Undergraduate Students’ Shifting Views as They Teach Science Lessons in Spanish at Bilingual Elementary Schools (Poster 4)

Sat, April 13, 3:05 to 4:35pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, Room 115B

Abstract

Critical scholars call for new, equitable approaches to conducting research and teaching in partnership with communities (Bang & Medin, 2010; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Penuel, 2017). Nuestra Ciencia (NC) addresses this call, as a university-school bilingual program run by an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty in California. NC undergraduates participate in topic selection, experiment and lesson development, teaching, data collection and analysis, conference presentations and publications. Here, we focus on three years of participants as they developed and taught lessons about vaccines and herd immunity to fourth-sixth graders at two bilingual elementary schools from 2021-2023. Specifically, we describe the impact on undergraduates’ views on science teaching in Spanish. While there is research on supporting pre-service bilingual teachers, and the impact on elementary students (Nash et al., 2021), there is much less on how facilitators’ views shift while teaching in Spanish. Therefore, we posed the research question: What are NC undergraduates’ views on Spanish in relation to science communication and teaching?

A participatory design-based research approach was used to collect and analyze data in collaboration with researchers, participants, and practitioners (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). We examined program processes and products to understand the effect of design decisions and program components. We performed multiple rounds of emergent coding on 5 undergraduate focus group interviews with a total of 15 Latinx undergraduates (Saldana, 2012). Codes from interviews were triangulated with text from analytic memos, planning meeting notes, teaching artifacts, and pre-post surveys.

Our findings reveal that the use of Spanish to teach science was transformative for undergraduate learners. They shifted from viewing Spanish as a home language for “day to day things” to valuing it as “a tool” for teaching science in a meaningful way, reconnecting with their community and countering exclusionary experiences with science. They expressed how it was “challenging yet empowering” to teach science lessons in Spanish. While they initially lacked confidence in scientific vocabulary, students felt empowered, joyful, and proud to be giving back to their community and “connecting with their roots” both through sharing with the elementary students and through discussing these activities with family members. Undergraduates reported that their families showed a renewed interest in their college experience and expressed pride about their teaching in Spanish. Besides bonding with their families, undergraduates articulated their passion for teaching Latinx children and felt that the affirming experiences they provided to current students countered their own negative experiences. Multiple undergraduates reported that teaching younger students in Spanish, in the way they would have appreciated, was “healing”, or “doing a service to my younger self.” One student reported, “It healed the little girl in me that didn't get science, didn’t get that [experience], and being able to do that for someone else and seeing their smile just brings me something that I would never have thought would come from a research project.”

By outlining our project design and documenting undergraduate students’ experiences, we hope to provide recommendations for educators and policymakers on how to better support Latinx undergraduates in teaching science.

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