Promoting Asset-Based Science Teaching for Emergent Language Learners

• In Event: Centering Multilingual Ideologies and Practices in Disciplinary Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Objective
While research calls for teachers to develop asset-based instruction for multilingual learners, less attention has been paid to how teachers negotiate asset-based teaching with their multiple identities and ideologies, particularly in science teaching and learning.
This paper examines the contexts, trends, and tensions at the intersections of teachers’ ideologies, identities, and instructional practice as the teachers work to reconcile science, language, and literacy teaching and learning. What ideologies permeate the teachers’ sense-making of their students and their practices in fostering asset-based science, language, and literacy teaching? In what ways do these ideologies intersect with the teachers’ instructional practices? Implications for how these contexts, trends, and tensions may shape spaces for teacher learning and sense-making discourse in science, language, and literacy are discussed.
Theoretical Framework
Our study brings together multiple theoretical strands in examining the intersections of teachers’ science, language, and literacy ideologies, identities, and instructional practice. (See Figure 1.) Specifically we attend to race, language, and culture, (Daniels & Varghese, 2019), teacher learning and identity development (Lucas & Villegas, 2013), interdisciplinary approaches to learning (García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017), multilingualism (Lucas, Strom, Bratkovich, & Wnuk, 2018), while taking a critical equity stance (Flores & Rosa, 2015).

Methods
This is the first year of a multi-year study on dual language elementary science teacher learning, discourse, language, and literacy. We sought to understand the intersection among three in-service teachers’ identities, ideologies, and instructional practice.
We conducted a thematic analysis (Guest, et.al., 2012) of data to identify common ideas, topics, and patterns regarding how language and literacy were addressed in science instruction and how students were positioned as sensemakers to use their complete linguistic and cultural repertoires.
Data Sources
Data consisted of:
Four to seven classroom observations
In-depth two hour exit interviews

Results
Preliminary findings show the dual language teachers’ compartmentalization of science, literacy, and language resulted in challenges addressing all three in their instruction. Findings also show how the teachers’ struggled to align their science, language, and literacy instruction with their linguistic and racial ideologies. Finally, accessing teachers’ identities and own funds of knowledge in their instructional practice intersected in problematic ways with broader district and school socio-political contexts that privileged White middle class students’ needs and the use and development of the English language. Implications for identifying spaces for teacher learning within these complex intersections are discussed.

Scholarly Significance
More attention is needed to understand how teachers can learn to support students in developing discipline-specific explanations and arguments in multiple languages, utilize translanguaging pedagogies (García & Sylvan, 2011) and engage students in critical conversations about power dynamics in science and literacy classrooms that often privilege speaking English only (Beeman & Urow, 2013).

This work draws attention to the tensions of teachers’ negotiating their multiple ideologies, identities, and perspectives with their instructional practice to identify potential learning spaces for science teachers of multilingual learners.

Authors

• Kerry Soo Von Esch, Seattle University

• Patricia E. Venegas-Weber, University of Washington - Seattle

• Hsin-Jung Li, University of Washington - Seattle

• Jessica J. Thompson, University of Washington