Date: December 02, 2006
Special to The Well at MHC
Thomas Destino Prepares Teachers for Linguistic and Cultural Diversity
Most recently Destino, his teacher education colleagues and the Lifeworks office at Mars Hill College, have received a three-year service-learning grant ($120,000) to train literacy tutors to work in local public schools. This work infuses service-learning into teacher education courses and the campus as a whole and provides a way for Mars Hill students to serve local children in need in specific and concrete ways. In recent years, immigration to the United States has been on the rise and destinations for immigrants have changed. Whereas immigrants used to gravitate toward the southwestern U.S. and to urban areas in general, they now gravitate to the southeastern U.S. and Midwest and have begun to populate rural areas, such as Western North Carolina. In fact, North Carolina and Georgia are currently the fastest growing immigrant states. Clearly population changes such as these challenge social agencies, including the public school system.
This is precisely what attracted Tom Destino to Mars Hill College in 2002. After several years on faculty at the University of California, Riverside, Destino came to Mars Hill to develop a new major and licensure program in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teacher education. Mars Hill had received a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education to found the Center for ESL Education, Destino was hired to direct the Center and to develop new ESL academic programs and to prepare local teachers in strategies and methods for teaching nonnative English speakers. Destino organizes the work of the Center around two main themes: 1. Literacy - through working with public schools and preparing current and future teachers in the fundamentals of developing literacy in children who know little or know English and 2. Culture - through the study of the sociocultural foundations of local immigrant populations, particularly of Mexican Spanish-speaking immigrants in Yancey County.
While at Mars Hill, Destino has been very active professionally at work on these two themes locally, statewide, and nationally. He has made numerous conference presentations, published a book-length treatment and instructional DVD, researched immigrants locally and in Mexico, served on two advisory committees to the North Carolina state department of education, as well as on the board of Carolina TESOL, the professional organization for ESL in the southeastern United States.
As a means of advancing his scholarly and teaching agenda at Mars Hill, Destino has written and received several grants and assisted school districts in grant projects to work on ESL issues. Two of Destino’s grants, ($100,000) from the Institute for Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education, have been dedicated to the study of biliteracy use and development among children and teachers in classrooms in Utah, Illinois, and California. This work has produced an interactive DVD for teacher professional development and an accompanying book. Destino and his co-author Annela Teemant of the University of California, Berkeley have been invited to present this work at teacher institutes for the California Post-Secondary Education Commission each of the last three summers in San Diego.
With his Berkeley colleague as well as two others from Stanford University, Destino is currently working on a book that discusses the teaching and learning of school subject matter in a second language.
In addition to classroom-based work, Destino studies the immigrant experience in the broader cultural context. He has made the Mexican immigrant population of Yancey County North Carolina the focal point of this research and has visited their hometowns in Mexico on three different occasions. Along with Yancey County teachers, Mars Hill faculty and students, Destino has visited and stayed with families in the rural and mountainous region of Michoacán. The video and photographic data from these trips have been used in numerous professional conference presentations as well as in his classes and school workshops in Western North Carolina. Related to this cultural work is Destino’s interest in the topic of language politics and policy which he researches and writes on with Dr. Paul Green of the University of California, Riverside. This work investigates the influence of ideology and politics on school policies for nonnative English speakers.
Most recently Destino, his teacher education colleagues and the Lifeworks office at Mars Hill College, have received a three-year service-learning grant ($120,000) to train literacy tutors to work in local public schools. This work infuses service-learning into teacher education courses and the campus as a whole and provides a way for Mars Hill students to serve local children in need in specific and concrete ways. This grant will provide a means to develop a special section of LAA 111 centered on preparing literacy tutors and focusing on the theme of literacy development.
The newness of immigration to North Carolina has provided Destino with a fresh and exciting perspective on the schooling of language minority children and teacher education in general. The ESL population in some North Carolina counties has grown by 1000% in the last 10 years. Given these kinds of demographic shifts, Destino believes that if teacher education programs do not rapidly revision the way they prepare teachers, we will fail to meet the academic needs of huge numbers of children.
Destino holds a B.A. (1988) in Spanish Education from Niagara University, an M.A. (1991) in Spanish Studies from Wayne State University, and a PhD (1994) from The Ohio State University. Finally, he completed a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz.