What Elementary Teachers Respond To: Tensions Around Translanguaging as a Sense-Making Practice for Learning Science

• In Event: Centering Multilingual Ideologies and Practices in Disciplinary Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Objectives and Framing. Responsive Teaching focuses on how teachers support student learning through eliciting, noticing, and responding to students’ reasoning (Thompson et al., 2016). Operationalizing a commitment to justice within responsive teaching 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). I argue that science teachers’ interpretive lens must also value and leverage students’ translanguaging, “the process by which bilingual students and teachers engage in complex discursive practices in order to ‘make sense’ of, and communicate in, multilingual classrooms” (García & Sylvan, 2011, p. 389). When engaging in translanguaging practices, emergent multilingual students draw from a broad communicative repertoire that comprises multilingual, multimodal, and multisensory resources for meaning-making.
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 Sheltered English Immersion 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.

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.

Results. 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. Analyzing students’ ideas and translanguaging also surfaced tensions within teachers about when to support more open-ended investigations and communication, and when to follow district-imposed requirements and pedagogies around language acquisition. Teachers also seemed to have benefited from engaging in phenomena-based investigations, emphasizing the similarities between their sense-making repertoires and those of their students’.

Significance. This study offers insight into the professional learning opportunities that can support elementary grade teachers develop their interpretive lens. Transformative science learning must include opportunities for students to leverage multiple semiotic resources in the service of co-constructing knowledge. Additionally, justice-oriented responsive pedagogies play a crucial role in creating those opportunities through identifying, valuing, and leveraging students’ translanguaging practices.

Author

• Enrique Suárez, University of Massachusetts - Amherst