Literature+Review

Mariel Novas **Bridging the Gap:** **//A Literature Review of Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE)//** **//at Home and Abroad//**

One of the most outstanding trends in our world today is the constant movement of people across borders and lands. State lines that were previously firmly demarcated stand today as porous juxtapositions of nations in many cases. As a result, many students are moving in and out of school systems, with particular significant shifts from the so-called “Third World” to institutions in more developed nations. In the United States, and other countries like it, a group of students, referred to as English Language Learners (ELL’s), now constitute a large portion of the student population in many schools. Within this population exists an increasingly larger subset of students who are often referred to as students with limited or interrupted formal education (SIFE). These are students who have significant gaps in their academic trajectory and thus lag behind their peers in regards to their ability to compete in more structured school settings. Scholars in the field of education have shed light on how to best understand and identify this group, and have contributed to a body of knowledge that proposes best practices for instructing SIFE students.

DeCapua, Smathers, and Tang (2007) helped led a case study that looked at SIFE students from Sierra Leone, the Dominican Republic, and China. They outlined the factors that can contribute to the interruption of students’ education, such as “war, migration, lack of education facilities, cultural dictates, and economic circumstances” (DeCapua et al., 2007, p. 40). Each student profiled in the study underwent a unique circumstance that resulted in significant gaps in their academic development. Nevertheless, the authors argued that, although SIFE students lacked the academic wherewithal appropriate for their age, they had life experiences that were unparalleled among their peers (DeCapua et al., 2007, p. 42). As a result, they believed that teachers had to capitalize on SIFE students’ strengths via a specific set of instructional best practices. In particular, they pointed to sheltered instruction, content ESL, bilingual instruction, and collaborative learning as the strategies that would best support students with interrupted education (DeCapua et al., 2007, pgs. 43-44). The latter two strategies would help foster students’ sense of community, allowing them to recreate learning environments similar to those from their home countries, and thus facilitating their acquisition of academic content.

Within several years, DeCapua and Marshall (2010) furthered this vein of research and introduced the idea of the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP) as the optimal strategy for reaching SIFE students. MALP combined features of low-context (LC) and high context (HC) cultures and their learning styles in order to best bridge the gap for students with limited formal education. The authors determined that SLIFE students, as they called them, “neede[d] immediate applications, interpersonal relationships, collaborative opportunities, oral learning components, and repeated contextualized practice” in order to succeed in the classroom (DeCapus and Marshall, 2010, p. 167). The central elements of the U.S. classroom – “future relevance, independence, individual achievement and accountability, the written word, and academic orientation” – stand in direct contradiction to the highly contextualized SLIFE learning paradigm. As a result, the authors determined, teachers need to teach SLIFE students lessons that are meaningful to them and that have relevance to their lives and experiences. Furthermore, all concepts taught should be embedded in context and not exist as abstract ideas to be learned discretely. Given SLIFE students’ pragmatic view of the world, as opposed to the academic orientation espoused by many American students, it is important that students with such gaps in their academic content knowledge be taught in group contexts with heavy discussion in order to allow them to communicate in more flexible ways.

Jennifer Miller (2009) studied the immigrant African SIFE student population in Melbourne high schools as they struggled with science content classes, and determined that vocabulary for content classes such as science and math needed to be taught in meaningful and explicit ways in order for SIFE students to access content (Miller, 2009, p. 576). Miller observed that teachers in these classrooms helped students create vocabulary notebooks and dictionaries in groups (with other SIFE students), yet also allowed them to “talk science” in their native language in order to build confidence with the content knowledge. Students were also encouraged to use visual aids. Most importantly, though, SIFE students in Melbourne learned to make science vocabulary meaningful in order to solidify their understanding. Without question, Miller’s contribution adds to DeCapua et al.’s 2007 and 2010 stipulations that students with interrupted learning succeed the most when taught in peer groups, and when material is presented to them in a highly contextualized, multi-faceted way. As a final statement, Miller (2009) declares that explicit vocabulary instruction needs to be an essential part of pedagogy particularly in content classes that have “hard words” that block student progress. It is clear that the individualistic and competitive nature of Western classrooms do not help SIFE students as they transition from the schools and organizations in their home countries, which tend to be more collectivistic and orally-inclined.

In her research, Nykiel-Herbert (2010) agrees that culturally relevant instruction is an imperative when dealing with students with interrupted formal education. Nykiel-Herbert (2010) studied Iraqi refugee students, ages 8-11, from an upstate New York urban school. The author’s “ data confirmed that when in a learning environment similar to that of their home culture, students' learning outcomes significantly improved” (Nykiel-Herbert, 2010, p. 3). Like DeCapua et al. (2007 and 2009) and Miller (2009) before her, Nykiel-Herbert (2010) outlines the importance of having SIFE students maintain a sense of home culture at school so that they are able to perform well within this foreign framework. The author elaborates: “ The culturally homogenous learning environment of the self-contained classroom created unique opportunities for the Iraqi children to advance academically, strengthen their sense of ethnic and cultural identity, and gain appreciation and respect for the host culture” (Nykiel-Herbert, 2010, p. 13). As proved by this case study, SIFE students need a classroom environment where their culture is reaffirmed and celebrated, and where they are able to explore academic content in the company of other students that share their experience. Only then are they able to make academic progress, feel like they have a stake in a US (or otherwise) classroom, and feel valued in their classroom experience.

In the past several years, researchers have greatly contributed to our understanding of students with interrupted or limited formal education, exposing the challenges that they face in schools around the world and proposing best instructional practices to educators that have struggled to reach this population in the past. The anthology of their work provides teachers with valuable solutions that can be used to better serve a subgroup of students who, in today’s world, composes an increasingly larger segment of our classroom populations.