Dr. William Pulte, director of the Bilingual Education Program and associate professor of linguistic anthropology at SMU, has received the 2005 Higher Education Honoree award from the Texas Association for Bilingual Education.
The award has been “established to honor outstanding individuals that have earned the recognition, respect, and admiration of bilingual educators,” according to a letter from the TABE.
Pulte received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Spanish at North Texas State University, now known as the University of North Texas. He earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1971.
In 1963, he traveled to Mexico to work on a health care project and spent time with the native Otomi Indians.
“I got interested in Indian language because I was exposed to the Otomi language,” said Pulte. Now, Pulte says that Spanish bilingual education and the Cherokee language are his two main interests.
Pulte has been involved with bilingual education since the Bilingual Education Act was passed in 1968 under President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1971, Pulte served as project director for the Cherokee Bilingual Education Program in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, one of the first 75 programs funded by the Bilingual Education Act.
Since joining the department of anthropology at SMU in 1973, Pulte has worked to build the bilingual education teacher-training program.
“In 1977, I began to submit grant proposals to the U.S. Department of Education for training teachers in bilingual education at SMU,” Pulte said. Since then, 14 proposals have been funded and Pulte has been the program director of each of them. The grants have totaled over $7 million.
Right now there are two bilingual education grant projects being funded at SMU, totaling $3 million over the next five years.
Through the education program, teachers can become certified to teach bilingual education, or they can enroll to earn their master’s degree in the subject. The grants pay for the tuition of every participant.
Since 1977, 700 teachers have been enrolled in bilingual education teacher-training at SMU. Though 80 percent of these teachers have been Hispanic and the other 20 percent have been African-American or Anglo-American, Pulte said that enrollment is based solely on linguistic and bilingual ability. Teachers must be able to speak both English and Spanish.
“They have had a tremendous impact on the Dallas area,” said Pulte. “So many teachers, after completing the program stay in the Dallas area and teach for five, maybe 10 years. Many become principals or directors of bilingual education programs.”This spring, the SMU bilingual education master’s program will enroll 30 new students, in addition to the 20 already registered. These students, who take evening, Saturday and summer classes, will take 36 semester hours in order to complete the program.
The teacher certification program will have 60 students total, each taking about 12 semester hours.
“These teachers are very dedicated,” said Pulte, who calls the growth of the program “very important [and] very positive.”Pulte has also been very involved in studying the effects of an early bilingual education on children. Research points to the fact that Spanish-speaking children who are in bilingual education learn English better than those who are not.
“Bilingual teachers, when they train to teach in bilingual programs, learn how to teach English, as well,” Pulte said. “It’s a win-win situation.”
The students stay on grade level in academic subjects and learn English at the same time. Pulte stresses how important it is for students to learn math and science concepts in their own language.
Currently, Pulte is working on a new book with his research partner Durbin Feeling. “We’re still doing research thirty years later,” he said of his long relationship with Feeling. Pulte edited the “Cherokee-English Dictionary,” which was compiled by Feeling, and the two co-authored the “Outline of Cherokee Grammar.”
Their latest book is a compilation of traditional Cherokee narratives and legends, published in both Cherokee and English. There will also be a linguistic analysis of each story. Pulte says that he plans on submitting the book for publishing to the University of Oklahoma Press soon.
Pulte will be presented with the TABE 2005 Higher Education Honoree Award on Oct. 13 in Corpus Christi, Texas.
