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Background/Context: Bi/multilingual students’ STEM learning is better supported when educators leverage their language and cultural practices as resources, but STEM subject divisions have been historically constructed based on oppressive, dominant values and exclude the ways of knowing of nondominant groups. Truly promoting equity requires expanding and transforming STEM disciplines. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article contributes to efforts to illuminate emergent bi/multilingual students’ ways of knowing, languaging, and doing in STEM. We follow the development of syncretic literacies in relation to translanguaging practices, asking, How do knowledges and practices from different communities get combined and reorganized by students and teachers in service of new modeling practices? Setting and Participants: We focus on a seventh-grade science classroom, deliberately designed to support syncretic literacies and translanguaging practices, where computer science concepts were infused into the curriculum through modeling activities. The majority of the students in the bilingual program had arrived in the United States at most three years before enrolling, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Research Design: We analyze one lesson that was part of a larger research–practice partnership focused on teaching computer science through leveraging translanguaging practices and syncretic literacies. The lesson was a modeling and computing activity codesigned by the teacher and two researchers about post–Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Analysis used microethnographic methods to trace how students assembled translanguaging, social, and schooled practices to make sense of and construct models. Findings/Results: Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing and negotiating both designed and emergent goals. These included sensemaking, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting both the physical and computational models of migration. Conclusions/Recommendations: Implications support the development of theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students to engage in meaning-making through translanguaging and syncretic practices in order to provide new possibilities for lifting up STEM learning that may include, but is not constrained by, disciplinary learning. Additional implications for teacher education and student assessment practices call for reconceptualizing schooling beyond day-to-day curriculum as part of making an ontological shift away from prioritizing math, science, and CS disciplinary and language objectives as defined by and for schooling, and toward celebrating, supporting, and centering students’ diverse, syncretic knowledges and knowledge use.
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Language Views for Scientific Sensemaking Matter: A Synthesis of Research on Multilingual Students’ Experiences with Science Practices Through a Translanguaging Lens
This synthesis examines recent science education research on multilingual students’ experiences with language-rich science practices. Adopting a translanguaging lens, we explore how researchers’ language conceptualizations impact the science practices they study and the ways multilingual students are positioned. This analysis helps us understand the extent to which recent research is disrupting, or sustaining, minoritizing narratives about multilingual students and how they sensemake in science. Based on our findings, we suggest researchers: (1) reflect upon and expand their views of language, which will enable the field to develop more nuanced understandings of how language use across linguistic and multimodal resources permeates all science practices, and (2) consider how to expand multilingual students’ language repertoires for sensemaking while also valuing students’ existing language resources and practices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1942912
- PAR ID:
- 10480924
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Educational Researcher
- Volume:
- 52
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 0013-189X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 570 to 579
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- multilingual students science practices sensemaking translanguaging equity
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X231206172
