Informal Science Learning With Multilingual Learners

• In Event: Science Education With Multilingual Learners: Toward Equity as Transformation

Abstract

Objectives & Theoretical Framework. This presentation highlight emerging research on science learning with MLs in informal science learning settings. Successful Informal STEM Education (ISE) programs connect with learners’ cultural resources, values, and home practices to advance their STEM learning (National Research Council, 2015). Because ISE is not bound by restrictive curriculum and assessment mandates associated with formal schooling, it allows diverse ways of merging everyday knowledge of learners from historically minoritized groups with new ideas and practices (Bang & Medin, 2010; Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010). While many ISE programs tend to focus on offering extra instructional supports for MLs that formal schooling cannot provide (NASEM, 2018), some scholars have strived to reconceptualize equity questions for MLs as transformation (Ash, 2004; Harper, 2017). For example, ISE may promote translanguaging that enables MLs to employ their full linguistic repertoire to co-construct meanings with other multilingual peers (e.g., Suárez, 2020), or rightful presence of refugee-background children and youths through making injustice visible and shifting existing power dynamics (Tan & Faircloth, 2023).

Data and methods. We designed a community-based afterschool STEM program that invited resettled Chin refugee high school students to learn about climate change and produce multimodal texts (e.g., videos) to communicate with various audience groups (Ryu & Daniel, 2020). Chin people are ethnic minorities in Myanmar that are made up of more than 30 different ethnic groups and have developed unique cultural heritages and languages. Interviews with participating teens revealed how they became part of existing power relationships of race and language and simultaneously authored empowering narratives about themselves as refugees, multilinguals, and change agents (Ryu & Tuvilla, 2018). Through analyzing ethnographic data from the project (e.g., recordings of program sessions, interviews), we demonstrate several ways in which Chin youth participated in the afterschool program.

Results. First, youth strategically blended humor and STEM discourse, crafting a space for themselves and their peers in which diverse identities (e.g., a funny person, a person who cares about others) could contribute meaningfully to collaborative justice-oriented work. Second, youth drew flexibly and strategically from their wide range of linguistic and semiotic resources to engage in scientific sense-making and provide caring social support for others (Daniel et al., 2021). For example, in situations where learners had different levels of proficiency in different named languages, they communicated by speaking in one named language and listening in another while also leveraging other semiotic resources, such as gaze and body language. Finally, youth used their knowledge of developing parts of the world to raise critical questions regarding the impacts of climate change, including who is severely impacted, who is responsible, and who needs to take actions (Ryu et al., 2020).

Significance. This research seeks to provide supplementary STEM learning experiences for refugee youth who often have interrupted schooling (equity as access). At the same time, this research empowers youth to interrogate the roles of science and engineering in disrupting inequities and to design justice-oriented solutions that center the interests of marginalized people they care deeply about (equity as transformation).

Authors

• Minjung Ryu, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Shannon M. Daniel, Vanderbilt University