Ashley Hedtke and Jodi Mallak from the Wittenberg-Birnamwood School District, along with expert guidance from Gretchen Lettau, a representative from the CESA 2 Language and Culture Center in Whitewater, had the opportunity to present at the state Wisconsin Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages conference held Nov. 4 in Verona.
Their presentation was called, “Translanguaging in the General Education Classroom in a Small Northern Wisconsin School District.” The presentation contained information to help other smaller districts in Wisconsin with ways to incorporate a child’s home language into their classrooms. Translanguaging is when a person that speaks more than one language uses the linguistic information they have in both languages to better build their academic knowledge in the classroom, maintain their home language and grow in the academic language of English.
Mallak and Hedtke shared their presentation with English Learner teachers from across the state. They shared their journey working with multilingual learners in the Witt-Birn EL program. The focus so far has been on using translanguaging with Spanish and English. They shared examples from WBSD and how it is working as a district to incorporate culture, identity and language into the schools.
Hedtke is a fifth grade teacher at Wittenberg Elementary-Middle School. She resides in Tigerton with her husband and her two sons.
Mallak is the K-12 EL teacher for the district. She also resides in Tigerton with her husband.
Hedtke and Mallak both share a love of teaching and of learning new ways to help their students to be successful. As WBSD’s local English Learner population continues to grow, teachers are working even harder to make their lessons accessible to all students.
Witt-Birn teachers give language presentation
