CAREER: Supporting Teachers to Leverage Students' Languages in Mathematics

Across the U.S., multilingual students are systematically offered lower-quality learning opportunities than their monolingual English-speaking peers, despite many policy efforts aimed at improving their performance in mathematics. While many approaches to teaching multilingual students tend to reflect deficit-based perspectives, decades of research show that quality mathematics teaching builds on the assets that students bring to the classroom. For this reason, there is a pressing need to develop pedagogies that leverage students’ languages in mathematics, and, relatedly, to develop methods for supporting teachers in learning such pedagogies. This project partners with a mathematics department at a public middle school to co-design, analyze, and improve teachers’ translanguaging pedagogies, that is pedagogies that draw on students’ full linguistic repertoires as resources for their learning. This project will investigate how teachers make sense of and enact translanguaging pedagogies, how translanguaging pedagogies shape students’ mathematical experiences and learning opportunities, and how teachers’ learning of translanguaging spaces can be supported. As a result of this work, teachers, teacher educators, and researchers will be able to better understand how students’ languages can be leveraged as resources for mathematical learning, contributing to efforts to address persistent opportunity gaps for multilingual students across the nation.

This project employs a series of three qualitative studies using social design experiment methods to address its primary goals. In the first study, the research team and the teachers will co-design pedagogical resources such as lessons, mathematical tasks, and pedagogical strategies to support translanguaging in middle school mathematics. In the second study, the research team will video-record these co-designed translanguaging pedagogies in the classroom, focusing investigation on the character of students’ learning opportunities and experiences in translanguaging spaces. In the third study, the project team will develop video clubs to support teachers’ learning about translanguaging pedagogies, using classroom video as a key learning resource for teachers. Data will include ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, video-recorded co-design and video club sessions, co-designed pedagogical resources, and video-recorded classroom observations. The primary outcomes will be: (1) a bank of co-designed translanguaging resources for middle-school mathematics teachers (e.g., lessons, tasks, pedagogical strategies); (2) a bank of videos of translanguaging in action in mathematics to guide teachers, teacher educators, and researchers; (3) empirical evidence about the character of students’ learning in translanguaging spaces in mathematics; and (4) empirically-grounded theory of teachers’ learning of translanguaging pedagogies.