BACK TO SCHOOL : GARDEN GROVE : Los Amigos Workshop Focuses on Ethnic Diversity

As students signed up for classes at Los Amigos High School last year, teacher Eppie Correa offered to help a dark-haired student who seemed lost. When he didn’t respond, she tried asking in Spanish. Still no response.

“I was getting very frustrated,” she said. “Then another student came along and told me he was Vietnamese and Indian.”

Such is the plight of teachers with students who come from many cultural backgrounds. Some students speak enough English to get by. Others rely on sympathetic teachers and students for help until they can communicate.

But even after they have learned English, other barriers continue to hamper some students in school.

“I think what we have to do is sensitize the teachers to their very diversified classrooms,” said Khamchong Luangpraseut, supervisor of the Indochinese Program in the Santa Ana Unified School District.

Luangpraseut talked to about 40 teachers in the Garden Grove School District last week at a workshop about about cultural differences among Asian students. A former refugee from Laos, Luangpraseut emphasized that teachers need not feel overwhelmed about the diversity in their classrooms.

Instead, they should help their students feel they belong there.

“We have a sense of discovery,” Luangpraseut told the teachers. “We are not only refugees, but we are human beings and we have special gifts.”

Teachers like Correa and Vivianne Haskin, who also teaches at Los Amigos, said they try to learn key words and phrases to communicate in the different languages of their students.

“They respond because they know you’re trying to understand them,” Correa said. “I try to imagine if I were in their country and how I would feel.”

The workshop, offered for the second year in Garden Grove, gives teachers an idea of their Asian students’ perspectives, Luangpraseut said. And although teachers can’t possibly know everything about a student’s background, knowing some of the basic differences between cultures allows for better understanding and learning.

“I sympathize with teachers. A lot of people do not know how many hot and cold showers they have to take each day. They have to switch from level to level and language to language,” he said.

Asians make up 25% of the school district’s population, according to district figures.

Luangpraseut explained that even though some students may look like they came from the same country, Vietnamese, Laotian, Burmese, Chinese and Cambodian children differ in religion and culture.

In all ethnic groups, however, parents want to see their children live better lives than they have, Luangpraseut told the teachers.

“We have to pull those kids up to our level and then prove to them that they are better than us. If all we expect is for the kids to be as good as us, then we are going backward,” he said.