For Choua Lor, a 2nd grade teacher at Vang Pao Elementary in Fresno, Calif., teaching is a calling. But working in the school’s Hmong dual-language immersion program is what she calls her life’s purpose.
“You are educating students, but at the same time, you’re doing more than that,” Lor said. “You are helping them identify with their identity. You’re grounding them back to their roots, their culture, their language, and it’s so rewarding.”
Lor is among a small cohort of bilingual educators who work in the handful of Hmong dual-language immersion programs across the country. These programs typically serve elementary grades, with some expanding into middle and high school. Students learn academic content in both English and Hmong, with school days split between the two languages.
Districts face several challenges in launching dual-language immersion programs, which are often compounded when working with less commonly taught languages such as Urdu, Vietnamese, or Hmong. For instance, Hmong is a stateless language, and for centuries existed only as an oral tradition with no formal writing system, said Pa Foua Thao, a Hmong teacher-leader in the Madison Metropolitan school district’s department of curriculum and instruction, in Wisconsin.
Districts offering Hmong dual-language immersion programs, as well as similar programs in other less commonly taught languages, often must create their own curriculum and instructional materials from scratch. In turn, U.S. schools become some of the few places in the world to teach reading and writing in Hmong, Thao added.
Teachers working in such programs spoke with Education Week about the unique challenges they face in the classroom, as well as the rewarding experiences they face in helping students better connect with their families.
Teachers experience flexibility in testing out Hmong curriculum
Hmong dual-language immersion curriculum is often edited on the go in programs across the country, teachers said, requiring adaptability through trial and error, and offering opportunities for teachers to take ownership over instruction.
“I find that if someone writes a curriculum or a lesson for us, and they haven’t really taught long, or they haven’t really been in the classroom, a lot of the time it’s either too rigorous or not rigorous [enough],” Lor said. “So we do get a lot of wiggle room in which we get to try. If it’s good, we keep it. If it’s not good, we throw it out.”
At Balderas Elementary in Fresno, Calif., Sasah Xiong, a 1st grade Hmong dual-language immersion teacher, builds decodables and language progressions for her students.
“I have that privilege [of] creating the curriculum,” Xiong said. “I’m teaching as I’m creating it, and it’s so powerful that I get to make changes here, make changes there, and it’s still fluid.”
In Madison, Wis., while Thao and her district-level colleagues are primarily responsible for creating the Hmong curriculum, which is rooted in research, teachers still have creative agency to incorporate Hmong culture into instruction, such as having students sing Hmong folk songs that they read off a page.
“I think that’s the best part of being in a program that isn’t so scripted,” Thao said. “You can use creativity to bring the culture piece and wrap that in literacy.”
Even with district support in creating curriculum, Hmong teachers said they sometimes still need to develop their own instructional materials, which aren’t often readily available online. They must also ensure their students meet state standards in English, with only half the time their English-only counterparts get each school day.
“I didn’t expect how much behind-the-scenes work it would take, especially creating resources and advocating for support,” said Kalia Yang, a kindergarten and 1st grade Hmong dual-language immersion teacher at Lake View Elementary in Madison. “But it’s worth the effort.”
Yang recalls one start of a school year when an incoming student asked her if she was Hmong. His face lit up when she said yes, and he replied, “I am Hmong, too!”
“For the first time, he was going to have a teacher who shares the same home language and background system. This is something that’s so powerful, and it just helps students to feel seen and valued in a school environment,” Yang said.
Students bridge generational divides through Hmong instruction
Most students in Hmong dual-language immersion programs speak English as their first language with limited to no fluency in Hmong, teachers said.
Though these students often live in multigenerational households where their grandparents speak Hmong, their parents don’t always choose to—or are sometimes unable to—pass the language down.
In the case of California, a state proposition back in the 1990s required English-only instruction for decades, further motivating families to focus on cultural and linguistic assimilation, teachers said. California voters overturned this law in 2016.
“When I was still a student, I didn’t get this opportunity. It was English only, and I was lost,” Xiong said. “My identity was lost. It was so hard to figure out who I was.”
It’s why Hmong teachers say one of the highlights of working in dual-language immersion programs is hearing parents report that their children can finally communicate freely with their grandparents, in some cases even surpassing their grandparents’ literacy after learning how to read and write in Hmong.
Helping students connect to their culture and seeing it honored in an academic setting is what keeps many of these educators going.
“I had an incoming student who didn’t know what Hmong was, but over time, she became really interested and is now one of my strongest Hmong readers,” Yang said. “I have another student who rarely spoke Hmong when he started, but now he uses it naturally to affirm directions and doesn’t need to wait for an adult. That’s a great sign of internalizing the language.”
“Language ownership is one of the most meaningful outcomes,” Yang said.
