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This inquiry is guided by a curiosity around the stories that teachers tell about their students, content, and pedagogical approaches focused on data and computational literacies. We present a form of storytelling with theory as we apply theories of syncretism and translanguaging to empirical vignettes about teachers’ sensemaking. We also present a form of storytelling of theory, drawing on teachers’ stories to help us better understand how these theories are related to each other. We bring two teachers’ stories into conversation: one from the Writing Data Stories (WDS) project and the other from the Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS) project. Both projects utilized translanguaging and syncretism in their conceptions and designs, working with teachers to design for expansive forms of data-based and computational literacies. 

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. 

In this article, we share examples from our project, Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLaCS), which focuses on how students' language practices shape their participation and engagement in language arts projects that integrate code. Integrating Code into Language Arts: Ashley's Multimodal Translanguaging Approach Tasked with fulfilling her school's commitment to CS for All within her sixth grade bilingual language arts class, Ashley chose to teach a unit with a software and programming language called Scratch, created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to support creative approaches to code (https://scratch.mit.edu/). What follows are examples from Ashley's class that demonstrate how a CS-integrated language arts curriculum provided her students with space to engage, create, and communicate using language, text, and their bodies in dynamic expressions. Álvaro's dynamic expression of sliding across the room animated his understanding of the connection between the text and the code, showing how integrating code into language arts provides a forum for students' language practices to be integrated and validated. 

Background and Context: In this theory paper, we explore the concept of translanguaging from bilingual education, and its implications for teaching and learning programming and computing in especially computer science (CS) for all initiatives. Objective: We use translanguaging to examine how programming is and isn't like using human languages. We frame CS as computational literacies. We describe a pedagogical approach for teaching computational literacies. Method: We review theory from applied linguistics, literacy, and computational literacy. We provide a design narrative of our pedagogical approach by describing activities from bilingual middle school classrooms integrating Scratch into academic subjects. Findings: Translanguaging pedagogy can leverage learners' (bilingual and otherwise) full linguistic repertoires as they engage with computational literacies. Implications: Our data helps demonstrate how translanguaging can be mobilized to do CS, which has implications for increasing equitable participation in computer science. 

Bilingual education has described a process called translanguaging by which students use linguistic resources across and beyond multiple named languages to learn. Here, we examine how bilingual learners translanguage while learning computer science. These middle schoolers participated in a curricular intervention which infused computational thinking into their Spanish-English bilingual language arts class. Through a descriptive qualitative methodology, we document classroom moments supporting four claims: 1) students’ translanguaging blurs linguistic, disciplinary, and modal boundaries, 2) computational literacies are intertwined with students’ other literacies , 3) students’ attitudes about language and the contexts around them play a role in their translanguaging, and 4) students translanguage to engage in specific CT practices.