, I have focused on using purely critical skills and maintaining distance from the subject in how ideas are expressed, avoiding personal experience as valid an example as citing from text, and too, avoiding using “I” statements. This did not preclude having students do freewrite where they expressed themselves and told their personal stories. But it didn’t enter into the critical dialogue. In spite of my background as a creative writer, it has not been obvious that students should “write what they know,” a mantra that many teachers impart. It has felt wrong, in fact, to practice that as a composition teacher. Some see critical writing as the great equalizer, that anyone from any background can use analysis as a window; rather than depending on ethnic backgrounds for relating to a text, it’s about the process of analysis. However comfortable I am in doing that kind of writing, I see its use to the exclusion of more colloquial language elitist. The academy does not let in slang—they have one platform and you’ve got to speak the language to get into the club.
Students do not easily grasp critical writing, as academic voice is not intuitive and must be explained clearly, especially for “non-traditional students,” who have not been brought up with the assumption that they will go to college, transfer to a four year university, and proceed into professional life. They have not received the legacy of parents who have college degrees. Non-traditional students, though, do have families who want their children to get a higher degree, succeed, and have a professional career. Or, at the very least, the family begins by understanding college is a path to success, a way to get beyond the economic struggles they have suffered in poverty, back in their country of origin.
The idea with Puente is that students will transfer and more—that they will return to mentor new Puente students and make a difference in the community. The connection, then, between what students read and the way they respond to it, is hugely important, because they need to be drawn into the academic dialogue rather than being left outside of it, a hard reality. The idea of the mirror, then, is to bridge the unfamiliar, so they get used to their own voices before adapting to this new way of conversing.
The first morning at PSI, the organizers put up large sheets of paper on the walls around us. At our specified seats around the rectangular table, each of us, including leaders Grace and Julia, took the colored marker pen and wrote the required information on each sheet of paper. On one we wrote our preferred name or nickname; on others the last movie we saw, the last book we read, and a surprising piece of information someone wouldn’t know from looking at us. This is not an unusual ice breaker, but they combined it with the act of physically getting up and walking around to write on the walls, which helped us share the space. Then, we took turns, each of us talking about the name we wished to be called and one other item.
A handful of assignments that we did at PSI reminded me of a term that Ruth Saxton at Mills used frequently in our Teaching Methods class—“meta-teaching.” Here, this meant that we participated in an exercise, which then, in turn, we could use for our classes. One assignment asked us to respond to one of the vignettes in Sandra Cisneros’ book The House on Mango Street, entitled “My Name.” I had used this prompt before, having taken it off the Puente Wiki site the previous fall, but what I didn’t have then was the scaffolding which Grace and Julia now provided. Grace read the vignette once. Then she had a second person read it aloud. During this, we were to underline a few strong lines. Then Grace read her own response to it, which she had written previously, to demonstrate our next task. The entire group was then broken up into “familias,” groups of four, where we sat down and wrote for 15 minutes before sharing. My familia consisted of Julia, the co-leader (because the teacher should participate), along with my fellow participants Vero and Jamie. Family, as I knew from my work around Puente thus far, was important. We would keep working in these same familias for the entire eight days of the conference.
As each person in the familia read, the rest of us wrote down several strong lines and two questions to ask the writer. Then we shared those comments with the writer, who in turn, made a note of them. The writer didn’t need to answer the questions; instead she could use comments later on, in the revision process. Everyone’s writing revealed something deeply personal in response to the prompt. The feedback would allow a door to open up for the writer with the focus on doing a re-write. Other assignments included the photo activity, which also had scaffolding to facilitate a process, and the writing prompt given by author Alex Espinosa, whose novel Still Water Saints we had been assigned to read.
One activity which branched out of the strictly “familia” groups was the “expert group.” The expert groups were made up of people from different familias—people we had not yet worked with. Each group was assigned to read a different excerpt from a longer reading. My group was assigned the opening from Victor Villasenor’s memoir Burro Genius, where he talks about what supports and obstacles he has had in his education. He was under-value and misunderstood, discriminated against, and explains how sometimes the one person who encourages you to excel may not be a teacher or a parent. This particular excerpt of begins with a speech for an award. Up at the podium, he speaks to a room full of English teachers—just the very kind of teacher who has always discouraged him. The enemy. He throws away his notes and goes off on a vicious rant against English teachers. Some teachers in the audience storm out. Some weather the barrage. At the end, whoever is left in the room gives him a standing ovation, because he has, in fact, recognized good teaching.
Using the reading in these expert groups rather than our familias had an advantage in that we were asked to do a critical reading of a text. This contrasted with the work with our familias, which had a more personal flavor— a different tone and different purpose. We spent 15 minutes analyzing the Villasenor excerpt. After reading the piece, we wrote for 15 solid minutes. The reading resonated with me, for even though English was always my good subject, I had no more motivation than Villasenor, and also struggled to feel more positive about myself and achieve something. I responded both on a critical and personal level.
Then we returned to our familias to read our writing aloud. As it turns out, the writing that came out of this expert group discussion allowed me, for the first time, to see my mother and father’s role in my education. Here is where the concept of the mirror and the window come in. The result of working in two groups benefited another layer of learning, but revealed, too, another layer of the personal. This brought confidence and knowledge, looking through a critical lense and transforming that personally. With the familia and the expert group I got a sense of how the mirror and window felt.
With PSI, because I participated in the way a student would in my classes, I benefited personally and professionally in a way which has helped me understand student thinking and student writing.
While the idea of the Puente Program is to utilize the mirror in fall semester and the window in spring, a base of personal experience broadening into critical analysis, the lines don’t seem so clear cut, depending on which Puente English instructor you talk to, or which program you are referring to. Laney's program, for instance, has greater diversity rather than many, so a Puente class there has its own unique mix. Plus, the counselor purposefully recruits some non-Latinos to give a real view of the greater Bay Area community. Mostly the Latinos speak Spanish, but we also have Chicanos who may be distant from their original language and are seeking connection. The end result is that some have the mirror while some have the window on a particular text.
Laney College cancelled its Puente Program for this year. The Dean of Humanities told me several weeks before the semester began. My response was to burst into tears. After a mourning period, I decided to refocus and use my “Puentified” material for what would now be a regular 201 class, because the Dean said she was opening it up to all students who wished to enroll. Most of the students who had registered for the Puente program stayed in my class, though there are more “window” experiences this fall, with the typical mix of African American, Vietnamese, African, Chinese, and others. They are experiencing what Puente students receive in an English class, without the support of a counselor or mentor, so enjoy the materials, such as Francisco Jiminez’ young adult memoir Breaking Through, as well as vignettes from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. We also examine essays from Gloria Naylor, Amy Tan, and M. Scott Momaday, as well as gender-related essays, to cut across the multiplicity of backgrounds.
The non-Puente class responded to Breaking Through with joy. The story of a migrant farm worker family, when the author was a boy, reaches out to everyone because of the issues faced. I had them do reading responses where they listed which characters appeared in what setting, a summary per chapter, and a close reading of three quotations to look at the author’s use of language. We had already done summary and close reading with the first unit, so this honed these skills. In class, we investigated, firstly, the student’s personal aspirations, and secondly, the challenges of the characters in the story. Beginning with a freewrite about a time they had to start over, they talked about how the characters in the story started over and the hardships and rewards involved. From there we discussed examples of power in the story—who has it, who does not, and how it’s used, pointing in the direction of both traditional family gender roles and a hierarchy and discrimination based on racial lines. Through looking at their own lives, they could now appreciate Jiminez’ story on two levels—personally and critically.
Whether a Puente class or not, any class will benefit from what a Puente teacher gleans at one of the teacher trainings or conferences, conferring with other Puente teachers, and having the support of a co-coordinator and others in the program. When at first I heard people in the program saying over and over “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” about Puente, I didn’t believe it. I saw no need to put students in “familias” for the entire semester and didn’t understand how important family was to the Latino culture. Why was the mentor important? Why did the English instructor and the counselor need to work together. perhaps even co-teaching an occasional class in addition to being present in each other’s classes? Why did it need to be an accelerated program? My questions would be answered in time. And I would discover the experience of Puente from within and how it transforms everyone who participates. The window and the mirror are two parts of the same vision—to open up the boundaries, both looking within and searching further afield, and to grow.
