Expanding What Counts as Science With Bilingual Children Perceived as Having Disabilities

• In Event: 73.060 - Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 73.060-1 - Bilingual Students with Special Needs

Abstract

Objectives
Children come to schools with cultural and linguistic resources that are not recognized or valued in today's science classrooms. This is particularly true with children who experience science outside of school in ways, which contrast with more traditionally accepted science. These children are often identified as having special needs. The aim of this study is to explore ways in which we can help these bilingual children, who are portrayed as having special needs, recognize science in their daily practices and in their own cultures of origin, and ways in which we can create spaces for these children’s sciencing practices in schools.

Theoretical Framework
Inspired by educationalists such as John Dewey (1916) this research departs from the traditional school science teaching and learning and engages a humanistic perspective in school science (e.g., Duschl, 1988). This perspective embraces an everyday-life approach to science that encourages students’ flexible and dynamic identities, and personal meaning making in science (Aikenhead, 2006). Furthermore and given the historical resistance to properly address the needs of minoritized populations in the United States and in shaping science education, I utilize Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Within CHAT, Yrjö Engeström (1999) encourages us to think of development not just as a vertical movement, but also “as [a] horizontal movement across borders” (p. 4), involving agency to impact the direction of an activity. The research questions are:
RQ1. How can we expand what counts as science in bilingual schools when working with bilingual children perceived as having disabilities?
RQ2. What are the bridging contextual mediators that can create spaces for everyday sciencing in schools?

Methods and Data Sources
Part of a larger qualitative research effort (Erickson, 1986), this study involves three Spanish/English and two Chinese/English first and second grade bilingual children, who were described by their teachers as struggling in academic settings.

The study took place in two bilingual public schools in New York City committed to guide students in becoming bilingual and biliteral. Assisted by a team of two researchers and three graduate assistants, I collaborated in planning a series of curricular invitations with a group of ten teacher candidates who led the afterschool sessions once a week along a semester. The data, generated as the children worked with digital cameras and other tools for generating multimodal compositions, consisted of multimedia data in the form of drawings of scientists, and photographs and videos the children captured; and audio-recordings of all class sessions. For the analysis, I codified the data with the help of a graduate research assistant using NVivo.

Results & Scholarly Significance
The data shows how the five bilingual children, whose teachers suspected had disabilities, became agents for transforming what teachers and researchers considered science in schools.
In so doing, these five children accepted the invitation to demystify science and scientists, enacted unique identities as scientists, and engaged in scientific thinking in culturally relevant ways. Ways, which are rarely utilized, appreciated, or even recognized as scientific in current remediation-oriented educational efforts. The findings contribute to operationalize ways for such an equity-based approach to science education.

Author

• Patricia Martínez-Álvarez, Teachers College, Columbia University