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In a mathematics class where students are encouraged to freely share ideas, the room brims with diverse thoughts. How do students and teachers use them? Let’s follow a group of multilingual students and teachers to see what they did with an idea! 

This work studies mathematics word problems’ use in a classroom of recent immigrants, or newcomers, to a United States public elementary school. I study how word problems foster the recontextualization of mathematical concepts in a lived real- ity experienced by newcomer students in their new cultural and educational setting. In this study’s setting language plays a significant role in the process of meaning-making. I describe how language use in word problems remains intertwined with mathematics instruction. This opens a space for questioning word problems’ purpose and role in multilingual classrooms, and I highlight how the creative process of co-constructing problems’ meaning in this context can expand notions of genre applied to word problems. Throughout I adopt a theorization of translanguaging as a language practice and apply it in problem discussion. This helps probe how language use impacts students’ ways of understanding and utilizing mathematical concepts. 

In fall 2019, the National Science Foundation awarded Southern Oregon University a two-year Computer Science for All Researcher Practitioner Partnership grant focused on integrating computational thinking (CT) into the K'5 instruction of general elementary and elementary bilingual teachers. This experience report highlights the process of transitioning one essential component of the project an elementary teacher summer institute (SI) from in-person to online due to COVID-19. This report covers the approach the team took to designing the SI to work virtually, the challenges encountered, the experiences of the 15 teachers involved through observations and surveys, and the opportunities for refinement. This report will be of potential interest for other computer science (CS) education researchers who also may be working with elementary teachers to incorporate CS and CT activities into their instruction.