Volunteer Teaching and ESL Education at the Nationalities Service Center: An Interview with Ellen Polsky

Posted by on February 29, 2012

I interviewed Ellen Polsky, the Education Director at Nationalities Service Center, to learn more about the work that her volunteers from local colleges and universities do with parents from Philadelphia public schools. Nationalities Service Center is a non-profit established in 1921 for immigrants and refugees in Philadelphia.

NSC does everything from teaching ESL to immigrants from all over the world, resettling refugees, providing translation and interpretation to businesses, non-profits, and individuals, providing legal services to immigrants and refugees, and providing meals and health care services to senior citizens. Staff includes lawyers, paralegals, case managers, folks to help clients with heath care access and employment, and a management team made up of all of the directors of departments. NSC’s legal services help immigrants adjust their legal status. Their legal aids also work with victims of domestic violence. Telling a woman that she will be deported is a big threat in the immigrant community. The education work we do is to help support parents in developing language skills and help them to interpret information they obtain from schools.

Q: Do you currently partner with Philadelphia School District schools directly or do parents come to your site in center city?

A: Yes, we do partner with them directly.We do our education work through the School District of Philadelphia to provide ESL classes for parents of school-age children. In addition, if the School District gets an influx of people with a language that they haven’t dealt with before, we get called and asked to provide services for families and parents; for example, translation and interpretation. Because we are so linked in to the immigrant and refugee communities, we can predict when there are more refugees coming and we help schools in particular neighborhoods prepare for that. For example, Burmese refugees have been coming to this area recently and we have been helping schools prepare for transitioning them.

Our collaboration with the District is run through Parent University. They contract with us to provide ESL classes for parents all over the city. Those are the only paid jobs we have for ESL teachers. If someone wants to obtain a paid job in teaching adults, then it’s a good idea to start out as a volunteer at NSC in our center city location.

Q: How do you recruit and support new ESL teachers for your programs?

A: We teach almost exclusively adults, but we consider adults people who are 16 and older. Sometimes we’ll get a request from someone who is in the public schools and wants extra services. For most of our programs we actually don’t really advertise at all. I would say it’s 99% word of mouth, both for volunteer teachers and for ESL students.

There’s no adult education certification in Pennsylvania, so we provide training on site and we go to other locations to give trainings as well. We do an 8 hour training 4 times a year for anyone who wants to be a volunteer ESL teacher. If you don’t want to volunteer, you have to pay to get the training, but you can do that as well if you would like to use the training to support another program. We are a very supportive place for our volunteer teachers. Teachers can call us and get help creating lesson plans. Though we will give them support and resources, we ask our teachers to modify lesson plans based on their groups. We believe strongly in a student-centered curriculum. Students’ needs come first, and they must practice the language more than 50% of class time. Teachers should not lecture, and we are focused on creating a very participatory curriculum.

Q: Where to most of your teachers come from?

A: 40-45% of our volunteer teachers are in TESOL programs from Penn and Temple. We have a bunch of undergraduate and grad students who are studying issues that are closely related that they need to gain experience in. We have social work interns, law students and international relations students doing teaching and tutoring. We also have a great collaboration with Penn’s TESOL program. We also work with a lot of international students who are on visas. We get teachers from the RSVP – Retired Senior Volunteer Program. We also have some teachers who are just very passionate about helping new immigrant communities.

We are also looking to expand opportunities to different groups of college students who don’t have as much knowledge about our students and clients. I just had a meeting with Eric Hartman from Drexel who would like NSC to serve as a placement for the 15 hours of required service for freshman students. We’ve even had high school students as tutors and volunteers. This year, we have a South Philly High School student working on his Senior Project with us. He is a Haitian student and was interested in how he and other immigrants are able to access education. He was able to observe classes and conduct interviews. We also had a student from CAPA come learn more about her parents’ struggle to learn English. She wanted to know why it was so hard for an adult to learn English when it wasn’t as challenging for her. (She came as a child.)

Q: What issues do recent immigrants and refugees face in pursuing higher education?

A: Well, we collaborate with CCP a lot to help students navigate the services that are out there for them. CCP has an ESL consortium to talk about what they can do in order to help students prepare and be more aware of what is available at CCP. For example, students don’t need the test of English as a Foreign Language, which you need at other schools to get in, which is an advantage, but they also need to know about ESL services at CCP. We also work to push the American Dream Act because there are significant numbers of undocumented students who are not able to apply for in-state tuition because of their status. We also try and help students understand the easiest inroads to colleges. For anyone who comes to us who is under 25, we encourage them to graduate from a Philadelphia Public School because it’s much easier to directly matriculate to Community College as a Philadelphia high school graduate.

Q: What do you think volunteer teachers learn from their experiences at the Nationalities Service Center?

A: Nationalities Service Center had an impact on how I became an advocate and an educator, and I think it’s important for our younger generations to understand the immigrant community. I was a volunteer teacher here in 1975. They didn’t have whole classes going on, but they sent people to students’ homes, and I got to really know the immigrant community through that experience. Our teachers get to be advocates for our organization in the community.

We also are a site for service-learning projects in elementary schools. For example, at the Philadelphia School, 3rd graders do a read-a-thon and raise money for us, and then they come here and we talk about what we do here and they get to ask questions to recent immigrants about what their experiences are like.

A lot of our students take our classes plus free ESL classes around the city. Our students are willing to pay for classes because they know we watch their progress carefully and monitor their goals, and we have well-supported teachers. We pay attention to our students.

Q: Where could you use more support from college students for your programs?

A: We could use a lot more help in the Parent University classes at different schools around the city.  We are looking for assistant teachers because we could have up to 20 students in a class and a much wider array of levels for volunteers to be able help with. We really try to make classes interactive, so volunteers are very helpful with that. We are currently working at Juniata Park, South Philly High School, Roberto Clemente, DeBurgos Elementary and Bartram High School.

To learn more:
Nationalities Service Center: http://www.nationalitiesservice.org/
Education Opportunities: http://www.nscphila.org/education/
How to Volunteer: http://www.nscphila.org/about/jobs/volunteer-esl-teacher/