Bridging the gap: Professor helps teachers connect with students learning English

Immigrants bring cultural and linguistic diversity to communities and classrooms. However, at times, they encounter misunderstandings while navigating their new world. By training current and future teachers, Beth Clark-Gareca hopes to help avoid misunderstandings caused by language barriers.

Clark-Gareca joined the College of Community and Public Affairs last fall as an associate professor of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership (TLEL).

The TESOL program supports a number of career paths, such as teaching in English as a New Language (ENL) programs on college campuses, being involved in English education around the world, and teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) in K-12 settings.

Clark-Gareca came to Binghamton from the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she was an associate professor and coordinator of the TESOL program. She also directed the Clinically Rich Intensive Teacher Institute in ESOL, a state-funded initiative designed to better meet the needs of ELLs in New York by providing already certified teachers with a fast track to TESOL certification. Her research interests include classroom-based assessment for ELLs, second language acquisition and K-12 teacher education.

“New Paltz is a great university and a beautiful place,” she says. “I loved my colleagues and working with preservice teachers and school districts, but New Paltz doesn’t have its eye to research like Binghamton does. At Binghamton, I can prepare teachers for the field, but I also have time and support to make contributions to research.”

Born in Detroit and raised in Oil City, Pa., Clark-Gareca developed a passion for research over the course of what she would describe as a nontraditional career path. She taught for five summers at Wuhan University in China, and was an instructor at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina where she was a Fulbright Scholar.

Wanting to learn how to be a teacher after returning stateside, she pursued a master’s degree at Columbia University’s Teachers College and then moved to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley where she taught at nearly every level from elementary to college. She subsequently started her doctoral program at New York University, where she also taught in the TESOL master’s program.

In her dissertation, with the assistance of a grant from The International Research Foundation for English Language Education, Clark-Gareca examined how English learners were accounted for in classroom-based assessments.

“They are entitled to receive accommodations on standardized tests, but if they’ve never used any in their classrooms, they won’t know what to do,” she says. “You can’t just give someone an English-Spanish dictionary and expect them to know how to use it when they haven’t had one before. Nobody had looked at this in a systematic way before.”

At CCPA, Clark-Gareca looks forward to working with teachers across Broome County, N.Y. She feels there are possibilities for increased professional development within school districts. She is also continuing the outreach she started at New Paltz and actively partnering with teachers across the state on fast-track certification programs.

“Practical focus is what teachers need,” Clark-Gareca says. “I can talk about the theory all day, but if I have precious few hours with teachers, I want to make sure I give them something concrete. There is a tremendous influx of ELLs in our schools currently, and they need teachers. That’s a mandate for me as a teacher-educator to keep my finger on the pulse [of education] and have insight on how best to help teachers going forward.”