Abstract
This chapter focuses on the importance of including emergent bilingual students’ cultural practices in the science learning process at a time when there is a growing diversity in schools, inadequate preparation for science teachers to address diverse students’ needs, and a pressing demand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals in society (Gordon C, DeBard A, 2014). We describe work that took place during a 2-week student summer academy, part of the Language-rich Inquiry Science with English Language Learners through Biotechnology (LISELL-B) project. In this setting, science teachers, Latino/a emergent bilingual students, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers, and university researchers collaborated to create and promote science investigation practices and the language of science investigation in an outside-of-school science learning environment. We discuss how science teachers are adopting and adapting these practices and the language of science investigation and incorporating them into their classrooms. We use an architectural perspective (De Landa 2010) to study how these elements connected in both outside-of-school and classroom settings in order to provide a set of recommendations for future and current science teachers who are facing challenges and opportunities posed by demographic, policy, and curriculum changes in the schools.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, we use the term emergent bilingual students to emphasize the positive attribute of having a home language that is a resource that can and should be used, maintained, and strengthened in school and in science learning contexts. It refers to a range of students, including those who are new to English and literate in their home language as well as those who report receptive skills in home languages and a language other than English spoken at home but identify themselves as lacking literacy and oral skills in that home language.
- 2.
The work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (award # DRL-1316398).
- 3.
We use the term space to refer only to a physical setting; we use the terms environment, context, and territory to refer to the combination of a physical setting and the corresponding social elements (e.g., interactions between people, institutions, and larger social organizations). We further differentiate between territory and environment or context by claiming that the creation of a territory requires a different (and more intentional) relation between the space and the social settings than is the case for a context or environment.
- 4.
These investigations were co-developed with a science teacher who was also the soccer coach at one of our participant schools. Most students on the soccer team were emergent bilingual students of Latino descent.
- 5.
Recent research about teaching science with Karen refugee group (Harper 2015) is serving as a resource.
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Domínguez, M.V., Allexsaht-Snider, M., Latimer, A. (2017). Science Teachers as Architects: Building and Supporting Science-Learning Environments with Emergent Bilingual Students. In: Oliveira, A., Weinburgh, M. (eds) Science Teacher Preparation in Content-Based Second Language Acquisition. ASTE Series in Science Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43516-9_13
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