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Theoretical understanding of bilingualism has advanced tremendously in recent decades, moving from colonialist understandings of named languages as static, separate entities to decolonializing conceptualizations of dynamic translanguaging (García, 2009)—or dynamic use of speakers’ whole linguistic repertoires to serve communicative needs. As we work to include this theoretical shift into teacher education and into instructional practice in diverse contexts, we ask what facilitates educators’ learning of new ways of seeing bilingualism and what gets in the way? This presentation examines adults’ learning experiences in a collaborative research project to use translanguaging pedagogy as a way to increase minoritized bilingual students’ access to computer science education. We —a team of teachers, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers working onthe US-Mexico border—use ethnographic data to explore how our beliefs about bilingualism and language in education surface and shift in the work. We discuss the potential of science education as a location and opportunity to advance educators’ understandings of holistic, dynamic bilingualism, and we draw connections to possibilities in science education in Paraguay.
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This content will become publicly available on December 14, 2026
Collective (Un)Learning: A Self‐Examination of Science Teacher Educators' Evolving Translanguaging Pedagogy for Eliciting and Elevating Student Ideas
ABSTRACT This study centers the idea that it is not just what science teacher educators (STEs) teach, but how they teach it, that matters. To prepare future teachers who can enact more equitable and transformative reform‐oriented science instruction with multilingual learners, research must explore what STEs are doing, and how, to develop preservice teachers' expansive views of language and understandings around the nuanced ways students might use their diverse language repertoires for sensemaking. Wanting to explore whether our instructional practices as STEs aligned to the translanguaging pedagogy we espouse within our bilingual elementary science methods course, we employed self‐study methodology to critically examine our own instruction across a semester, specifically in terms of how we engaged in the core practice of “eliciting student ideas.” Findings revealed particularities around the evolution of our translanguaging pedagogy with respect to this core practice, the extensive and intentional effort that went into designing learning activities strongly suited to facilitate our elicitation of PSTs' ideas in language‐expansive ways, and the vulnerable space that we had to hold, as individuals and as a collective, in order to (un)learn and carry out this work. These findings highlight the importance of STEs addressing their own continued professional growth, and of the power of collaboration in supporting this growth through self‐examination and loving self‐critique. Furthermore, findings suggest the importance of intentionally eliciting and elevating PSTs' ideas both implicitly and explicitly, and for needing to attend to the emotional and relational aspects of learning environments to support students' language use.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1942912
- PAR ID:
- 10656299
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Education
- ISSN:
- 0036-8326
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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