Where the Sun Breezes Don't Stop Shining
Teachers' Journals and Students' Writings
on First-time Homebuying
from the
New
Americans Homeowners Project
February - June 1997
The Adult Literacy Resource Institute
Boston, Massachusetts
"America is not like a blanket, one piece of cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt - many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread."
--Jesse Jackson
Project Summary
The Adult Literacy Resource Institute (A.L.R.I.)* launched its New Americans Homeowners Project with the purpose of projecting a vision of hope in a culture becoming increasingly more anti-immigrant. Generously supported by the Fannie Mae Foundation, the project offered teacher training workshops and technical assistance on the use of Fannie Mae's homebuying curriculum, How to Buy a Home in the United States. Written by the Center for Applied Linguistics, the curriculum is designed to teach the basics of first-time homebuying to intermediate and advanced students of English who are new immigrants.
Fifteen teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at community programs from all over Boston participated in the project. They attended three training workshops held in March, April and May of 1997 and taught the curriculum in their classes. In June, the A.L.R.I. held an open community meeting featuring the curriculum and local Boston real estate experts. The A.L.R.I. also provided technical assistance to teachers as they went through the curriculum. The project reached over 200 students, representing the major ethnicities of Boston: Latino, Haitian, Portuguese-speaking, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, and African. Many classes were comprised of students from the same ethnic and/or language group, but a number of classes were mixed. Students shared the common goal of speaking and writing better English, as well as learning more about life in the United States.
The Goals of the A.L.R.I.
The A.L.R.I. envisioned the project as a way to support students' goals of established a new life in this country. Many immigrants are studying for citizenship, getting involved in their communities and making the U.S. a permanent home. Homeownership reinforces those steps. In addition, the ALRI was interested in discovering new approaches to working with a content-based curriculum and finding new methods of gathering information and organizing content. The project fulfilled these expectations and assisted in further refining the uses of a content-based curriculum. As one teacher expressed, "On the whole, students were pleased to be dealing with such adult materials. Very often ESOL students are not given access to such dense subject matter in such thorough coverage. In most texts, reading passages are of unrelated and disconnected subject matter. The advantage of content learning and teaching was evident in this curriculum."
Using the Curriculum
Teachers felt that the Fannie Mae curriculum and the materials developed through their classes and the ALRI should not be used as a substitute for the comprehensive first-time homeownership courses offered in Boston. Instead, the curriculum served as an introduction to the idea of homebuying and a preparation for making a purchase some day in the future. Teachers were able to adjust their curriculum to focus on the more immediate needs of students, such as financial planning, credit, deciding the kind of home (one-family, duplex) a family would need, or the best location to live. Many teachers, especially those who did not own homes, were able to convey to students that they themselves were learning about homebuying at the same time. One teacher commented in her report: "Some of [the students] knew a lot already. I faced my inadequacy squarely, rushed to the library, and borrowed two books about buying a first home. That weekend, I drowned myself in real estate."
Most teachers began by asking their classes if anyone had thought about buying a home, and explained their own interest in the curriculum. A few teachers informally surveyed students to determine their level of knowledge about homebuying, and/or if there were homeowners in the class. In at least two classes, the students who were homeowners opted not to disclose the fact to other students. In another class, a student was very forthright about her negative experience as a homeowner. Teachers were challenged to integrate students' various perspectives on homeownership, as well as their varying levels of interest and experience with finances in this country. As classes gained momentum, teachers were discovering various approaches to the curriculum, such as: 1) descriptive writing of house structures; 2) creating a video of the class and teacher using the curriculum; 3) researching houses for sale on the Internet (Boston Globe website); 4) practicing negotiations with a seller or a landlord by role-playing in class; 5) drawing a dream house; or 6) collaborating with other teachers to share speakers, and provide information on first-time homebuying.
In using How to Buy a Home in the United States, teachers recommend that before beginning, an ESOL teacher should review the whole curriculum first, chapter by chapter, noting which areas would be relevant to their students' interests. In creating a lesson plan, teachers can use the exercises laid out in the units, in addition to supplementing them with other resources. The following were common areas of focus:
1. Credit & savings.
2. Steps in planning to buy a house.
3. Looking for a home.
4. Deciding how much you can afford to pay for a home.
5. Negotiating with banks and lawyers.
6. Programs that can save you money.
7. Home issues of importance to tenants: lead paint poisoning and tenants' rights.
8. Filling out applications for mortgage programs.
9. Looking at the fuller picture: when homebuying is not a good choice right now.
Learning Together: the Workshops and Teacher's Participation
As the workshops progressed, the fifteen teachers shared their insights with each other and four gave presentations at the open community meeting in June. This document, edited by Cathy Anderson, the project's facilitator, represents a compilation of teachers' final reports on the project, along with a selection of student writings. A wide range of approaches are represented here, with candid remarks on how students were interpreting the materials and using them in their own lives. Because of space limitations, not all fifteen teachers' reports and students' writings are represented, but remain on file at the ALRI,
The first section, "The ALRI's New Americans Homeowners Project: A Workshop Approach" is a description of the three teachers' training workshops on using the curriculum written by project participant Bonnie Nadler, who teaches ESOL and External Diploma Program (EDP) classes at the Haitian Multi-Service Center in Dorchester, a section of Boston. Bonnie's first-hand account covers the questions teachers asked about the curriculum, the information they received from guest speakers, and how teachers made use of the information in their classes.
The second section, "Lessons and Inquiries" includes the teachers' journals and narratives of how they used the materials in their classes. Students' writing -- their wishes, dreams, hesitations and leaps-- are included in "Where the Sun Breezes Don't Stop Shining," the third section. Before each writing section, where appropriate, the particular catalyst the teacher used for the writing assignment is briefly explained. To give a further sense of students' particular responses, oral interviews of four students are also included in section four.
The final section is a list of resources for teachers who plan to use this curriculum in the future. A copy of this volume, along with a number of resources listed here will be permanently available in the A.L.R.I. library.
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to many people for their wholehearted enthusiasm for the project. Thank you to: the Fannie Mae Foundation, the FannieMae Partnership Office/Boston, the Roxbury Community College Foundation, the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, The Cambridge Community Development Department, the Boston Home Center, Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, Eve Moss of Clarendon Real Estate Advisors, Avi Davis of Innovative Moves, former A.L.R.I. ESOL Coordinator, Lenore Balliro, and Roxbury Community College.
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* The A.L.R.I. is a joint project of Roxbury Community College and the University of Massachusetts/Boston. It is sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Education.
Updated 8/11/97 by David J. Rosen