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Background/Context: Bi/multilingual students’ STEM learning is better supported when educators leverage their language and cultural practices as resources, but STEM subject divisions have been historically constructed based on oppressive, dominant values and exclude the ways of knowing of nondominant groups. Truly promoting equity requires expanding and transforming STEM disciplines. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article contributes to efforts to illuminate emergent bi/multilingual students’ ways of knowing, languaging, and doing in STEM. We follow the development of syncretic literacies in relation to translanguaging practices, asking, How do knowledges and practices from different communities get combined and reorganized by students and teachers in service of new modeling practices? Setting and Participants: We focus on a seventh-grade science classroom, deliberately designed to support syncretic literacies and translanguaging practices, where computer science concepts were infused into the curriculum through modeling activities. The majority of the students in the bilingual program had arrived in the United States at most three years before enrolling, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Research Design: We analyze one lesson that was part of a larger research–practice partnership focused on teaching computer science through leveraging translanguaging practices and syncretic literacies. The lesson was a modeling and computing activity codesigned by the teacher and two researchers about post–Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Analysis used microethnographic methods to trace how students assembled translanguaging, social, and schooled practices to make sense of and construct models. Findings/Results: Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing and negotiating both designed and emergent goals. These included sensemaking, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting both the physical and computational models of migration. Conclusions/Recommendations: Implications support the development of theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students to engage in meaning-making through translanguaging and syncretic practices in order to provide new possibilities for lifting up STEM learning that may include, but is not constrained by, disciplinary learning. Additional implications for teacher education and student assessment practices call for reconceptualizing schooling beyond day-to-day curriculum as part of making an ontological shift away from prioritizing math, science, and CS disciplinary and language objectives as defined by and for schooling, and toward celebrating, supporting, and centering students’ diverse, syncretic knowledges and knowledge use.

Recent scholarship has identified how the reading assessment process can be improved by adapting to and accounting for emergent bilinguals’ multilingual resources. While this work provides guidance about how teachers can take this approach within their assessment practices, this article strengthens and builds on this scholarship by combining translanguaging and raciolinguistic lenses to examine the ideologies that circulate through assessment. By comparing interview data from English as a new language and dual-language bilingual teachers, we found that while reading assessments fail to capture the complexity of all emergent bilinguals’ reading abilities, they particularly marginalize emergent bilinguals of color. Thus, we expose the myths of neutrality and validity around reading assessment and demonstrate how they are linked to ideologies about race and language. We offer a critical translingual approach to professional learning that encourages teachers to grapple with these ideologies and shift toward a more critical implementation of reading assessments.

In this theory paper, we explore the concept of translanguaging from bilingual education, and its implications for teaching and learning programming and computing in especially computer science (CS...

CUNY-NYSIEB (City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals) brought together bilingual education and TESOL faculty from various colleges from The City University of New York (CUNY). This chapter focuses on the transformative shifts in these faculty's own understanding of bilingualism and the changes that they implemented in their teacher education programs through their participation in CUNY-NYSIEB. This chapter starts by describing how discussions on translanguaging theory and pedagogy allowed faculty to unpack the linguistic oppression of policies, programming, and practice in bilingual education and TESOL. Next, it focuses on the ways in which by taking a translanguaging stance they were able to create spaces that capitalize upon students' fluid and dynamic linguistic resources and lived experiences, as well as to work with prospective and practicing teachers to shape curriculum and programming that is responsive to and honors their students' languaging practices. The chapter discusses the tensions students from these teacher education programs encounter when schools hold static and rigid conceptions of language, and the need for college faculty to continue to grapple with these tensions. Finally, it describes the ways in which faculty collaborate beyond their specific programs in order to push the boundaries and create learning environments where emergent bilingual languaging practices become the norm.

Through translanguaging pedagogy, the whole child is invited into engaging in literacies. While translanguaging is incorporated more frequently into day to day literacy instruction such as read alouds and writing, the area of assessment has been remained largely untouched by translanguaging pedagogy. In this essay, the critical connections between translanguaging, assessment, and teacher agency are explored. The transgressive elements of translanguaging pedagogy which are linked to equity are only possible if teachers take a critical and active stance—the learning edge. Teachers' knowledge of emergent bilinguals, reading, and translanguaging along with agency can pave the way for translanguaging in assessment. When teachers open up a space for translanguaging within reading assessment, they invite the entire child to demonstrate what they know. When assessments incorporate student translanguaging, an accurate view of emergent bilinguals' reading is possible because students can enable all of their language and social resources while reading.

This chapter offers insights into the education of young children—what is referred to in the United States as early childhood education—who come from homes where languages other than English are spoken. Drawing on recent critiques of early childhood education in the U.S., this chapter provides classroom-based examples of how teachers can leverage young children’s translanguaging and cultural knowledge in their education. Overall, the chapter demonstrates both the possibilities and challenges of adopting a translanguaging pedagogy (García et al., The Translanguaging classroom. Leveraging student bilingualism for learning, Caslon, Philadelphia, 2017) in early childhood classrooms in the United States.

Although the number and diversity of emergent bilingual students is rising, this population is viewed as homogeneous rather than vibrant and eclectic. This case study explores how two secon...

Bilingual education has described a process called translanguaging by which students use linguistic resources across and beyond multiple named languages to learn. Here, we examine how bilingual learners translanguage while learning computer science. These middle schoolers participated in a curricular intervention which infused computational thinking into their Spanish-English bilingual language arts class. Through a descriptive qualitative methodology, we document classroom moments supporting four claims: 1) students' translanguaging blurs linguistic, disciplinary, and modal boundaries, 2) computational literacies are intertwined with students' other literacies, 3) students' attitudes about language and the contexts around them play a role in their translanguaging, and 4) students translanguage to engage in specific CT practices.

This study examines how elementary teachers (grades three through five) in dual-language, bilingual programs (Spanish/English) view informal reading inventories (IRIs) to support their students’ reading growth. The research, conducted in an urban district in the Northeastern United States, draws on interviews with 20 teachers in these programs. One significant finding is that although teachers in the sample collected IRIs in the two languages of instruction, they did not examine English and Spanish reading assessment data side by side in order to construct a unified portrait of their students as bilingual readers. This study highlights the finding that IRIs are currently viewed as monolingual assessments rather than as a lens into students’ biliteracy, thus bypassing a powerful way to assist teachers in making instructional decisions in support of students’ bilingual reading development.

This article explores the critical role of school leaders in language policy change, and specifically in shifting their language education policies and practices from monolingual to multilingual. We examine the process of language policy change in three schools that were involved in a project aimed at increasing the knowledge base of school leaders about bilingualism and language learning, and which required that participating schools use bilingualism as a resource in instruction and cultivate a school-wide ecology of multilingualism. The project encouraged translanguaging pedagogical strategies that engage the entire linguistic repertoire of emergent bilinguals flexibly. Our findings demonstrate that the school leaders made significant language policy changes that included structural changes in programming and pedagogy as well as ideological changes in adopting more favorable approaches towards emergent bilinguals and their languages. A significant finding to emerge is that shifts within schools ...