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This article investigates how young multilingual children's mathematics learning is connected to their language use, lived experiences, contexts, and emotions. To this end, we consider the experiences of children who used both Spanish and English to learn mathematics. We center on two instances of kindergarten children counting and use Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as our theoretical framework to reflect on how words become meaningful in multiple ways as a result of context, particularly when used in more than one language. From this perspective, we pose that children's language use is affective and made meaningful through social relationships. We consider how the understandings of multilayered meanings uncovered using an SFL lens affords a substantial path to interpret and think about the language use of multilingual children during mathematics learning. We argue that careful attention to and interpretation of children's language can help counteract pervasive ideas of neutrality in education.

This article examines the shared experiences and understandings teachers draw on to teach children with an awareness of linguistic diversity. To do so, we analyzed interviews from Turkey and the United States and drew on philosophical hermeneutics as a way to develop a disruptive understanding of teachers' views regarding the role of languages in mathematics learning. We pose that teachers' perspectives about languages and children's ability to learn are challenged when there is an "interruption," an event that fails to reflect the normative linguistic practices of hegemonic groups. We found teachers' understandings fluctuate as part of an organic sense-making process of events in their classrooms, portraying perspectives such as multilingual students' ability to learn, assumptions which limit expectations for children's learning, the ability of mathematics to be experienced as its own mode of communication, as well as a willingness to effectively teach children.

The purpose of this qualitative research study is to portray the complex language practices of multilingual children when learning mathematics. To do so, I draw on data collected as part of a three-year research study that was designed to understand the relationship between young children's language use and mathematics learning, focusing on students' work as well as interactions collected through research journal entries and audio recordings. I center the practice of thick description as a path to advance disruptive understanding of multimodal representations of children's language use while learning mathematics. I then consider the necessary movement from a preconceived understanding of language to enacting an understanding of language that is responsive to the experiences and diverse language practices of children. I argue that a disruptive understanding and enactment of language can foster meaningful mathematics learning by dismantling hierarchical power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ontology of theory as a shaping phenomenon in qualitative research by opening up its intersection with artistic dimensions of knowing and knowledge. We argue that the plurality of practices and perspectives for research hinges on what theory is understood to be. Thus, rather than approaching theory as something predefined, we draw on conceptualizations of the experience of art to articulate the being of theory as an aesthetic renewal of a shared human movement of becoming. We then illuminate theory's potential as a multidimensional artful being by engaging with a subset of photographs of street art collected in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]