School of Education Efforts Seek to Identify, Document Diversity

By Bruce Buchanan



Dr. Belinda Hardin encourages guests at UNCG Homecoming to describe the meaning of education in their community as part of the Tapestry Project.

The Greensboro region is a community woven together with the threads of many cultures, languages and countries of origin. Guilford County is home to residents from 95 nations who speak 117 different languages and dialects.

With this enormous diversity at hand, School of Education faculty members are leading efforts to document and celebrate these local communities, using teaching and research to serve the community. Three of those efforts include the Tapestry Project; Project APRCH (Agency in the Preservation of Refugee Cultural Heritage) and their effort to document the culture of the Montagnard community, conducted by Drs. Nora Bird, Clara M. Chu and Fatih Oguz; and Dr. Joseph Hill’s research into American Sign Language use among deaf and hard-of-hearing members of the African-American community.

Tapestry Project Gives Immigrants a Chance to Express Views

The Tapestry Project was created to help recent immigrants document their successes and challenges in education. The project included literally producing a tapestry, which was made by hand by the project’s participants, as well as an accompanying book.

Tapestry artists include natives of Bhutan, Niger, Honduras, Vietnam, Laos, Burma (Myanmar), Zimbabwe, the Sudan, Mexico, Colombia, Liberia, Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic and other nations.

UNCG’s Coalition for Diverse Language Communities (CDLC) was among the organizations that helped bring the project to life. Faculty members Dr. Belinda Hardin and Dr. Silvia Bettez led the effort in close collaboration with community members.

“My research work has largely focused on issues related to immigrant and refugee communities,” Dr. Hardin said. “What I wanted to do in this project was to create something that would give back to the community.”

The Tapestry Project asks the question, “What is the meaning of education in your community?” and asks participants to product a tapestry square answering question. Community meetings were held to gauge interest and recruit participants and Drs. Bettez and Hardin worked with a wide range of groups to be as inclusive as possible. Doctoral students from the Specialized Education Services (SES) Department and interns from UNCG’s Center for New North Carolinians assisted with the project.

Dr. Hardin said the actual tapestry pieces were something of a surprise. “We originally had this idea the tapestry squares would be indigenous submissions. But they turned out to be quite diverse in terms of submissions,” she said. Many participants used non-traditional techniques and art media to express their views of education.

The collaborative project also gave participants the chance to explain what their squares represent.

The finished tapestry has been displayed at numerous events and meetings. More than 100 people came to see its October unveiling. The research portion of the project has continued by asking viewers to share their own opinions on the meaning of education.

“We used it as a tool to create a dialogue about the meaning of education,” Dr. Hardin said. “The people who participated were very pleased and proud.”

Library and Information Studies Department Documents Culture of Montagnards, Refugees

“Montagnard” is a term that actually refers to roughly 30 tribes in Vietnam, according to Dr. Oguz. The term is French for “mountain people,” as the Montagnards are the indigenous people of the Vietnamese highlands. In the 1970s, thousands of Montagnards fought alongside the United States in the Vietnam War. When the war ended, many Montagnards fled as refugees to the United States, with Greensboro emerging as home to the world’s largest Montagnard population outside of Southeast Asia.

The goal of the team of faculty members from the Library and Information Studies (LIS) department working with Greensboro’s Montagnard community isn’t to tell the story of how the Montagnards arrived in North Carolina. Instead, Drs. Bird, Chu and Oguz say they want to document the culture of this community.

“Refugees come to this country with very little, but they do have their culture,” Dr. Chu said. “The research we’re doing is looking at how we can preserve the culture of refugee communities.”

Chu said a vital part of the LIS research is making sure the Montagnards themselves have a say in how their culture is represented. To meet that goal, researchers are carefully building relationships with local Montagnard residents. In particular, they are trying to speak directly to the older members of the community via in-home interviews.

“They may not be fluent in English, so one of our challenges is to make sure we can reach them and let them speak in their own language,” Chu said. Other research challenges include the largely oral tradition of the Montagnard culture, as well as the incredible diversity within the Montagnard community. Oguz says locally, Greensboro’s Montagnard community includes members of five tribes.

There are advantages to working with the Montagnard community. “They are one of the communities that has been in this area the longest, with well-established resources and networks,” Dr. Bird said. Also, Dr. Chu said the community’s leaders have been strongly receptive to the LIS Department project, as they appreciate the opportunity to document their community’s culture.

In fact, Greensboro’s Montagnard leaders would like to build a local museum, and Dr. Chu said the research being conducted by the LIS team will help document and catalogue information and artifacts that could be used in the museum.

Drs. Bird, Chu and Oguz say they eventually plan to expand their work to include other refugee communities, which is the larger goal of Project APRCH (Agency in the Preservation of Refugee Cultural Heritage) (for more information, see aprch.wordpress.com). For now, though, they are hard at work on the Montagnard community project, and received a UNCG Coalition for Diverse Languages Communities Grant to fund their research.

African-American ASL a Passion for Dr. Joseph Hill

Dr. Joseph Hill teaches American Sign Language to students at UNCG.

As is the case with spoken languages, sign language varies greatly along geographic and cultural lines. Sign language users in England, for example, use different signs than Americans. So it makes sense a separate dialect of African-American ASL (American Sign Language) developed during Segregation. And like any other language, African-American ASL continues to evolve, particularly as signers come into greater contact with traditional ASL signers.

Dr. Joseph Hill is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on African-American ASL, having begun researching the subject as a Ph.D. student at Gallaudet University. Dr. Hill is continuing this work at UNCG, where he also leads the School of Education’s ASL teacher licensing program.

“The evidence of Black ASL is more noticeable in the South when racial segregation regulations were strictly enforced in the Southern and border states, whereas in the North the evidence of Black ASL is not as clear,” Dr. Hill said. “Younger generations have much more exposure to ASL used by the general deaf community because they are included in the racially integrated educational settings, although there are exceptions when you consider the concentration of racial groups in the urban and suburban areas. However, the older generations of black deaf people who attended segregated schools for the deaf before 1954 still sign differently from their white peers. When my research team interviewed older black deaf people and asked them for the example of signs they used at their schools, the signs were completely different in form and movement from the signs used by their white peers at other schools.”

In sign language, the shape of the hand, location, movement, and palm orientation take the place of consonants and vowels in spoken language. Dr. Hill’s research has found significant differences in between traditional American Sign Language and African-American ASL in all of these aspects.

Dr. Hill is the co-author of the 2011 book, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, and also helped created a companion documentary film. That project was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

“Right now, I feel like we are just scratching the surface, so there is so much work that needs to be done. I think the immediate need is to see how the use of Black ASL is currently practiced by the younger generation today,” he said. “My intent is not to create linguistic divisions as some people may suspect. The linguistic differences already exist so I am just interested in how the differences came to be there and whether the differences are maintained or not.”

Whether documenting refugee culture, giving new immigrants a voice or exploring cultural differences among sign language users, the UNCG School of Education is using both classroom work and research projects to provide needed services to community partners and enriching educational opportunities for students.