My wife, Suzann, is a volunteer at an elementary school in St. Louis Park, reading with young students and working with them on literacy skills. Each year she finds a few students entering the classroom who have little or no experience with English, reading, writing, books, or, sometimes, school itself. Her experience is a common one for teachers, classroom aides, and school volunteers throughout Minnesota.

These inexperienced students are children who have come to the United States hoping for a better life, escaping from war, refugee camps, political persecution, and other horrendous upheavals. How can our P–12 schools and our teachers creatively and effectively meet the needs of these children and youth—ranging in age from preschoolers to 20-year-olds—and make sure they succeed in their new country?

The college is working to help Minnesota’s educators deal with this increasingly common challenge. As you will read in this issue of Link, we are taking the lead with a federal grant that allows our faculty in second languages and cultures to gather both general classroom teachers and English as a second language teachers from around Minnesota to study the most recent research, compare their own classroom and school practices, and collaborate to find the most effective ways to work with students who don’t speak English and have little or no literacy skills.

Our goal is to share these teachers’ “best practices” with other teachers and other school districts to help all of Minnesota’s newest residents succeed in their education.

We also have faculty working in schools and in community settings to find the best way to help non-English-speaking children and adults become literate, to help counselors ease new citizens’ transition into a very different culture, and to prepare educators to teach native-English-speaking children world languages, either in regular classrooms or in immersion schools where only other world languages are spoken—thus encouraging them to become citizens of a larger world.

The day when Minnesota was primarily Scandinavian and German is long gone. The number of Hispanics in the state has increased 166 percent in the past decade. The Twin Cities has the largest urban Hmong population in the United States and the largest Somali population outside of East Africa. Minneapolis schools have more than 10,000 students speaking more than 80 home languages.

As a college with deep and historic ties to the education community of the state and as citizens of Minnesota, we believe our job is to pursue research in this field of growing importance and to share the results of that work, to collaborate with teachers who are dealing with related issues in their classrooms, and to help to educate the public about the needs of our new American students and what we and the schools are doing to make sure they succeed.

—Steve Yussen, dean