As a teacher, I approach each day hoping that what occurs in the classroom will be profitable for students. Once in a while, the experience in the classroom is riveting, even life-changing. It was one of those treasured moments in my ABE/GED classroom today. I'm getting more and more ESL students, and today the room was half American-born (all people of color) and half immigrants. Our lesson was divided between a writing assignment using the week's vocabulary words and practice summarizing short reading passages. Feeling the frustration and sadness of the current news reports of African Americans shot by police, I decided to give students an opportunity to use their vocabulary words from this week to write about a conflict that they had experienced either in the workplace or with some authority figure. The vocabulary list included the following words: biased, annoyance, deplete, anxiety, and dispense. I had a hunch that some of the students would resonate with this assignment and have no trouble using these words. According to my prediction, students were readily able to write about their personal experiences using the vocabulary, and one student, in particular, recorded an experience of glaring injustice in an encounter with law enforcement. I believe this assignment primed the pump of their minds for what was to happen next.

We began reading a passage about ninjas, and the first paragraph was about the origin of the word ninja. The article claimed that the word originated from a Chinese word and gave the reasoning behind the theory. We had almost finished reading the paragraph when one of the ESL students said, "That's not true." This particular student, like most of my ESL students, is very quiet and studious and rarely initiates discussion. All eyes were on this student as we queried her about her ardent assertion. As it turned out, this student is from Japan and could read the supposed Chinese word, and verified that it was a Japanese word instead. (The article was in error; the word ninja actually comes from a Japanese word, not a Chinese word.) It was as if Pandora's Box had been opened as conversation erupted about assumptions and misunderstandings and biases. In the course of the discussion, we discovered that our group consisted of one student from Ethiopia, one from the Gambia, and two from Afghanistan, in addition to the one from Japan. Questions and responses were flying around the room, and students were expressing amazement at their own lack of knowledge and understanding about others. We talked about religion (Islam, in particular), beliefs, power structures, stereotypes, prejudice (bias--there's that vocabulary word), and profiling. And I was not leading the discussion; the students were. Each of my very quiet and reserved ESL students enthusiastically engaged in conversation with my American-born students who were humbly admitting their erroneous and stereotypical assumptions about the students' countries of origin and cultures. Empathy and a feeling of connectedness, even an awareness of our need for one another, emerged. The goodwill in the room was palpable. I believe students left the classroom feeling empowered in their ability to learn, grow, express themselves, and connect with people from very different backgrounds. It was a good day.