Enacting reform-oriented, phenomenon-based instruction provides us an opportunity to more equitably teach science. Particularly, our teaching can be stronger when we elicit, notice and then use all students’ ideas and questions to inform how students collaborate to figure out phenomena. However, this is only possible if we learn to expansively notice the many language resources multilingual students have available for sharing their thinking, which requires teachers to see and hear beyond what has been traditionally privileged in school spaces. In this piece, we describe how we draw upon translanguaging theory and pedagogy to prepare prospective teachers to teach science with multilingual students. Specifically, we share and illustrate how we approach using interactive science interviews to develop prospective teachers’ language-expansive noticing of multilingual students’ scientific sensemaking. Language-expansive noticing describes an asset-based instructional practice that enables teachers to recognize the nuanced ideas students have about phenomena in addition to the ways multilingual students engage in translanguaging (i.e., using linguistic and multimodal resources) to communicate their thinking. As science teachers (preservice and inservice alike) learn to notice their multilingual students’ brilliant ideas and questions in language-expansive ways, they will better be able to use them to transform their science instruction.
González-Howard, M., Robinson, C., Andersen, S., Vazquez Esparza, M., & Rodriguez, N. (2025). Developing prospective teachers’ language-expansive noticing: Attuning to multilingual students’ scientific sensemaking during interactive science interviews. Science and Children, 62(5), 26–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/00368148.2025.2528270