Where Language is No Barrier

Room 2201 at Cesar A. Batalla Elementary School may be short on supplies, but it's overflowing with HOPE.

From the Spring 2021 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By Gina Pribaz Vozenilek

She has half a classroom in which to make do. It’s an elementary school, but with 1,100 students, space here is at a premium. She keeps a cubbyhole bookshelf stocked with graphic novels to help develop vocabulary while keeping her students engaged in learning. The combination of images and text in the novels is essential, since often the only things her students have in common are their dreams and the language they don’t speak—yet.

Jessica Baldizon ’13 teaches at Cesar A. Batalla Elementary School in Bridgeport, where 93% of the students are minorities, a significant number of whom are immigrants and refugees. Among this group are Jessica’s sixth graders, who are learning English as a second or even third language.

Hers is more than just a classroom—it’s a model of community for her students, a place where all are welcome and valued. A classroom charter states, “We the ESOL students and teacher of Room 2201 want to feel respected, welcome, intelligent, safe and happy.” On a bulletin board bearing the invitation to “Create the World You Want,” her sixth graders stretch their language skills by writing about a particular place that they want to see in their community and then reading each other’s needs and dreams: daycare centers, orphanages, schools of art, soccer fields.

Then, come the final bell of the day when the other classrooms empty, Baldizon’s tiny room expands to fit giants. Baldizon’s fiancé, William King, teaches ESL just down the street from Room 2201 at the high school serving the same neighborhood. As both teachers were already in the habit of staying after school to tutor their own students, they wondered what might happen if they combined the groups and joined forces.

For four years now, HOPE Club—Harboring Optimism and Perseverance through Education—has brought together kids ranging in age from grades 4‒12 and from countries and backgrounds as diverse as Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Sudan, Eritrea and Congo. Roughly 30 students crowd together in Baldizon’s classroom to eat together (“like the Last Supper,” she says), build community and develop language skills in an authentic way. In the absence of grades, but with the support of each other, they gain confidence and leadership skills as they learn how to lead discussion, arrive at consensus and give one another constructive feedback.

At first blush, it may seem odd that young adults about to head off to college would want to spend their time with the hopscotch set. But that’s the power of community. Those who are older see themselves in the younger students, who in turn look up to them, and the club becomes something more than an extracurricular activity. It becomes family.

Stories’ Staying Power

“Growing up, I knew there was power in language,” says Baldizon, whose classroom reflects her own upbringing in more ways than one. She is herself the child of immigrants who sought safety and stability; her parents and maternal grandparents fled a war-torn Nicaragua in 1984. Once settled in Connecticut, her parents worked for a large book company, and her playroom featured a wall of books. Living in a multigenerational home, she drank in the family narratives about life in Nicaragua—vivid pictures of her young Abuelita rolling cigars and her Abuelito selling avocados filled her imagination. Grittier tales, too, the kind that forge resilience and character, and some that explained why certain loud noises could still cause her mother to freeze. Creativity, resourcefulness and “unconditional care” were common themes that emerged from these stories that helped Baldizon think about who she was.

Raised listening to stories of extended family arriving in the States, fortunately all able to live together—17 people and three generations under one roof at one point—Jessica grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles and many cousins. Still, sitting around the crowded dining room table, there was always room for anyone needing a little help or a plate of Abuelita’s nacatamales. There, she listened and she learned.

“Their stories helped ground me,” Baldizon says. They also showed her the power of the village and the need to build strong communities to rise up and endure.

Building Community

Jessica Baldizon’s time at SHU was all about connecting to and serving community. She joined the Rotaract Club, a collegiate branch of the Rotary Club, to cultivate leadership skills and volunteered every Saturday morning with the Daughters of Charity, organizing the donation center.

Now as a graduate and educator, Baldizon relies once again on those family stories to inform her work. She conceives of education as an endeavor that may be anchored in a classroom, but not bound by it. As with that crowded dinner table or the gathered desks of HOPE Club, she knows firsthand the need newcomers have for a welcoming space.

“Teaching is a vehicle for working deeply within the community,” Baldizon says, a theory tested and proven as COVID-19 restrictions drove HOPE Club out of the classroom, forcing them to regroup online. Though everyone missed the physical sense of community, an interesting thing happened. The new format allowed for alumni of HOPE Club to join the meetings in a kind of homecoming. And come they did, returning as guest speakers, playing the part of that older generation with all those stories to tell. “Their shared experience of being immigrants transcends their difference in age and even in culture,” says Baldizon, so that fascinating overlaps and rich connections occur. “We see them really own their stories.”

Baldizon’s students also learn, as she has, how important sharing those stories is to building a community.