Curriculum in Motion for English Language Learners in Science: Teachers Supporting Newcomer Unaccompanied Youth

Abstract

This chapter aims at providing a dynamic pedagogical and instructional framework incorporating classroom practices for serving newcomer unaccompanied youth. This framework is the result of a collaborative approach among teacher educators, a science teacher, and students in a project called Curriculum in Motion (CiM). The CiM project conceptualized curriculum as an in-progress design, making it suitable for other science teachers to adapt it in their particular contexts. We conceptualize language as a dynamic resource for science meaning making. We provide an overview of the perspectives that informed our work as we developed the CiM project, and an outline of the principles that framed our teaching in the science classroom, as well as relevant examples of student work.

Things have changed, but our memories are still fresh. That Tuesday morning in October found us, a group of science and English as a second language bilingual teacher educators, inside a cold, humid, artificially illuminated trailer, removed from the main school building. More than 40 high school-aged immigrant learners were gathered together in the classroom with their science/ESOL teacher and were staring back at us curiously. After all, we were a new set of strangers coming to observe them, talk to them, and possibly teach them. Their eyes opened wide as they heard familiar sounds when we began to talk with them in Spanish: a shared realm in which we would build relationships for the next two years.

A year passed and the trailer was traded in for a “real” classroom inside the school building, where the science/ESOL teacher and bilingual paraprofessional taught an environmental science class for these students. That classroom evolved into a bilingual space, full of signs and texts that integrated Spanish and English; both languages used on the walls and in the teaching materials. For example, bilingual general academic vocabulary cards and science concept cards were on display at all times for the students to use as touchstones when communicating their ideas orally or in writing. This classroom was unique in the school, as it allowed students to negotiate meaning freely and fluidly in both Spanish and English, to express their ideas about science multimodally and to find dynamic language support with their peers. Language-rich science investigations were central to the activities of the class. Linguistic resources flowed with ease and familiarity and were embedded in the collective movement of everyday classroom life. We all were bilingual learners, dynamically emerging. We were also scientists together, coming to know the natural world through a multitude of resources and practices. We were, indeed, teachers and students in motion.