Martha Allexsaht-Snider

Educational renewal in an alternative teacher education program: Evolution of a school-university partnership

Abstract Can the discontinuities inherent in school university partnerships become generative sources of educational change? The purpose of this study was to analyze how participants viewed an evolving collaboration and the ways in which discontinuities between school and university agendas were negotiated. Findings over the 3-year period from interview, questionnaire, and journal data indicate patterns of changing roles and relationships between and among university faculty, cooperating teachers, and student interns. The findings indicate that as participants negotiated a common agenda for teaching and curricular improvement, a spiralling process of educational renewal in schools and university emerged.

Using Educative Assessments to Support Science Teaching for Middle School English-language Learners

Grounded in Hallidayan perspectives on academic language, we report on our development of an educative science assessment as one component of the language-rich inquiry science for English-language learners teacher professional learning project for middle school science teachers. The project emphasizes the role of content-area writing to support teachers in diagnosing their students’ emergent understandings of science inquiry practices, science content knowledge, and the academic language of science, with a particular focus on the needs of English-language learners. In our current school policy context, writing for meaningful purposes has received decreased attention as teachers struggle to cover large numbers of discrete content standards. Additionally, high-stakes assessments presented in multiple-choice format have become the definitive measure of student science learning, further de-emphasizing the value of academic writing for developing and expressing understanding. To counter these trends, we examine the implementation of educative assessment materials—writing-rich assessments designed to support teachers’ instructional decision making. We report on the qualities of our educative assessment that supported teachers in diagnosing their students’ emergent understandings, and how teacher–researcher collaborative scoring sessions and interpretation of assessment results led to changes in teachers’ instructional decision making to better support students in expressing their scientific understandings. We conclude with implications of this work for theory, research, and practice.

Research and Praxis On Challenging Anti-immigration Discourses in School and Community Contexts

Recently, harsh immigration policies have made the lives of the new immigrant Diaspora in the southeastern United States extremely challenging. Disturbed by the impact of these sociopolitical changes on students, their families, and their teachers, as multicultural educators, we have turned for help to recent research and praxis from the U.S. and Europe that overtly challenges anti-immigration discourse. We examine two theoretical perspectives that can support educators in talking back and acting against anti-immigration discourses and practices in schools and communities. We provide cases of our own work in the southeastern United States to test the value of these theories

Science, Language, and Families: Constructing a Model of Steps to College Through Language-Rich Science Inquiry

In this chapter, we propose a new framework for collaborative science education with English language learners based on bringing together three educational components: (a) engaging students, parents, and teachers together in bilingual science learning and preparation for college; (b) authentic science practice; and (c) academic language development to support language-rich science inquiry. We describe the model and how we applied it during a bilingual project for Latino/a middle school students and their families that focused on preparedness in science as a point of entry to higher education. Our work with this model evolved over 2 years of leading inquiry-based science workshops in university laboratory settings where students, their parents, and their teachers all engaged bilingually in science learning together. We present findings that focus on changes in the workshop participants’ ideas about science, academic success, and higher education. We suggest that further work with this and related models of collaborative science learning could provide positive examples of successful academic engagement with Latino/a students and families.

Figured worlds of immigrant fathers, sons, and daughters in steps to college through science bilingual family workshops

ABSTRACT Interest in parents’ roles in promoting students’ academic success and career aspirations, especially in STEM areas, has grown as educators and world leaders set goals for expanding and diversifying the STEM workforce and extending science literacy across the globe. Responding to a call for research on fathers’ roles, and considering the rise in immigrant populations in many regions of the world, the study reported here investigates the experiences of Latino immigrant fathers and their adolescent sons and daughters who participated in Steps to College through science bilingual family workshops. Findings, informed by figured worlds theory, illustrate the ways in which fathers and their children figured identities together that included engaging with science learning in pursuit of college and career pathways.

Connecting Soccer to Middle School Science: Latino Students' Passion in Learning.

ABSTRACT Building on a pedagogical model designed to support the teaching and learning of the language of science investigation practices with middle school emergent bilingual learners, we developed a series of soccer and science investigations to promote interest and engagement in science learning. We used assemblage theory to study how students engaged in and acted within this bilingual curriculum situated in an afterschool soccer practice context. We found that soccer, a passion for several Latino students, can be used as a cultural tool for science teachers to support the emerging bilingual students’ learning process. Implications for educators and researchers considering ways of integrating diverse students’ cultural practices and passions with culturally sustaining pedagogies for science teaching and learning are discussed.

Science Teachers as Architects: Building and Supporting Science-Learning Environments with Emergent Bilingual Students

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.

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

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.

A Design-Based Model of Teacher Professional Learning in the LISELL-B Project

The Language-rich Inquiry Science with English Language Learners through Biotechnology (LISELL-B) project is the latest iteration of an ongoing design-based research project to develop, test, and refine a teacher professional learning framework and a pedagogical model for teaching science with emergent bilingual learners. The LISELL-B professional learning framework and pedagogical model support middle school and high school science and ESOL teachers, their emergent bilingual students, and those students’ families in gaining proficiency with science investigation practices and with the academic language of science. The project uses science, and particularly biotechnology, as a context for developing the problem solving and communication skills that emergent bilingual learners need to attain academic success and access to college and career pathways. LISELL-B collaborates with ten schools in two Georgia school districts, in what Wortham has called the new Latino diaspora, the region of the Southeastern U.S. with rapidly changing demographics driven largely by Latino/a immigration from Mexico, Central America, and South America. Schools and teachers in this region have historically had little interaction or experience with teaching emergent bilingual learners, but are now confronted with classes that may be predominantly first- or second-generation immigrant students. In our chapter, we describe the LISELL-B pedagogical model and professional learning framework and our efforts to refine, disseminate, and sustain this model over time.

Using the Sociology of Associations to Rethink STEM Education

Using three constructs taken from Latours 2005 book, Reassembling the Social, we consider our work in 2 contexts that were part of a project to support science teachers working with English learners: an 8th-grade physical science class in a summer science enrichment academy, and a 6th-grade Earth science class in a public middle school. We utilize Latours constructs of (a) group formation, (b) mediators and intermediaries, and (c) traces of intentionality to interpret the interactions that occur in these spaces. We analyze these interactions to make a broader argument about the limitations of improvement science perspectives that are increasingly influential in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education research in the U.S. context.