“This is Spanish Time”: Perspectives of Elementary Teachers in Bilingual Classrooms

• In Event: Translenguando en STEM: Conceptualizing Multilingual STEM Education as a Distinct Ontology

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework. The sociopolitical turn in bilingual education has created a new lens through which we can understand language acquisition more critically, translanguaging (Garcia, 2009). Translanguaging is a stance that acknowledges when a multilingual person's full linguistic repertoire is used and honored rather than trying to narrow it down to one dominant language (Garcia, et. al, 2017). Such stance aligns with emancipatory education as it both considers the intersectionality of identity (Crenshaw, 2013), creates avenues for honoring people’s full repertoire and humanity and explicitly challenges hierarchies of language that position English as the dominant language (Flores et. al, 2015). Analogously, the sociopolitical turn in STEM education (Gutierrez, 2013; McKinney de Royston et. al, 2019; Tolbert et. al, 2017) considers how dominant narratives about STEM learning can be disrupted to center multiple ways of knowing and being. In both cases, there is a conscious move away from deficit understandings of students’ existing knowledge, and towards an asset-based approach to incorporating students’ ways of knowing into the classroom that supports both linguistic and disciplinary learning.

As these shifts have begun in many diverse learning communities, including pre-service teacher preparation and in-service teacher learning, we contend that it is fruitful to understand how such stances are currently enacted within disciplinary learning in STEM. Thus, this research project investigated the following research question:
1. What are the challenges and opportunities that in-service bilingual teachers encounter as they incorporate a translanguaging stance into STEM lessons?

Data Sources and Methods. The authors conducted hour-long semi-structured interviews with in-service dual language (Spanish/English) elementary classroom teachers. Teachers were asked to reflect on their preparation and describe both content and language practices that they used in teaching each subject. These semi-structured interviews were transcribed and analyzed using grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1994) to identify major themes in the data.

Results and Conclusions. As teachers described their science and math lessons in dual language classrooms, three major themes emerged. The first, emotion and expression, captured the ways that teachers described the affective importance of multilingual communication. They described their own emotions related to language and that which they observed in their students. Second, teachers grappled with the purpose of translanguaging. While all teachers engaged in some level of translanguaging during their lessons, their purposes for doing so varied. Finally, teachers reflected on the institutional demands that dictated what subjects were taught in English and which were taught in Spanish and often led to minimal time allotted to science in the schedule.

Scholarly Significance. This work provides evidence of the varied ways that teachers make sense of the intersection of translanguaging and disciplinary STEM education in their practice. Theoretically, this work documents ongoing tensions and opportunities that teachers grapple with to build an understanding of translanguaging with disciplinary learning that is expansive and anti-deficit. Pedagogically, understanding these different approaches and challenges are critical for developing an expansive pedagogical approach in teacher preparation programs that systematically works to repair deficit narratives of multilingual STEM learners.

Authors

• Kathryn Ribay, San Jose State University

• Sandra Zuniga, San José State University

• Daisy Zuno, San Jose State University