Hmong: California School Aims To Educate And Preserve Culture
After surviving centuries of wars, genocide and migration mainly to the United States, the Hmong culture stands threatened. This has been acknowledged by a new elementary school in California, which has introduced an immersion program aiming to preserve the culture and connect migrant children with their roots.
Below is an article published by Public Radio International:
At Susan B. Anthony Elementary, Mr. Vue’s kindergarteners sit on a brightly colored carpet as they look up at him, repeating sounds of the alphabet.“Ahhh, aaay, eeeh,” he sings as the children sing along.
The sounds are not in English. The school, located in South Sacramento, is home to the only Hmong dual-language immersion program on the West Coast — and the second in the country after a similar program in St. Paul, Minn.
“The idea of the Hmong immersion program is so students will become bicultural and biliterate in both English and Hmong,” explains Lee Yang, the principal and a former director of Sacramento City Unified School District’s Multilingual Literacy Department, who spearheaded the program.
In the past few years, language immersion programs have sprouted up across the country, particularly in California, where the number nearly doubled from 119 in 2000 to 233 in 2010, according to the California Department of Education. About 200 of these programs are in Spanish; the rest are in Mandarin, Korean, Cantonese, Armenian