WIP: Engineering and Learning Affordances for Multilingual Learners in Elementary Classrooms

This is an innovative practice Work in Progress paper regarding teacher development around engineering and language. It is known that sustained Professional Development (PD) programs result in better uptake and implementation of best practices with US public school teachers. Furthermore, there is an ever-increasing number of multilingual learners in US public school classrooms, necessitating new practices by teachers and support structures to better assist these students' learning. Engineering provides a powerful location for shared growth and learning in the curriculum. Further, this area provides an avenue for teachers to utilize more inclusive language ideologies, such as translanguaging. Language ideologies are the beliefs, values, and attitudes which surround and influence the structure and usage of language. Translanguaging is a specific form of an inclusive language ideology geared toward multilingual learners which empowers them to leverage their full language repertoires (in whatever language or dialect), rather than exclusively the language of instruction. We have initiated a sustained professional development project with elementary school teachers in US Public schools who have multilingual learners in their classrooms. We invited them to a summer Professional Learning Experience and several half-day workshops where we worked with the teachers to learn about engineering, translanguaging, and how to apply these topics within their classrooms. We then went into the classrooms and recorded their execution of engineering unit(s). This paper presents the case study of a third-grade teacher, Emma, who has been implementing engineering projects with her students. We examine her changing positions related to engineering and linguistic usage in these projects and her classroom.