COE Connections Episode 8: Patricia Sánchez Lizardi

Patricia Sánchez Lizardi:
For the PUEDE interdisciplinary collaboration, something that we hear a lot is how powerful it is to understand from the other discipline areas they didn't think about when working with a child. So we hear from speech language pathologists how looking at behaviors is so important when they are working with a child, and vice versa. We hear from school psychology students how important it is to pay attention to the language students are using, and not only the language in the terms of like English, Spanish, or Russian, or any other language, but like how they're communicating, and the level of proficiency they may have in in their language, development. And something that we don't talk much in the school psychology program ... but how rich it becomes when you put those two things together?

Rachel Haine-Schlagel: 
Welcome to COE Connections, the SDSU College of Education research and Scholarship Podcast Series. I'm your host, Rachel Haine-Schlagel. I'm the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Education and an associate professor of child and family development at San Diego State University, a Hispanic serving institution on the land of the Kumeyaay. This is our second episode of the second season of the series, although I feel like it's the first since I was the guest last time. Today I'm talking with Patricia Sanchez LiZardi, who is an assistant professor in the school psychology program at SDSU. She completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City, and her master's and Ph.D. In school psychology at the University of Arizona. Patricia joined SDSU two years ago, after being a practicing school psychologist in California, Arizona and New Jersey. She was also a university professor and practitioner in Brazil and Mexico. She and her colleagues recently received funding from the Federal Office of Special Education programs for the PUEDE grant an interdisciplinary collaboration that prepares bilingual school psychologists and speech language pathologists to provide services in schools to multilingual learners with high intensity needs. Patricia is also a member of the California Consortium for Bilingual School Psychology, a group of school psychology educators across several universities who are working toward the certification of bilingual school psychologists. Welcome, Patricia, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me to day.

Patricia Sánchez Lizardi: 
Thank you, Rachel. I'm really excited about being part of this series.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel:
I'm so excited to have this chance to talk with you. I have a few questions for you today. They are questions, very same questions I've been asking for a while, and I love asking them because they always elicit really unique and interesting answers from my guests. So the first question is, why do you study what you do?

Patricia Sánchez Lizardi: 
That's a great question. And and it's very important to think about our whys right? So I think that comes from probably my own background, like being always interested in supporting and helping people that have been placed in marginalized positions. So back in Mexico City, where I grew up, I was able to experience that seeing other people being placed in positions that access to opportunities were very limited. So I think ever since then, since I was said, young child, I started thinking like that and paying attention to those issues. So with time, that just put me in areas where I wanted to learn more about how to support people. And my interest in psychology happened ever since I was in middle school. So ever since I've been trying to understand how children learn, why they behave in such a way and how I can support their learning and and emotional development. So I started working in schools, in psychiatric hospitals for children in the area. You know, I worked on a center that supported children that had been sexually abused, too. So that was very intense. But doing these work really, allowed me to understand a lot of things better. So when I came to the United States for graduate school, I was very convinced that I wanted to continue in the area of working with children and school psychology happened to be like a perfect match between all that clinical work that I was doing, my interest, working with children for very diverse backgrounds, and for me, coming to the United States was a diverse background, right? Because I was not from here. So learning from this culture was also very interesting my personal and professional development. So that's kind of how started and then I went to school, completed my my master's Ph.d. And I was living happily in my in my bubble, understanding everything that theoretically, and research papers and and all that fun stuff! And then I went to do my internship. Then I realized that the city where I lived actually was very, very kind of separated, and I wouldn't say completely segregated, because that's not part of the law right? But I could see a lot of students that spoke like me, that look like me were actually being overlooked by their teachers, or they were not receiving the services that they needed, or their behaviors and ways of expressing themselves were very misunderstood and misinterpreted. So I thought, well, I mean, that's that's really not what we study to do. We really want to provide services to all children, and not all the not only the children, for which, like the research, says that we're supposed to be working for. So that's how I kind of became more interested in that during my internship actually on the field in the schools. And then, when I became a school psychologist in my own school in a very Hispanic community, very Mexican actually, south of San Diego — pretty close to the border. Then I realized also that children again, they look like me, they talk like me and I was like noticing that they were not having a lot of like fun experiences with their own language. So I started noticing that when I approached to them, and I started talking to them in Spanish, they look at me like Whoa! An adult is talking to me in Spanish in this school. So they were really excited in feeling that their background, their language was actually something that they could use in their own context, in their own and learning environment. And so I started learning, like, okay, so we need more bilingual, more multicultural things within the school settings. More approaches that actually look at children's multi-language skills as an asset, and not something that has to be either punished or prohibited or limited in the expression of their beings. 

Rachel Haine-Schlagel:
I love how you know you just sort of laid out every phase of your of your life, and really talked about how the your personal observations kept driving your professional interests, and they kept becoming more and more refined as you are doing more and more learning both learning in the classroom, learning through research as well as learning. Well, learning in the classroom as a student and learning in the classroom as a school psychologist. So thank you. That was really cool. Just hearing the progression of your interests and the sort of narrowing of them is, it was really cool. I have a second question, but it's actually a request. Can you describe an example of the impact your research has had on the community? And by community I really mean from very specific and local to very broad. It's really, however, you want to define it.

Patricia Sánchez Lizardi: 
I think I can think of the answering in 2 ways, one kind of like a small scale. In my own school, for example, when I was a school psychologist or right now in the classroom, when I'm preparing future school psychologists. So this this small scale could be something like what I mentioned before being able to communicate with children in their own language. I love languages, so I also learned Portuguese. So I can also communicate with kids in Portuguese. There's not a lot of students, but I have had a few experiences in that using that language. So this small the small scale could be that like being able to build rapport connection, trust with families and and children in a school setting in their community, having parents feel more comfortable to come to meetings, having parents to feel more comfortable, to talk to me, or call me, or taking my call when I call them. That could be like at the small scale, or parents being more willing to interventions that I may suggest. During an IP meeting at the larger scale. I could think of the work that we are doing right now, for example, working towards the certification of bilingual school psychologists that, for example, what you mentioned in the introduction, we just got a grant to prepare bilingual school psychologists to work interdisciplinary with bilingual speech, language, pathologists. And that is huge, because when you work in the schools and when you work on a team, the collaboration that could happen among these professionals is very important. So if you think about preparing professionals to be ready to collaborate once they're on their field and they're actually bilingual. And then you're preparing them to provide those services, the services that they're preparing, that they're ready. They're learning in the programs. And then you are preparing them bilingually. I think it's very that is huge. I have been part of the original grant. I was part of it for two years, first, like a seminary structure, and then as a supervisor, looking at the students working in their schools. And just the response that we get from children, from parents, from the community itself, from from principals, from advocates in terms of the work that the scholars of these grants are doing is is tremendous. So if we could have more of that that would be great. And that's kind of a little bit of the justification of why schools and university programs need to move into preparing bilingual school psychology. So we have some data to suggest that when you prepare people to work with multilingual learners in their language, looking at their language as an asset, then you're probably going to have better outcomes, academically and emotionally for all children, not all children that are multilingual. But children. That's my work right now. 

Rachel Haine-Schlagel:
Well, that's that's fantastic, you know one thing that you said that I took a moment to actually write down a note about it, so I could follow up with you about it was the the idea of preparing the workforce that's going to be in schools, serving children, families, and how to collaborate across disciplines. I think that that process piece is not always attended to, and grants like the the one that you're a part of with the speech language and hearing sciences school is so cool. For that reason you're you're giving students in the their training program, this opportunity to really learn what it's like to collaborate with someone who's learning about child development from a very different perspective, maybe not entirely different perspective, but using different terms and have going about supporting kids with different interventions and strategies. So I think that's a really cool added benefit beyond what you're focusing on with preparing students to work or psychologists, school psychologists to work with multilingual learners. So now I wanna ask you: What do you struggle with the most in studying what you study?

Patricia Sánchez Lizardi:  
I think I doubt a lot about my understanding of the system, even though I have worked in several schools and several states. Sometimes I struggle a lot about understanding how to approach the system to do my work. And that's just kind of like a doubting or this imposter experience that we get like, maybe self doubting. So I think in many ways I struggled the most with my own personality traits like wanting to do a lot, and sometimes not knowing or questioning if what I'm doing is going to be important enough to support students, then I go into doing it. And then I realized that it was really important to do it. But it's that maybe initial kind of like hesitation. Because I don't know, not having grown up here or not, having all the background experiences that a lot of people that I work with have. Sometimes I feel like, huh... Is this a way to approach this? Is this the next step? Is this appropriate to do? Like all of those questions that have to do just like, maybe feel feeling confident that I actually know all of that, because I have the experiences. So that would be perhaps at the personal level. For the other part, I sometimes just llack of time to do everything that you want to do right? You have all these great ideas, and you want to go to so many different schools and train 100 psychologists to be providers of bilingual services or something like that. And then you realize, okay, I can only prepare 12 at a time, and maybe that will be if I'm lucky, maybe 100 in my whole career. Right?

Rachel Haine-Schlagel 
Yeah, we need cloning services. Or time expanding services, something like that. Okay. I wanna ask you my last question which comes out of my own background as a clinical psychologist, which maybe sounds like you've done some clinical psychology work as well. So this question might really speak to you in a way that's different than it does to other guests. But if I could wave a magic wand and make schools better in the way that you want them to be, wWhat would it look like?

Patricia Sánchez Lizardi: 
I think it would look like a place where all children get their needs met, and I mean, academically, emotionally, where they meet the child where they are. And they don't think of children a product where you can't respect the individuality of the child, the creativity of the child, this social, emotional development of the child, their pace of learning. All children can learn. They need different supports where you actually really praise and accept the differences as something beautiful and something positive, and not something to put in the same box. Where teachers could feel that they actually can do their work, because I think most teachers that I have work with really feel like they wanna be teachers. They wanna work with children. They want to support them in their development. But many times the administrative structures are such that limit what they can do. So a place where all children could thrive and feel safe and learn at their own pace, and feel happy for developing, and where they don't feel ashamed because they don't speak their language well enough, or because they're in this country for ... I don't know. They're refugees, so they have different backgrounds that have prevented them from being in this place from the beginning, and where they can actually feel that they belong.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel:
Oh, that's a wonderful, wonderful vision. I was just smiling inside and outside as you were talking about. And it I it sounds like the work you're doing to prepare school psychologists is really a step in that direction, right — to populate that workforce with people that that are feel confident in in their ability to meet kids where they are and to really be paying attention to kids assets. And so that's just very, very exciting work. So thank you so much, Patricia, for talking with us. I really really enjoyed our conversation. And I wish you all the best of luck in your work.

Patricia Sánchez Lizardi: 
Thank you. This has been very enjoyable. Nice talk talking to you. Thank you so much for having me.