Costanza Eggers-Piérola

Senior Associate for Research and Development

Center for Children & Families (CC&F)

“I’ve been an immigrant in three different countries,” says Costanza Eggers-Piérola, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Her father was a journalist in Argentina from the 1920s to the late 1950s during times of political struggle against a military government. “It wasn’t a healthy environment for a liberal, social democrat,” she says. “So we left when I was quite young.”

Her father’s work took her family to the United States, Switzerland, Spain, and finally back to the United States She remembers the isolation of being a Spanish-speaking student at a grammar school in Forest Hills, New York, in the late 1950s. “It was a shocking experience not being able to communicate or have anyone interested in what I had to say,” she recalls. “I wasn’t asked any questions except my name. The teachers would say, ‘That’s too difficult [to pronounce], so we’re going to call you María.’ I don’t think I spoke for two years.”

Eggers-Piérola never forgot her early classroom experience. She has since dedicated her career to helping teachers better understand and learn together with their bilingual and immigrant students. She is author of Connections and Commitments: Reflecting Latino Values in Early Childhood Programs (Heinemann 2005) and coauthor of Through My Own Eyes: Single Mothers and the Cultures of Poverty (Harvard University Press 2001).

How has public education changed since you first immigrated to the United States?

When I first came here, there was really no effort to embrace diverse learners. No one was even going to try to pronounce your name. Then my family moved to Switzerland, and then Spain. By the time we came back to the United States in the late 1960s, I was in high school and I knew English. That was at the start of the whole bilingual movement. Now the teaching body itself is more diverse and people are more accepting. They realize that people who are multilingual and multicultural have so much to contribute.

What is the biggest misunderstanding about Latinos in the classroom?

People assume that because Latino students can’t express themselves in the same linear way that subjects are taught in American classrooms, that they don’t know the subjects. Teachers have been programmed to focus on what a child doesn’t know, rather than what they do know. We are trying to help teachers engage in conversation with students that focuses on what they do know. This forces teachers to go outside the paradigm inside their own heads and to look at teaching in a different way.

How does your EDC research work help Latino children and their teachers?

In our Improving Access and Opportunity project, we developed a set of publications to help early childhood educators better respond to young Latino children and their families, both culturally and linguistically. Our Connections and Commitments training program is organized around four values in Latino culture: familia (family), pertenencia (belonging), educación (education), and compromiso (commitment). The training program led to my book, which then led to a class called “Cultural Connections” that I’m co-teaching at the Urban College of Boston.

The goal of all of these materials is to not only improve education for multilingual and multicultural students, but to build on the strengths and power that these students will bring to our diverse work force. To be successful as a society, we have to move from integrating diversity to valuing diversity over conformity. The experiences, the beliefs, the knowledge, and the skills these students bring are the keys to their success in school and at work. Our research is ongoing to find out what’s working and what isn’t working in classrooms with increasingly multicultural populations.

What’s the most satisfying aspect of your work?

My early experience of feeling left out really influenced my desire to work with young children from diverse cultures. I see such potential and excitement in them when they first come here. There’s such wonder and such a sense of opportunity. If you’re an immigrant, you’ve already been through changes in your life. You’ve risked so much and you’ve taken courageous steps.

Immigrants have critical skills to take forth for learning and development. But the research shows that the longer they stay—after about seven years—they begin to lose a lot of that motivation and sense of empowerment. So we have to take advantage of this window of opportunity to teach them. That’s what really propels my work. I believe building on the strengths that immigrants bring is the only way to evolve our multicultural society.

Related Links:

Improving Access and Opportunity for Latinos in Early Childhood

Connections and Commitments: Reflecting Latino Values in Early Childhood Programs

Cultural Connections