$154,000 state grant increases funding to ESL teaching programs

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education awarded $154,000 to the ESL Professional Communities for Expertise and Leadership Development, an IU School of Education program.

The grant will fund training for more English as a Second Language teachers for two Indiana school corporations in East Chicago, Ind., and South Bend, through on-site workshops, graduate courses, summer institutes and a capstone project.

“This need is felt statewide,” said Faridah Pawan, program leader and associate professor of ESL/English. “We have had multiple federally funded and state-funded programs that train and certify ESL teachers around the state.”

Enrollment of students in Indiana with limited English proficiency increased from about 11,000 to about 46,000 during the past 10 years, according to the Indiana Department of Education.

Pawan said the trend “will continue and may even accelerate.”

Pawan said she hoped the program offers a long-term, sustained and embedded professional development to the teachers.

“This means that we provide professional development to our teachers in a unique way,” Pawan said. “We do not remove them from their classrooms and from their students, but we provide a hybrid of face-to-face and online training to the teachers while they teach.”

Pawan said that in 2003, fewer than 300 ESL-certified teachers were in the state and programs similar to this have increased the number of certified ESL teachers by about 20 percent.

Michelle Greene, an ESL teacher and an IU doctoral student who is an assistant in the program, said ESL teachers in the East Chicago and South Bend areas face a lack of local training, tuition costs, inconvenient scheduling and time conflicts.

“Our project aims to overcome those barriers and bring direct, in-depth ESL and leadership training to 11 teachers every year at every school corporation over the two-year span,” she said.