The Role of Positioning in Making Visible Emergent Bilingual/Multilingual Students' Ontic and Epistemic Agencies in the Context of Science Education

• In Event: The Power and Possibility of Science Education Research in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Contexts: Unpacking Critical Issues

Abstract

While science education focuses on making science culture and practices more inclusive of diverse learners’ funds of knowledge, ways of being, and knowing ––– linguistic background and its intersection with dominant science practices and sociopolitical contexts of learning is rarely understood. Language is a sociopolitical construct, however a pervasive notion about the importance of learning dominant language often clouds its ideological roots and subtle identity indexicalities.

The data for this study comes from a design based participatory research study, conducted in two seventh grade science classrooms in the U.S. Northeast and later within an informal learning setting at a summer science program with over a hundred emergent bilingual/multilingual elementary and middle grades students. Students’ interactions with others entail not only a degree of cognitive and conceptual engagement, but also interpersonal, social, cultural, and power dynamics, which include a range of identity positions from which to make-meaning, communicate, or represent and express meanings (spoken -written word, visual images or body language) (Norton & Toohey, 2011). Our assumption is that when students are afforded expansive opportunities to engage in science meaning-making, they are more likely to recruit and develop multiplicities of complex social, cultural, cognitive, and epistemic resources and agencies, communicative and representational repertoires, as well as potential ingenuities. This challenges "hitherto settled notions of language” (Kress, 2010, p. 79 emphasis is original), and disrupts traditional notions of what it means to be a knowledge producer, to know and practice science. Therefore, it is crucial to attend to these power dynamics, and to understand how the availability of different positions, tools, and repertoires enable or constrain students’ identities and epistemic agencies in learning science. Drawing on Millet et al’s (2018) work, we define epistemic agency as " students being positioned with, perceiving, and acting on, opportunities to shape the knowledge building work in their classroom community” (p.1058).

Qualitative data was collected using video, audio recording , observational notes, and student interviews to (1) make visible the kinds of cultural, epistemic, and multimodal agencies and communicative resources and repertoires diverse emergent bilinguals/multilinguals deployed in our learning settings. We were interested to see (2) which roles, identity positions, and epistemic tools afforded these learners make-meanings and express their epistemic agencies and identities using multiple modes and modalities. Thus our research questions were; (1) what kinds of identity positions were made available for students from to which to make-meaning, communicate, or represent and express meanings in science?; (2) in what ways did students accept, reject, or negotiate these identity positions and how this process enabled or contained their epistemic agencies?; (3) what types roles/relations, interactions, and tools within the classroom activity were productive to support the range of students’ identities and epistemic agencies? Our findings show various ingenuities, heterogeneous resources, and agentic moves emergent bilingual students employ in their learning, communication, and knowledge construction. The study allows researchers to make visible science learning as a struggle for epistemic justice against impositions of dominant ways of knowing and being.

Authors

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Semiha Gun-Yildiz, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Akira Harper, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth