Culturally Relevant Classroom
Bic Ngo addresses shifting school populations
Bic Ngo’s life experiences inform her work with immigrant youth and families. When she was five years old, Ngo and her family fled Vietnam by boat and were placed in an Indonesian refugee camp. There they remained until an Episcopalian church in Virginia sponsored their emigration to the United States in 1979.
“I grew up in a very homogenous, white community in Virginia,” says Ngo, an assistant professor in culture and teaching (curriculum and instruction). “In fact, I didn’t connect with my Asian-American heritage until I had finished college.”
After completing her undergraduate degree at Carleton College, Ngo worked with Hmong refugees at Hmong-American Partnership in St Paul. Inspired by their struggles with class, race, and gender issues in schools, Ngo pursued a Ph.D. at UW-Madison, focused on the social and cultural contexts of education. She has been at the University of Minnesota since 2004, where she has researched and taught about culturally relevant pedagogy, urban and multicultural education in general, and immigrant education, in particular.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau 20 percent of all U.S. births are to foreign-born mothers, and more than one in four under the age of 6 are being raised by at least one foreign-born parent. Many people of Hmong and Lao descent have been here multiple generations.
“The situation is complex,” Ngo says. “To say that immigrant kids experience a ‘cultural clash’ or a ‘struggle between two cultures’ is too simplistic. These kids are not Hmong or American. They are a complex and evolving hybrid of the two.”
To prepare the next generation of teachers, Ngo’s ethnographic studies of Hmong and Lao populations, community work, and teaching all strive to provide an understanding of the “social and cultural contexts” that illuminate how race, ethnicity, class and gender impact educational experiences and outcomes.
“I believe that teachers can better serve their immigrant students by understanding the complexities of their lives, and the fact that they experience life differently than mainstream Americans born and raised here,” she says.
However, Ngo argues that simply preparing teachers is not enough. “Given the increasing numbers of immigrant youth and families in America, colleges could do a better job of recruiting teachers with an immigrant background and graduate students from immigrant communities. I hope we can enhance this commitment at the college level and be leaders in this area,” she says.
Recently, the college promoted Ngo to assistant professor, and the University honored her as a William T. Grant Scholar for exceptional early-career research. The award will support her new study, "Innovating Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Insights from Arts Programs Serving Immigrant Youth." Ngo was also one of the University’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Faculty Teaching Fellows for 2008-10 and received the Rising Star Faculty Award from the Women's Philanthropic Leadership Circle last year.
Story by Brigitt Martin | February 2011
