Fostering Equitable Sense-Making With Emerging Bilinguals

• In Event: 31.031 - Multimodal STEM Learning With Emerging Bilingual Students

Abstract

Objectives. The emphasis on student engagement with practices carries high language and cognitive demands. In this study, we explore how teachers and elementary students engaged in scientific practices use discourse tools (Author, 2016) to promote equitable knowledge-building in classrooms with Emerging Bilinguals (EBs). We begin with the premise that developing sensemaking facility requires equipping the community with resources for valuing, mining, and including the ideas presented by EB. Thus, we explore the question: “How can discourse tools support discourse and remove persistent exclusions of EB’s ideas?”

Theoretical Framing. We define equitable discourse as discourse in which students are not excluded—discourse in which all students’ ideas have presumed value for sensemaking (Barron, 2000; Damşa et.al, 2010). Our work shows that even with the necessary language support to access science discourse, EBs experience persistent exclusions in shared sensemaking, which have systematic, political, historical and social factors. Without addressing these exclusions, EBs are unable to engage in the class’s sensemaking. Thus, discourse tools (Michaels & O’Connor, 2012) designed to support equitable spaces for sensemaking are especially critical for EBs who frequently experience epistemic exclusion, and for the community in which they are part of, thus deprived of affordances of such sensemaking (Dotson, 2014).
We build on strategies that focus on social-historical exclusions (i.e., Rosebery, Warren, & Tucker-Raymond, 2015), and discourse and language supports for EBs (Author, 2014; Quinn, Lee & Valdes, 2012), to develop discourse tools designed to support equitable discourse.

Methods/Data. We observed two 3rd grade classes as they enacted two project-based units that used the discourse tools while students engaged in scientific practices. We drew on the above theories to guide our micro-genetic analysis of each sensemaking interaction. Through this, we used theoretical constructs of epistemic systems and power dynamics (Dotson, 2014; Fricker, 2012), and modified dialogic coding schemes of agency and shared agency (Stroupe, 2014 & Damsa, 2010). In our analyses, we characterized ideas presented and included, or excluded, in the shared space.

Results and Scholarly Significance. Our preliminary analysis reveals that discourse tools recalibrate group resources to promote inclusion of the ideas presented by EBs. For example, Tank used the discourse tools to persist in Mustafa’s (an EB) sensemaking about a moving object, demonstrating that he valued Mustafa’s idea:

The students feel the air around them. Teacher: “Can you feel air? Is that what you mean, Mustafa?”
Mustafa (nods. Then doubtful): “I don’t mean air. I mean the…wind…on the car.” (points to the back of the car, swooshing movement after the car)
Tank:“The car make wind when it go super fast. And the wind come in after the car.”
Now Mustafa nods.

This study demonstrates the potential efficacy of equitable discourse tools for supporting classroom communities as they build capacity to engage in equitable knowledge-building through the scientific practices, alleviating epistemic exclusions. In the full paper, we use activity theory and socio cultural learning theories to explore the mechanism behind this efficacy.

Authors

• Emily Adah Miller, University of Georgia

• Leema G. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison