Teacher Candidates' Emerging Multilingual Science Practices

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

Abstract

Purposes
Research on integrating multilingual pedagogies in teacher education has primarily taken place in the context of literacy or bilingual education (Machado & Cornell Gonzales, 2020; Catalano & Hamann, 2016). Awareness of the impacts of centering English as the sole language of school science is increasing (Gonzlez-Howard & Suárez, 2021). As such this study aims to contribute to the shift from supporting multilingual students to learn in English to integrating multimodal and multilingual elementary science instruction by exploring the ideologies and experiences that undergird teacher candidates (TCs) emerging multilingual science practices.

Perspective(s)
This work finds its conceptual home in the multicultural education dimension of equity pedagogy (Banks & Banks, 1995) and specifically in the work based on Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris, 2012; Paris and Alim, 2017) as the outcome of this research is to work to sustain the home languages practices of minoritized students. The TCs in this study are participating in methods based on Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, 2018) and the study looks at how candidates ideologies impact the dynamic multilingual practices, for example translanguaging (García & Sylvan, 2011), they attempt during their preservice training and envision enacting in the future.

Methods of inquiry
This is a case study of one cohort of a 12 month elementary preservice program whose candidates are majority BIPOC and multilingual. The analysis focused on TCs ideologies around integrating multiple languages in their science practices via grounded theory to find themes across the cohort. Then we analyzed four TC’s initial enactments of science lessons to see how they envisioned integrating students’ languages in multilingual classrooms. These enactments were then mapped onto the data from the cohort.

Data sources
We analyzed two sets of reflections from all the teacher candidates (about 60 a set) related to integrating language in science and reflecting on their own raciolinguistic identities. Then analyzed videos of science teaching enactments, conducted interviews, and engaged in a document analysis of 4 TCs who agreed to participate in a deeper study (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).

Results
Preliminary findings highlight that TC’s various attempts at integrating multiple languages are predominantly around vocabulary support rather than integrating translanguaging in scientific discourse. There are various constraints that impact the use of multilingual practices in TCs placements including mentor/school culture around multilingualism and students’ internalized monolingualism in school settings. Findings also indicated that TCs ideologies around multilingualism are based on disrupting the implicit English-only policy of schooling to provide a more culturally and linguistically sustaining experience for their students.

Scholarly significance of the study
Since multilingual pedagogies is an emerging branch of research it is important to learn about how those who are new to the field of teaching, TCs, are envisioning this work and the ideologies that undergird their culturally and linguistically sustaining practices in order to support future teachers to “adopt a position of consistently swimming against the current" (Ladson-Billings, 1998) of monoglossic culture of schooling in the US

Authors

• Cristina M. Betancourt, University of Washington

• Grace Cornell Gonzales, University of Washington - Seattle