Multilingual Learners

The Urban Ecology Curriculum for English Learners is an interdisciplinary, standards-based, upper elementary/middle school curriculum designed to bolster English language and literacy learning for Long Term English Learners (LTELs)1, or students “at risk” of becoming LTELs by providing access to rigorous, STEM content. The curriculum emphasizes locally-relevant field studies focused on engaging students in scientific study through the “four ways of knowing science”: understanding science, talking science, doing science, and acting on science.

The Urban Ecology Curriculum for English Learners is an interdisciplinary, standards-based, upper elementary/middle school curriculum designed to bolster English language and literacy learning for Long Term English Learners (LTELs)1, or students “at risk” of becoming LTELs, by providing access to rigorous, STEM content. The curriculum emphasizes locally-relevant field studies focused on engaging students in scientific study through the “four ways of knowing science”: understanding science, talking science, doing science, and acting on science.

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Given the power that assessments have in today’s education systems, our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students’ emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments.

In this article, we turn our attention to context-based approaches to science instruction. We studied the effects of changes to a set of secondary science teacher education programs, all of which were redesigned with attention to the Secondary Science Teaching with English Language and Literacy Acquisition (SSTELLA) instructional framework, a framework for responsive and contextualized instruction in multilingual science classrooms. Contextualizing science activity is one of the key dimensions of the SSTELLA instructional framework.

Background/Context: Educational and societal phenomena can converge to draw attention to a new focus, such as ELs and STEM, and then trigger new research interests. A funding program can play a critical role in shaping these new research interests by prioritizing specific research topics and designs or by requiring particular specializations of researchers.