From a Dominican Island to a Mexican Rainforest: Developing and Designing Culturally Relevant Spanish-English Bilingual Science Storybooks (Poster 8)

• In Event: (Re)Imagining Different Educational Realities: Anti-Deficit Approaches in Informal Learning Environments Research

Abstract

  Parent-child book sharing is widely recognized as an important practice to support children’s language and literacy skills. Nonetheless, there is also growing interest in and evidence for book sharing advancing informal science education (see Haden et al., 2023, for review). One reason for this is that stories in books (and told orally) can convey science information that might not be available through direct experience and can boost children's engagement with challenging science-related ideas (Browning & Hohenstein, 2015; Cho & Plummer, 2018; Evans et al., 2016; Kelemen et al., 2014). As with the work on language and literacy, the current research on book sharing for science learning largely focuses on white, middle-class US children. Moreover, even though 52% of children under 4 years old come from racially diverse backgrounds (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021), less than 25% of children’s books include non-White human characters (Huyck & Park Dahlen, 2019). Consequently, there is an urgent need for authentic and meaningful representation of culturally and linguistically minoritized families in the art and content of science books for children. This presentation will detail our efforts to address this need by developing and designing two culturally-grounded Spanish-English bilingual books to promote informal science learning opportunities for Latine children and their families. These books are currently being used in a research study in which we aim to understand how Latine families talk about science when engaging in book sharing. 

We created one book set in the Lacandon Rainforest in Mexico featuring a human girl as a main character, and the other book set in Saona Island in the Dominican Republic featuring a human boy as a main character. Prior research offers mixed findings as to whether narrative or expository texts are more conducive to young children’s science learning, with much of this work, again, involving white, middle-class children (e.g., Aydin et al., 2021; Browning & Hohenstein, 2015). Therefore, we created two versions of each book--one narrative and one expository--that are comparable in the types of information units, defined as a single idea containing factual information presented in one sentence (Aydin et al., 2021). In each book, 14 of the information units express one idea, describing a single feature/characteristic of the location, flora, or fauna. The other 8 information units are causal, describing a causal relation between two features/characteristics of the location, flora or fauna. Including causal sentences might encourage families to engage in the science practice of explaining. The development and design delineated in the presentation followed a strengths-based approach, marrying a viable and rigorous methodology with intentional efforts to include and celebrate Latine families. Preliminary results from the research will illustrate how these efforts are received by Latine families. It is our hope that documenting the narrative and expository book creation process can serve as a map for further development of materials that authentically represent culturally and linguistically diverse communities.  

Author

• Paola Montufar Soria, New York University