Illinois

RSC Place Network Liason, Jenni Dickens reports back on Monmouth College's efforts to support rural multilingual learner.

When 40 Kindergarten and 1st grade multilingual students walked onto Monmouth College’s campus one Friday morning, they were greeted by familiar faces: Their own. The library’s periodical shelves had been transformed into a gallery exhibit of their self-portraits, the culminating projects of a unit of study on skin-color and identity.

While students in the Monmouth-Roseville school district all live in the same small rural community in western Illinois, they come from a broad range of national, ethnic and racial backgrounds. A striking 15 languages are represented in the district, and one in every five students in the district is multilingual. These students’ first years of school often take place in language-supported settings – such as in bilingual and English as a Second Language classrooms – that also aim to affirm their diverse identities.

Monmouth College’s REDI (Rural Education Initiatives) program collaborated with local teachers and the College’s library director to bring the students to campus with two goals in mind: To publicly display students’ work and to help the students see themselves (literally) in college.