Museums in support of preservice teacher learning: expanding understandings of multiliteracies and translanguaging in content area teaching

Abstract

This article investigates how a community-university partnership between an art-museum and a teacher education program supported university students in a disciplinary literacy course to move beyond the privileging of discrete language systems to extend awareness of learners’ multilingual and multimodal resources as a part of their integrated communicative repertoires. Specifically, the article highlights how engagement at the art museum and two course-based assignments allowed students to negotiate for meaning and make sense of art objects by drawing upon multiple ways to make meaning. Drawing on field notes, student created artifacts, and written reflections, findings show that as future teachers interact with the museum’s art objects, the museum supports emerging awareness of multiliteracies and translanguaging. This includes creating conditions where monolingual students can empathize with the challenges that multilingual students meet in responses to language demands in schools. Implications for using museums as sites of learning in language teacher education are offered.

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