Supporting Elementary Teachers Recognize Emergent Multilingual Students' Sense-Making Repertoires

• In Event: Articulating Theoretical and Methodological Approaches for Mathematics and Science Teachers' Pursuit of Racial Justice

Abstract

Purpose - This study investigates a year-long partnership between the author and elementary school teachers in a Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) school, focused on making science teaching and learning more equitable for emergent multilingual students. It addresses the questions:
How does teachers’ interpretive lens change over the length of the partnership?
What kinds of activities supported teachers in learning to recognize their students’ sense-making repertoires?

Perspective - As school science embraces the “practice turn” (Berland et al., 2016), teacher educators continue to investigate what forms of professional learning support PK-5 teachers to integrate phenomena-based learning into their practice (Author, 2018; Davis, Zembal-Saul, Kademian, 2019). Operationalizing a commitment to justice and equity within the practice turn necessitates supporting teachers to develop their interpretive power (Rosebery, Warren, Tucker-Raymond, 2016): an attunement to students’ sense-making repertoires (Bang et al., 2017), and pedagogies that identify, value, and leverage students’ conceptual and semiotic repertoires (Author, 2020; Warren et al., 2001). This study draws on situative theories of professional learning (Horn & Little, 2010): teacher learning is social, situated in particular contexts, and distributed across members of a learning community. Thus, supporting teachers to develop their interpretive lens entails identifying and disrupting the perceived deficits of students and the settled hierarchies of seeing, thinking, and knowing that are reproduced in classrooms.

Methods - The year-long partnership comprised the author and three elementary school teachers from a SEI school, which culminated in a co-designed PD for twelve K-3 teachers. The partnership was undergirded by two conjectures: (1) teachers who identify the generativity of their students’ sense-making repertoires develop expansive pedagogies, building on students’ conceptual resources (Warren et al., 2001) and translanguaging practices (Author, 2020); and (2) teachers who engage in phenomena-based investigations develop expansive definitions of what it means to know in science.

Data sources and Analysis - A total of 13 hours of interviews with teachers, 10 hours of classroom video, two hours of PD video, and field notes are analyzed qualitatively. The analysis focuses on teachers’ attunement to students’ conceptual and semiotic resources, particularly how teachers transcend their own culturally- and historically-developed sense-making repertoires. The analysis also focuses on teachers’ pedagogical imaginary: a disposition to question their own practice and how they responded or would respond to students’ sense-making repertoires.

Findings - Preliminary findings suggest that attending to and reflecting on students’ sense-making repertoires, particularly during phenomena-based investigations, created opportunities for teachers to identify the meaning and value of students’ ideas about natural phenomena; also worry less about students’ use of scientific vocabulary to share their thinking. Teachers also seemed to have benefited from engaging in phenomena-based investigations, deepening their conceptual understanding and emphasizing the similarities between their sense-making repertoires and those of their students’.

Scholarly Significance - This study offers insight into the professional learning opportunities that can support elementary grade teachers develop their interpretive lens: centering activities that encourage teachers to recognize the meaning and value of their own and their students’ sense-making-repertoires, and enacting necessary pedagogical shifts that make science education more equitable and just for minoritized students.

Author

• Enrique (Henry) Suárez, University of Massachusetts - Amherst