Collective Sensemaking Around Translanguaging in Formative Assessment Co-Design: A Catalyst for Science Teacher Agency

• In Event: Equity in Elementary Science Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Problem. Formative assessment is commonly understood as informal classroom activities where students share their emerging thinking and receive low-stakes feedback (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Additionally, formative assessment often informs teachers’ ongoing instructional decisions (Brookhart, 2003). Given the important role formative assessment plays, it is imperative that science formative assessments be linguistically equitable for emergent bilingual students (e.g., Mahoney, 2017; Menken & Shohamy, 2015). Translanguaging, the dynamic communicative norm of (bi)multilingual communities who use multiple linguistic resources for meaning-making, is as an important pedagogical and assessment tool for linguistic equity in science classrooms (e.g., Fine & Furtak, 2020; García & Wei, 2014; Karlsson et al., 2019; Poza, 2016; Suárez, 2020). Questions remain about how to integrate translanguaging in classrooms where teachers do not share multiple linguistic resources with their students (Tian et al., 2020).
Design. Design-based research in education puts theories to work in real-world contexts to bring new insights to learning theory (e.g., Penuel & Frank, 2016). Between August 2019 and March 2020, we worked with two teachers, Emily and Heather, to engage in participatory co-design (Bang & Vossoughi, 2017) following the (Trans)formative Assessment Co-Design (TAC) cycle. Analysis focuses on how teachers can be supported to interpret completed formative assessments that included translanguaging. We use sensemaking theory (e.g., Coburn, 2001), theories of teacher agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Severance et al., 2016), and the translanguaging pedagogies framework (García et al., 2017) to qualitatively analyze illustrative conversations during the Reflect and Modify phase of four sequential TAC cycles. Data include video and audio data transcriptions of teacher-researcher collaborative meetings, meeting minutes and artifacts, student work samples, and semi-structured interviews with teacher participants.

Findings. Findings point to the importance of collective sensemaking as a mechanism that helped Emily, an experienced and highly qualified teacher, begin to learn, borrow, and practice a set of tools and routines. Emily used tools/routines alongside her existing knowledge and strong translanguaging stances to better interpret (bi)multilingual student work. Collective sensemaking during iterative Reflect and Modify meetings enabled Emily to consider emergent bilinguals’ ideas, gain confidence in leveraging her limited multilingual knowledge, lean into internet-based translation tools, connect to students’ creativity and science ideas through their visual representations, and support students’ multilingual meaning-making in-the-moment during formative assessment events. Ultimately, participation in collective sensemaking conversations about student work supported Emily to expand her translanguaging pedagogies by building on ideological stances to develop more confident, joyful, concrete, agentive actions.

Contribution/Significance. This study expands our understanding of teacher agency in co-design with concrete ideas about how teachers support one another as they engage in collaborative sensemaking of emergent bilinguals’ science ideas and how that collaboration can, in turn, lead to individual agentive actions that expand equitable learning and assessment opportunities.

Authors

• Caitlin Fine, Boston College

• Melissa Braaten, University of Colorado - Boulder