In-Between Languages and In-Between Roles: Latinx Middle School Students Using Translanguaging to Enact Computer-Programming Teaching Identities

• In Event: 35.068 - Translanguaging and Mathematics: Recognizing and Capitalizing on the Brilliance of Bilingual Children

Abstract

This paper will share the central role of translanguaging practices during the process of teaching, learning, and the evolving identity development as computer programming and math ‘teachers’ of five middle-school students in an afterschool program. We argue that these co-facilitators’ translanguaging practices moved across languages, registers, subjects, and referential knowledges in the dual process of supporting peers’ understanding of mathematics and computer programming as well as of developing a nurturing community language.
Our view on translanguaging breaks traditional boundaries by describing the languaging practices of bilinguals and multilinguals to imagine new ways of being and acting in the world” (García & Wei, 2014). Translanguaging describes the processes “by which bilingual students perform bilingually in the myriad multimodal ways of classrooms” (García, 2011, p. 147). Further, translanguaging is also a ‘co-learning’ strategy that teachers and students use to adapt to another’s behavior during joint action (Wei, 2014); and which transforms the subjectivity and consciousness of those participating in a community language (García, Zakharia & Otcu, 2013). Finally, we also acknowledge how translanguaging practices support deeper and fuller understanding of the subject matter, the development of the weaker language, home-school links and cooperation, and the integration of fluent speakers with early learners (Baker & Wright, 2017).
The [Blinded] project is an afterschool program that introduces middle school students to computer programming and the associated mathematics through image and video processing. During twelve one-hour sessions, primarily Latinx students collaborated in small groups with an undergraduate student facilitator, mostly in computer engineering majors, to develop their projects. A qualitative analysis of the five co-facilitators’ videotaped interactions, work reflections on their own groups, and focus group interviews yielded their use of translanguaging practices to support both their fluid co-teaching/learning role on meaning-making processes of language, mathematics, and computer programming, as well as their co-constructing of an emotional-intellectual (nourishing) community language that simultaneously positioned them as learners and experts.    
Preliminary findings indicate that co-facilitators’ actions nurtured an environment where epistemic, linguistic, and social power dynamics shifted. As such, this community mediated a sense of accomplishment, an integrated learning/teaching process of mathematics, language, and computer programming, as well as of an identity inclusive of both familiar and STEM practices for all participants, as this excerpt partially captures:

“Speaking in English here has helped me a lot to communicate with teachers. Here, I explain things in English so that the teacher [facilitator] understands and also the student who doesn’t speak Spanish. This has helped me with school teachers who don’t speak Spanish, and I can tell them what I want to say in English, and without making mistakes.” (Kenneth, Spring 2018)

Using brief video clips, presenters will demonstrate how Latinx students used language across subjects, language across roles, and languages across life experiences.
This study advances knowledge in the areas of bilingual and STEM education by including bilingual Latinx middle-school students as co-facilitators in an educational community that positioned them as experts in using mathematics to teach foundational computer programming concepts.

Authors

• Sylvia Celedon-Pattichis, University of New Mexico

• Carlos Alfonso LopezLeiva, University of New Mexico

• Marios S. Pattichis, University of New Mexico