ELL

The resources that multilingual students bring to school mathematics are often ignored. During a teacher-researcher collaborative project focused on creating more equitable learning environments in high school math classrooms, we noted an initial tendency to focus on the challenges and barriers facing multilingual students. To counter this tendency, we worked with two teachers to engage in a structured teacher-student interview to identify and highlight secondary multilingual students’ home and community resources. We adapted a module from TeachMath to guide the activity and facilitated surveys, debriefs and teacher-research conversations to unpack this experience.

In this article, we—a team of science teachers and a university researcher—present the processes of adapting existing curricular resources to promote equitable learning experiences for diverse learners. Using a middle school ecology unit as an example, we illustrate what the modification process looks like in two key elements of designing NGSS-aligned science instruction: (a) making phenomena matter with the consideration of student identities and (b) leveraging students’ diverse ideas and questions to drive instruction.

This department explores the concept of disciplinary literacy—the conceptual understandings and ways of reading, thinking, and writing involved in critiquing and constructing knowledge in a discipline—and its intersections with aspects of culturally sustaining pedagogy.

We introduce and illustrate three principles for designing secondary mathematics classrooms in which multilingual students can benefit from participating in mathematical discussions. Drawing from the Academic Literacy in Mathematics (ALM) framework (Moschkovich, 2015), we developed these principles through a four-year design research collaboration with ninth grade mathematics teachers working in a linguistically diverse urban secondary school in the southwest USA.

Emerging multilingual students can develop the dimensions of Academic Literacy in Mathematics (ALM) in classroom discussions. But, there is a need for empirically-validated principles for fostering such discussions. This research used ALM as a framework to create a unit of instruction on linear rates of change for ninth grade mathematics in which multilingual students benefit from discussions.

This study investigated how newcomer emergent bilinguals made meaning in two 9th-grade biology classrooms. Methods relevant to naturalistic inquiry were used to collect and analyze data. Findings indicate that newcomers bridged aspects of personal experiences with social competencies valued in classrooms through using heritage languages, engaging as brokers and collaborators, and attempting to realize goals of learning English and content simultaneously. Findings also show that misalignments between social competence and personal experience constrained meaning-making. This study illustrates a need for activities that reflect and expand newcomer resources and experiences, and for activities that can take shape through student participation.

In this paper we argue for the need to design and develop transformative learning ecologies that explicitly position the diverse voices of youth from nondominant communities as central to re-defining and re-envisioning relationally just, pluralistic, and sustainable futures. To this end, we seek to provide examples from participatory design-based learning ecologies to illustrate the centering of middle school youth voices and agencies from multilingual Black, Brown, and Latinx communities through critical response-ability.

The Visual Access to Mathematics (VAM) project developed and studied teacher professional development (PD) focused on linguistically-responsive teaching to facilitate ELs’ mathematical problem solving and discourse. This study examines whether VAM PD has a positive impact on teachers’ self-efficacy in supporting ELs in mathematics and how components of the PD may have influenced teacher outcomes.

School, home, and neighborhoods make large amounts of garbage every day. In answering the driving question of the unit, “What happens to our garbage?”, students investigate a series of subquestions (e.g., “What is that smell?” and “What causes changes in the properties of garbage materials?”) that address a targeted set of physical science and life science performance expectations. This unit was developed with a specific focus on English learners by using an engaging, local phenomenon and design principles that capitalize on the mutually supportive nature of science and language learning.

School, home, and neighborhoods make large amounts of garbage every day. In answering the driving question of the unit, “What happens to our garbage?”, students investigate a series of subquestions (e.g., “What is that smell?” and “What causes changes in the properties of garbage materials?”) that address a targeted set of physical science and life science performance expectations. This unit was developed with a specific focus on English learners by using an engaging, local phenomenon and design principles that capitalize on the mutually supportive nature of science and language learning.