“It was so close to home, we couldn't deny it:” Co-Designing Climate Justice Curriculum with Multilingual families

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum in collaboration: Exploring multilingual family and community literacy practices as resources for curriculum development

Abstract

1. Purpose
This study focuses on the role of translanguaging tools in supporting teachers and families working together to foster students’ learning during a co-design curricular project, FamJam, that centers families’ rightful presence and translanguaging practices in science classrooms.
Grounded in critical ethnography and participatory design, we examine how alliances between teachers and families can foster more equitable, justice-oriented transformative approaches to climate change education.

2. Theoretical framework
Multilingual learners continue to face systemic barriers in science education (Grapin et al., 2023). Schools often ignore their linguistic and cultural assets, missing opportunities to access useful information about families’ knowledge (McWayne et al., 2021). Gaps intensify when addressing pressing socio-scientific issues like climate change. Meaningfully engagement recognizes how science intersects with social justice on global and local scales.
We draw upon families' rightful presence and translanguaging as joint activities. Rightful presence legitimizes families' community cultural wisdom and fosters capital/resource movement between families and schools (Author, 2020). Translanguaging, using linguistic resources such as gestures, home language, everyday speech, and physical artifacts.
3. Method
We collaborated with one teacher and five sixth-grade classrooms at an urban public school, serving a vibrant Arab immigrant population with ongoing migration from the Middle East, located in one of the ten most polluted cities in the U.S. The teacher, Ms. Hened, shares a cultural background with her students. FamJam included four collaborative activities: exploring familial capital, co-designing curriculum, classroom enactments, and reflective dialogues.
4. Data sources and analysis
Data were co-generated through field notes, video/audio observations, mothers’ photo voice and storytelling, students’ artifacts and group interviews, child-mother interviews, and teacher interviews. Analysis involved multiple stages of coding based on constant comparison procedures.
5. Results
Findings illustrate how translanguaging tools facilitated political allyship among teachers and parents in sharing responsibility and solidarity to uplift familial wealth and foster spaces for enduring agency and community thriving.
During the climate change unit, Ms. Hened introduced the video “What our moms think about climate change” where mothers recounted personal experiences with climate-related events, such as flooding in their local neighborhoods and homeland, Yemen. Testimonies illustrated the disproportionate effects of climate change on minoritized communities and deepened students’ understanding of structural inequities.
Hesitant to teach climate justice to students already navigating structural vulnerability, Ms. Hened questioned how to introduce issues like tree equity and environmental racism: “how are we going to deliver this unit on climate justice?. . .It was so close to home, we couldn’t deny it.” Yet, the mother’s testimonies reframed the unit, grounding abstract injustices in lived experience. This encouraged her to help her students advocate for climate justice.
6. Significance of study
This legitimizes translanguaging and fluid communication between schools and multilingual families, placing students and communities at the center of learning. Recognizing the community's cultural wealth of immigrant families is not enough. To confront and transform systemic injustices, it is imperative to find methods to activate this wealth, making it visible and accessible within a classroom setting.

Authors

• Wisam Sedawi, University of Michigan

• Angela Calabrese, University of Michigan