Spack, Ruth 1947–

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Spack, Ruth 1947–

PERSONAL: Born February 12, 1947, in Providence, RI; daughter of Israel and Esther Sarah (Levine) Karten; married Norman Paul Spack (a physician), September 3, 1967; children: Rebecca Spack Sneider, Jonathan Baidell. Education: University of Rochester, B.A., 1969; Simmons College, M.A., 1970; Lesley University, Ph.D., 1998. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Jewish. Hobbies and other interests: Travel.

ADDRESSES: Home—100 Salisbury Rd., Brookline, MA 02445. Office—Department of English, Bentley College, 175 Forest St., Waltham, MA 02452-4705; fax: 781-891-2896. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Teacher of English as a second language (ESL)at public schools in Watertown, MA, 1970–71, Prince George's County, MD, 1973–74, and Brookline, MA, 1974–79; Tufts University, Medford, MA, lecturer in English, 1980–98, director of composition program for ESL, 1988–98; Bentley College, Waltham, MA, associate professor of English, 1998–, director of English for speakers of other languages, 1999–. Boston University, adjunct lecturer, 1978–88.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, National Council of Teachers of English, Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Massachusetts Association of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages.

AWARDS, HONORS: Freedom to Learn award, Massachusetts Association of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages, 2003; Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, Modern Language Association of America, 2003, for America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860–1900.

WRITINGS:

The International Story: An Anthology with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Guidelines: A Cross-cultural Reading/Writing Text, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Vivian Zamel) Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning across Languages and Cultures, Lawrence Erlbaum (Mahwah, NJ), 1998.

English as a Second Language, 3rd edition, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 2000.

(Editor, with Vivian Zamel) Enriching ESOL Pedagogy: Readings and Activities for Engagement, Reflection, and Inquiry, Lawrence Erlbaum (Mahwah, NJ), 2002.

America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860–1900, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2002.

(Editor, with Vivian Zamel) Crossing the Curriculum: Multilingual Learners in College Classrooms, Lawrence Erlbaum (Mahwah, NJ), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including American Indian Culture and Research Journal, College English, Legacy: Journal of American Women Writers, MELUS, TESOL Quarterly, and Written Communication.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Compiling English Lessons (tentative title), a collection of short stories that deal with issues related to learning and using English as an additional language, with Vivian Zamel; research on the Boston years of Zitkala-Sa, a writer and Native rights activist in the early twentieth century.

SIDELIGHTS: Ruth Spack told CA: "I began writing in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) as a way to share with other instructors my discoveries about productive ways to help students engage with writing as a generative source for thinking and learning. I also wanted to challenge a deficit model that positioned second-language learners as having problems that needed to be fixed and to emphasize instead the linguistic and cultural resources and strengths that multilingual learners bring to their own learning and to the academic environment itself.

"I began writing in the field of Native American studies as a result of my scholarly activity in the ESOL field. In 1994 I was invited to speak to faculty across the curriculum at an English-language college in Quebec on the subject of linguistic and cultural diversity. I was told that the faculty were concerned, not only about students for whom French is the first language, but also about Cree and Inuit students who were dropping out at a high rate, often within weeks of starting school. I realized then that I was ignorant about the language backgrounds of indigenous people in Canada and even in the United States, the country in which I was born and raised. I determined to become more knowledgeable.

"Shortly thereafter Elizabeth Ammons introduced me to Zitkala-Sa's American Indian Stories. When I first opened the book and saw its large print, I thought it had been created for children. But as I started to read, I began to suspect that something subversive was unfolding before my eyes, especially when the narrator began describing a nineteenth-century English-only school designed for Native children. When I finished this astonishing work—a mixture of autobiography, fiction, and journalism—I began to search for whatever material I could find on Zitkala-Sa (1876–1938) and the education she had received in the 1880s and 1890s.

"As a teacher of English, I was especially curious about how Zitkala-Sa and other Native students had learned the language, for it occurred to me that the acronym ESL, which has always denoted English as a second language in the United States, actually signifies that English is the second language of this country, if we understand that hundreds of Native languages came first. I began to recognize the extent to which the growth and development of ESOL teaching in the United States was tied to a process by which the federal government attempted to establish linguistic and cultural control over second-language learners. Realizing that this was a history that no teacher of English could afford to ignore, I felt compelled to write and share what I was learning."