Community Connections

Penn GSE Students Help Break Down Barriers

At the Chinese take-out restaurants along West Philadelphia's 52nd Street corridor, customers — most of them African American — are, as often as not, welcomed by a bullet-proof plastic barrier.

"From the Chinese people's side," says Li Hong Qiao, a student in Penn GSE's Intercultural Communication program, "they had to use a plastic barrier to protect themselves. But from the other side, they feel this barrier as a real barrier, to exclude them."

In 2008, Fatimah Muhammad, manager of the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians West, teamed up with Li and his ICC classmate Xupeng Liang to pioneer the Intercultural Organizing and Research Program (ICORP), an outreach program that connects GSE students to foreign-owned businesses in West Philadelphia and Germantown. Read more >>

The Road Back to Teaching

First-time teacher Wilson Boyd had an assignment in one of Philadelphia's most troubled high schools. The challenges confronting Boyd — kids with reading skills that lag far behind their grade level, kids with disengaged parents, kids who've given up on school — are typical for urban schools like Olney West. Boyd, on the other hand, was something of an anomaly.

A Teach For America corps member not long out of college, Boyd was also a master's student at Penn GSE. He was working hard to improve his students' reading skills, thinking that he'd be successful at his job if student achievement moved up an average of two grade levels. Read more >>

Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

"For me, the happiest moment is when I hear children say ‘This is awesome!' and see the desire of learning on their faces," says Pei-ying Wu, a student in Penn GSE's Teaching, Learning and Curriculum program and one of the teachers in a new after-school Chinese language program that launched this fall in West Philadelphia.

West Philly's first-ever Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language after-school program is the brainchild of Penn GSE Lecturer Anne Pomerantz GEd'98 Gr'01 and Hilary Bonta GEd'98. Both mothers of elementary schoolchildren, the pair shared an interest in foreign language instruction — and a desire to bring it into Philadelphia classrooms.

One day, Pomerantz explains, "It just came to us. We have all these Chinese-language speakers here at GSE. What if they taught Chinese to our kids?"  Read more >>